I consider this a positive feature of having an android phone.
That thief must have been dumb as a bag of bricks, which is not a surprise. You can’t really steal an iPhone other than for parts because you won’t be cracking iCloud lock.
Petty criminals don’t tend to be particularly intelligent, yeah. The smart ones go into finance.
Yeah. Reminds of that day when a bunch of people broke into an apple shop to steal iPhones during a protest, just to have them all disabled next day.
I have an “old” iphone so I think we’d be in adjacent boats
She was most upset after realizing she got her android phone back.
What’s really funny is how trivial FRP is to bypass on Android, whereas a stolen iPhone would be useless other than for parts, and even then they’re all serialized anyway
FRP?
Factory reset protection. It’ll ask the last Google account logged into a device before you can set it up if it’s not reset from the OS (recovery).
It’s a Google service that does this, so it’s kinda stuck on top of android, no matter which phone it is, including pixels. It’s been super trivial to disable this service for long enough to get past setup, where you can then sign in with any Google account and the device will function as normal.
iCloud locks however prevent the phone from going past the setup screen if you don’t have the previous login. This is baked deep into the OS, and while it can be removed with a jailbreak, it’s near impossible to jailbreak it before getting past setup.
To what extent is it removeable or tamperable by Apple itself? Like legit, can Apple discretionarily remove it or is it out of their hands? Something tells me they wouldn’t be so crazy about not having the abillity to step in if they wanted
It’s a lock on apples servers, as long as they know the serial of the device they can remove it. Some people have had luck getting disabled devices re enabled by apple, but usually it requires a proof of purchase of the device from a retail store that includes the serial on the receipt or invoice.
There’s been discussion about whether Apple should be forced to have services to reset devices not claimed by their owners, but last I saw it hadn’t gone anywhere yet.
