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With both whatever-apple-is-doing and Android's whatever-it-is-called-that-prevent-factory-reset when you don't have access to the account on the device, I don't see how people still buy "shady" phones and tablets.
Last time I borrowed a relative's phone to run an experiment, I had to contact them to "unlock" the phone after a factory reset before being able to do anything because I didn't remove the account before. Unless people go out of their way to make their phone "stealable", that is.
Theives can still dump them in those shady cash for phones machines and walk away with a bit of cash.
I mean, if you can factory reset a phone to strip the need for authentication, that seems like kind of a bad thing, no?
You can factory reset it, but not really. On first boot, the phone requires a network connection; you can't skip setting up wifi if there is no cellular internet available. And it will ask you to authenticate the google account it expect before even starting the "real" setup process. As a matter of fact, once you authenticate with google, it does start again, ask again for wifi and will not have the account setup at all, as you would expect after a factory reset.
So, while you can "factory reset", the phone still needs the previously registered google account to start. There's probably some phone that gives more leniency, but I was not able to circumvent that using adb (the device being locked, and impossible to unlock without accessing the menu, impossible to access without starting in the first place…)
I have seen several tutorials to skip this step on xiaomi phones through fastboot.
oem unlocking must be allowed on Xiaomi in order for FB to work tho right? (or shorting debug pins on the motherboard)
No, debug pins are for edl and not needed you can enter fastboot whenever you want when it is unlocked you can do more, but you can use indian servers to bypass it
If the phone had is bootloader unlocked, sure. Otherwise, it won't accept the commands. My mistake was on a Xiaomi Mi A2.
The people that designed this feature are not that oblivious.
I had to pay $20 to a slightly shady online service cause one of my kids is an idiot and changed all his passwords cause one of the other kids knew them (because he told them...) then proceeded to forget all the new passwords.
So I know that on most models of Samsung phone you can just pay $20 to a slightly shady online service.