How was this not already a thing? These seem like quite basic features if you want to stop people from using stolen phones. From what I can tell online, it seems rather trivial for thieves to bypass FRP in the current incantation of the system.
I do wonder what will happen if your Google account gets banned, though. I can't find much about it online. Some older posts suggest that only having the email address and password is enough, but these days you can log in to Google without ever entering a password, and there's no way Google will just send your password to a new phone.
This assumes everything works fine. It's probably an edge case, but on my Nexus 6P an update somehow messed with my encryption keys, and the screen lock pattern that I'd used for over a year stopped getting recognised. I can't remember the solution but I vaguely remember having to factory reset. Whatever the solution was, it wasn't too different to what a thief would do... I was bypassing the screen lock after all.
Okay, according to the article, this functionality will only activate after you have signed into a Google account for the first time on the device. So, at least for those of us who use custom software such as lineage OS, that won't matter since we don't put a Google account on the device to begin with in a lot of cases. A lot of us boot the phone for the first time, skip the entire setup wizard as fast as possible without signing in or any of that stuff, and then immediately enable OEM unlocking and flash the lineage or whatever software.
Well, that won't matter unless it's a brand new phone or has been properly erased because you won't be able to install lineage anyway unless one of those two conditions are met.
for me it's been the same since 8. sure there are some good changes, but generally it's forced restrictions upon more forced restrictions, and I hate it
This could still be bypassed by flashing a new OS that deliberately messes up the userdata wipe-persisting secrets. Well idk if there's a way to prevent that, but I guess really needy and tech-savvy people could recover lost devices that way
You can't really flash phones without unlocking the bootloader first, and you can't unlock the bootloader without unlocking FRP
Without opening the phone up and directly accessing NAND storage, you're not going to be able to reflash much. This makes it impossible for most thieves to abuse custom ROMs to sell stolen devices, because there's not that much profit in stolen phones if you need to spend hours on making them work again. You might as well get a real job at that point.
Is the bootloader unlocking requirement that FRP is not triggered a hard one or just because the settings screen isn't (or shouldn't) be reachable? Now that OEM unlocking and FRP aren't tied together anymore, it doesn't seem like a hard one
Nah, fuck that. I'm not rewarding somebody's thievery, that just empowers them to do it again. I'd remote-destroy my stolen phone with thermite if I could; not to protect what's on the phone, but so that whoever stole it has absolutely nothing to show for it.