Disable factory reset protection

[JoshH]

Hi,

Is it possible to disable the factory reset protection in Android? I understand that it is to prevent someone from wiping the phone and using it if stolen but when I reset a device because someone has left the company, I am unable to use the device again without knowing the users google account password (if they have added a google account) to unlock the phone after reset.

Thanks

[LSTM-Jim]

We've experienced this issue also. I've had to have a manufacturer (Samsung) to unlock the Factory Reset Protection on devices.

[JoshH]

Would be great if we could have an option to turn it off in Meraki SM?

[Fratopolis]

What contact info for samsung did you use. This would be helpful as this happened on 16 of our classroom SM-T580's we are updaing. The account we used to enroll is no longer as we switched domain names last year. We are able to use an alias with the old name but that does not work.

[PhilipDAth]

I've had this happen on some low end Samsung phones a while ago.  I don't exactly recall how know, but we did a local level recovery and used the ADB command from memory (a process you use for an un-bootable corrupted phone).

[Melissa · Accepted solution]

@JoshH Good news! For all new devices enrolling in Android for Work, factory reset protection is automatically disabled. This was a fairly recent change in SM!

[JoshH]

Good to hear!

How recent was the change? 

Thanks

[LSTM-Jim]

---

@JoshH wrote:

Good to hear!

How recent was the change? 

Thanks

---

Echoing Josh's sentiment and question! Would be good to know so I can gauge what devices I have where FRP has been disabled. Is there an indication on the dashboard I can examine Melissa?

[Melissa]

It looks like the change happened on 11/29/17 - any devices using version 4.0.1 of the SM App should have this automatically disabled.

[bgi_Todd]

Unfortunately, this doesn't work for us.  SM 4.0.10 still effectively bricks our Galaxy Tabs if we erase them from Meraki or from the recovery boot mode.

[BlakeRichardson]

@Melissa Thats good news, its a shame Apple hasn't come to the party. We had a user leave and not disable find my iphone on their iPhone so it was activation locked. We had to provide proof to purchase to a special team at Apple to get the lock removed.

The whole process took over a week. 

[Melissa]

@BlakeRichardson - oh no, that sounds like a huge hassle!

There are some tools Apple has made available to help in this process. The first is "Activation Lock Bypass" - it's available on the device page under Mobile Security. The device does need to be enrolled in DEP and have Supervised settings applied for this to work! 

You can also prevent users from logging in with personal icloud/itunes accounts on a device...but usually folks want to allow end users to do this to back up their devices or download personal apps. If you did want to block this, it's under Restrictions> ios restrictions (supervised)> "Allow modifying account settings"

It didn't sound like this was an issue in your case - but like Android, you can also prevent users from factory reseting the device under Restrictions>ios restrictions (supervised)> "Allow Erase All Content and Settings"

Hope that helps in the future!! 

[Andrei_Gogiu]

Yes, but what about hardware reset? Is is possible to prevent that?

[projhope]

I see this FRP deactivation was supposed to go into effect in 2017.  However, I still have it happening.  The meraki command to change the passcode does not work on my android tablets and when I use recovery to factory reset, I'm still getting the google account or passcode lock during setup (even when using QR code setup for Meraki). I am also getting this FRP lock on devices I reset using the Erase device command in Meraki - I would say that is NOT disabled.