Comment by jdnenej
6 years ago
I got hit by this same issue. We had a few spare phones at work in a draw and I wanted to give them to friends in need of a phone. Had permission from the company but no one knew who owned them or what the password was. I did the manual factory reset from the recovery but was hit by this "security" feature.
I eventually managed to track down the original owner and had them unlock the devices. If I hadn't, these phones would be ewaste.
What bothers me is the solution is simple, when a manual factory reset is done, have the phone ping google and start a 1 week countdown. Google can then email the original owner and ask if they have had their phone stolen. If they reply yes then the phone is locked. If they reply no or have no response then the phone unlocks.
Apparently you can still wipe and reset and reinstall the phones even with "OEM unlock" switched off. At least, we managed to pull it off. But it took about half a day of trying and retrying random things from threads on forum.xda-developers.com. Sorry I can't be more specific, it becomes a bit of a blur after the 5th time :-p
If you do a reset from recovery and not the settings app it locks it down with android factory reset protection and the phone is bricked until the original owner enters their google password.
Oh that might be it then, they still had their google account (or the TFA backup codes printed). Either way it seems sensible to do the OEM unlocking, just in case.
Still stupid that it can brick the phone if you don't have that password.