Android's Factory Reset Protection and your Google Account

What Factory Reset Protection does

When you reset an Android phone without first removing the Google Account, setup will ask you to sign in to an account that was on the device before. A brand new account will not be accepted.

This is intentional: it makes a stolen phone worthless to resell. It also catches out honest owners who reset a phone in a hurry.

If you still have working access to the phone, the clean fix is to remove the Google Account in Settings before resetting. Do that whenever you can — it avoids this entirely.

Recovering the Google Account

1. Go to Google's account recovery page from a browser.
2. Use a device and a location you have signed in from before — Google weighs familiar context heavily.
3. Answer as many prompts as you can rather than skipping to the last resort. Approximate answers are accepted; guessing wildly is not.
4. If you have a recovery phone or recovery email set, use it.
5. If recovery fails, wait and try again from a familiar device and network rather than immediately retrying from somewhere new.

The delay after a password change

If you change the Google Account password, some devices will not accept it at the reset screen straight away. Google applies a holding period so a thief cannot reset a stolen phone by taking over the account.

If you hit this, the account is fine — the phone simply is not ready to accept it yet. Wait, then try setup again.

Manufacturer differences

Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo and others layer their own account on top of Google's. A Samsung phone may ask for a Samsung Account as well, with its own separate recovery process.

Work out which account the screen is actually asking for before starting recovery. People routinely spend days recovering the wrong one.

Secondhand phones

If you bought the phone from someone else and it is asking for their account, you cannot resolve this yourself and neither can Google.

The seller can fix it in under a minute by removing the device from their account at their Google account's device page. Ask them. If they will not, you have a dispute with the seller — that is a marketplace or payment-provider problem, not a technical one.