Expand / A smartphone is repaired.
Getty Images / krisanapong detraphiphat
Samsung is introducing an interesting new feature for people sending their Galaxy phones in for repair: “repair mode.” When you ship your phone, you might want to do something to protect your data, and the new feature looks like a great solution. Lock your data, but not your phone.
Handling data during a mail-in repair process is difficult. You could wipe your phone, but that’s a big hassle. You don’t want to just send a completely bricked device, as the techs can’t thoroughly test it if everything is bricked. While in repair mode, technicians can still look at the device and test everything, but they will only see the default apps with blank data. When you recover your device, you can re-authenticate and turn off repair mode and you’ll get all your data back.
The feature was first spotted by SamMobile, and Samsung has so far only announced the feature in a Korean press release; it’s first launched in Korea for the Galaxy S21 (the S22 is Samsung’s latest flagship phone). Repair mode can be activated from the settings menu, and Samsung says (via Google Translate): “You won’t be able to access your personal data, such as photos, messages and accounts,” and anyone with the phone ” only use default installed apps”. Repair mode can be exited the same way, though you’ll need to authenticate with a pattern, pin, or fingerprint.
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Samsung doesn’t explain how the feature works, but Android has a number of built-in capabilities that would make it relatively simple to implement this feature. Android supports multiple user accounts, which allow for multiple separate sets of apps and data. It wouldn’t take much to lock the main user and grow a “guest” user with no data to work with the fixers. It is also possible that Samsung is locking the user’s entire data partition. Repair technicians could gain temporary data storage and read-only access to the system partition, which houses all the operating system files you need to test.
While the feature works, it’s a great idea and something we’d like to see other manufacturers implement. For now, repair mode is only available on one device model and only in Korea, but Samsung says it will have a wider rollout in the future.