This article goes into more detail about how these new measures will actually work compared to the blog post earlier this year from Google. Namely:
- Enabling the OEM unlocking setting will no longer prevent FRP from activating.
- Bypassing the setup wizard will no longer deactivate FRP. FRP restrictions will apply until you verify ownership of the device by signing in.
- Adding a new Google account is blocked.
- Setting a lock screen PIN or password is blocked.
- Installing new apps is blocked.
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