Today, my phone decided to change my unlock pattern by itself. By googling I found that some users solved this by restarting their phone. For me, no matter how many times I restarted, the pattern was not accepted. The unlock feature at https://findmymobile.samsung.com/ did not work, as it had apparently not been set up before.
I then chatted with Samsung support, that:
- Suggested that I had entered the incorrect pattern even though I mentioned I use this daily (so, calling me a liar)
- Suggested that I had changed a setting that only allowed one attempt when I mentioned that suddenly, I got a 30 second timer each time I entered the pattern and it wasn't accepted. Even though I mentioned several times that I always, and as late as today, always got the "3 attempts" information whenever I missed a key point of the pattern
- Suggested that the ONLY solution was to send my phone for SERVICE, which I would have to pay for myself.
Samsung support did not suggest that:
- I go to https://findmymobile.samsung.com/ and then choose "backup" and:
- Restart my phone while I held down POWER BUTTON + BIXBY BUTTON + VOLUME UP to get into recovery and WIPE my DATA (I.e: Factory reset), and that..
- ..I then would have the option when setting up my phone again to actually use the newly made backup.
Instead, I could only use a backup that was three months old as that was apparently the last backup that was made.
When I later chatted with support again to ask WHY I was never presented with this SIMPLE and VALID solution to a problem caused by their product from the start, I was met with excuses like "Because factory reset can break your phone" (No, then why is it an option in the regular settings of the phone?) and "If you used the backup feature, it wouldn't have helped as your phone would be locked again" (No, I'm using my phone with the three month old backup right now!).
I just wanted to share this, in case someone else runs into Samsung's "Pattern change bug" like I did. I've seen hundreds of people on the internet with this issue, and after my run-in with support, it just feels like they don't want you to know the solution, so their service centers can run a similar scam as Apple does: Namely overcharge you for service.
