I was looking at buying a new android device with either android 12 or 13. and I wasn’t ready to see how all phones shipping with these versions have forced sign-up using a mandatory phone number. the step cannot be skipped , and workarounds are very tedious and sometimes require a PC.
Where is the EU when you need them. how is it acceptable to force people to sign-up to your spying software when they want to acquire a smartphone?
Are there no laws in place to forbid this type of bundling between hardware and forced subscriptions ??
Are there any privacy non profit organization that can take them to court ?
When setting up, you can skip adding a Google account. It’s not mandatory. Neither is a phone number unless you want to actually use the phone as a telephone.
Factory Reset Protection (FRP) only applies if you signed in a Google account and then did a factory reset via the recovery or a computer without logging out of the Google account. The purpose is that if someone steals your phone, it’s a useless brick without the ability to log back into that same Google account.
Unless you buy a stolen device, as a user, you should never have to worry about that.
If you really want to, you can just skip the Google account on first setup, unlock bootloader and nuke the Google stuff entirely.
