Here's the screen you never want to see: One UI 9 permalocking your phone

Samsung’s newest foldables are debuting with One UI 9, and beyond Android 17 itself, that’s introducing a whole lot of little changes. One important one we highlighted earlier this week concerns device security, and how your phone will now permanently lock itself down after 13 failed attempts to enter a PIN or password. Hopefully that’s never something you have to deal with yourself — but if you’re at all curious what it’s like, we’ve got a hands-on look to share with you.

Both Android 17 and One UI 9 are taking steps to harden your phone against attempts to guess its unlock code, adding delays of increasing length after too many attempts before finally locking the device down for good, with no option forward but a full reset.

If things ever get that far, here’s the screen you’ll ultimately be presented with, shown off here on a new Galaxy Z Flip 8 (thanks: Dylan H).

As you can see, after 13 failed attempts, Samsung isn’t leaving you with much of an option, instructing users get in touch with Samsung Customer Service for next steps.

It might be handy to offer a button for a quick factory reset, but we can certainly understand why Samsung might not want to display such an option. At the very least, there’s a separate setting that just automatically wipes the phone after hitting this threshold:

When that hasn’t been toggled on, though, users with permalocked phones will have no choice but to manually access recovery mode on boot and factory reset the hardware from there.

While this is the behavior you can expect from phones launching with One UI 9 like the new foldables, we still have some questions about how this might work for older hardware that will eventually be upgrading. Samsung’s support docs note that this 13-try policy begins with “devices launched with One UI 9.0,” but doesn’t explicitly clarify if we’ll see the same thing after upgrading from One UI 8.5. We also haven’t been able to find any similar mode for One UI 9 Watch on Samsung’s new wearables.