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I soft bricked my grandma's (soft-broken (play-services kept crashing)) phone [Samsung A3] by performing a factory reset not knowing about Samsung/Google's factory reset protection and thinking she'd find her google account credentials on her password paper. Since she uses a limited set of passwords there is substantial chance to recover her google account (and with it her phone) once we know her google account name. (She has proof of ownership but service points are closed & they charge to remove frp & this would not restore the google account)

I backed up her "internal shared storage" before the wipe and am now wondering if there is chance to find her google account name somewhere there among the data, Downloads, DCMI, WhatsApp, etc. folders. Do you have an idea where it might be saved in plain text?

jan-glx
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  • Does this answer your question? How to bypass "Verify your account" (Factory Reset Protection) – alecxs May 06 '21 at 11:37
  • @alecxs No, thanks. This question is not about how to bypass frp (through you could say it's about how to pass it) but about how to recover a google account if all you have is the password and the contents of the shared internal storage (the stuff that shows up in explorer if you plug the phone into a pc). – jan-glx May 06 '21 at 11:59
  • okay, check this link from Robert then :) – alecxs May 06 '21 at 12:06
  • In the meantime she went ahead and got an overpriced A12 (man, this generation so addicted to their phones ;-) ), (and it turns out whatsapp does not store (at least show on a new phone) the google account previously used to back-up in the cloud) . When I get hands on the phone I will for sure try to unbrick it with one of your suggestions. But the question remains. – jan-glx May 06 '21 at 12:10
  • thanks @alecxs the google account recovery link could have helped in this situation if she had set her email or phone number as recovery options (she did not (now she knows why they have been asking her for her phone number all the time)). – jan-glx May 06 '21 at 12:11
  • Only option i currently see is full-text search through the backup for "@gmail.com" or "@googlemail.com" and maybe loading the whatsapp backup to the new phone and check if the account is shown then... – jan-glx May 06 '21 at 12:14
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    afaik it's not limited to g(oogle)mail can be any email address? you can try grep with regex also on binary files – alecxs May 06 '21 at 13:31
  • Yes, of course you are right, could be any email! Thanks for the link - looks helpful! Will try (after activating WSL on her PC) next time I am there. Regarding my whatsapp approach: loading a local whatsapp backup does not indicate if/which googleaccount was previously used as backup. – jan-glx May 07 '21 at 12:50

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