It can be the most annoying thing. High-end Samsung Android phones that have a fingerprint screen lock security option have this thing where the scanner sometimes goes haywire. When this happens, the phone presents you with the option to enter your backup password. Unfortunately, most people rarely remember the password because they seldom need it.
If you find yourself in this predicament, you only have two options to unlock a Samsung fingerprint locked phone.
Unlock via Samsung’s Find My Mobile Service
There are a number of pre-requisites for this to succeed, namely:
The phone’s Internet connection must have been on before it got locked.
You had registered your phone with Samsung and have a Samsung account
Instructions
- Visit Find My Mobile.
- Log in using your Samsung account.
- Ensure the Connection, Remote controls and Reactivation Lock are green and on as shown below. Try refreshing using the Refresh icon if they aren’t.
- Next, scroll down and lock for Unlock my Screen on the left hand menu as shown below.
- Click and wait a few minutes for the screen to unlock.
Reset Your Android Phone to Factory Status
If your phone’s Internet connection was off before it got locked or you hadn’t set up your Samsung account then you have no choice but to reset the phone to factory status.
This will erase everything and you will loose any data and photos that you hadn’t backed up to a service such as Dropbox or Google Drive.
There are a number of ways to erase/reset your phone:
- Remotely, you can do this via Google’s Android Device Manager.
- You can also perform a hard reset using a series of key combinations. This can differ depending on the phone model. Simply Google “Hard reset xxx”, where xxx is your phone model.
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