How to turn on “Maintenance Mode” on your Samsung phone

Ideally when you send your smartphone in for a repair, the person repairing your device will remain professional and won’t go through your data to steal it, leak it, or blackmail you with it, but unfortunately as we have seen over the years, these things can happen.

To prevent that from happening with their phones, Samsung introduced a new feature in 2022 called “Maintenance Mode” (it was originally called “Repair Mode”) that basically locks your device down and restricts access to certain information so that even if the repair person were to snoop around, they can’t. According to Samsung:

“Maintenance Mode is a way of creating a separate user account when you hand in your device to be repaired so they can operate core functions without being able to access to any of your private information. All the user needs to do is select Maintenance Mode in the “Battery and device care” menu within “Settings” and reboot their smartphone. As soon as it’s rebooted, all their personal information including their photos, documents and messages will be restricted.”

If this sounds like a feature you’d like to take advantage of in the future if and when you may need to send your Samsung phone in for a repair, it’s really easy and here’s what you need to know to turn the feature on.

Turn on Maintenance Mode

1. On your Samsung smartphone, launch the Settings
2. Look for “Battery and device care” and tap on it
3. Tap on “Maintenance Mode”
4. Reboot your smartphone and you’re good to go

Keep in mind that in order to use Maintenance Mode, you will need to own a Samsung smartphone with One UI 5.0 installed since this is part of the update, so if your phone hasn’t been updated yet, you’ll have to wait, assuming it is on Samsung’s list of devices that will receive the One UI 5.0 update.