Pixel phones could get a maintenance mode similar to Samsung

Ideally when you send your phone in for repair, the person repairing your phone doesn’t snoop through your phone’s data. One way to “fix” that would be to factory reset your phone, but that’s troublesome because you’ll have to set everything up again later on.

Thankfully, Google Pixel owners might be able to avoid that in the future. According to a report from Android Authority, in the first beta for Android 14 QPR1, they discovered a potentially new feature called “Repair Mode”.

The details of the feature are unclear, but based on the strings that were discovered, it has been suggested that it could be similar to the Maintenance Mode on Samsung phones. For those unfamiliar, this basically creates a new and separate profile from the one that you normally use on your phone.

This allows the person repairing your phone to access your phone’s system in order to complete their repair work, but at the same time preventing them from accessing your private data like contacts, emails, messages, photos, and so on. If Repair Mode is going to be similar to Maintenance Mode, that would be pretty cool.

Granted, we don’t send our phones in for repairs that often to begin with, but it’s nice to know that if we have to, we don’t have to perform a factory reset and can preserve our phone’s data while also protecting our privacy.

Source: Android Authority