Fuck! My brain just had a catastrophic forgetting!!

I can't remember the PIN of my Android phone that I'm using right now. Luckily, I'm still in because of my finger print but won't help is phone restarts.

Seems like your can't reset PIN without entering previous PIN.

Help!

Happened to me few days ago. Wait for the brain lag to pass and all should be well.

Advice: Add an entry for it in your favourite password manager.

You can unset the PIN from recovery mode if you have a custom one.

Tip: try to remember the pattern, not the digits

12345

Your welcome

@Jilano Eventually got locked out. Couldn't wait anymore and reset the phone.

Thankfully, restoring was quite easy, thanks to the automatic Google backup. Other than losing months of WhatsApp chat messages, everything is back in order.

I think this brain lag maybe related to the nostalgic experience I had today. Basically, I was at a place where I had lots of memories from over 14 years ago. I walked around there reliving the old memories in my mind. That might have did something.

@kescherRant it's stock android.

If pin can be unset in custom rom, I guess it's not really secure?

@gronostaj I remember entering the pin just two days ago from muscle memory, I didn't even have to think about it then.

Tried all the patterns and combination of possible numbers from the pattern. Had to give up and reset eventually.

I'm gonna stick to the name of my favourite crush from school from now on :|

@virustark24 Google got me covered on that.

But lost months of WhatsApp messages, it turns out the weekly backup I had set up on Whatsapp was not working at all.

Focus on something else, it'll smack you in the face later

Also, mayb get some more rest

So what happens if you lock yourself out? Just enter an incorrect pin too many times. On previous Android versions you would then get an option to unlock your phone using your Google account and password.

Also, as long as you can use a fingerprint to unlock, why worry?

But it seems you've already reset the device...

@eeee On Android stock, maybe, others not so much. I have to enter my pin code every three days even with fingerprint enabled to prevent me from forgetting it.

Since nobody mentioned it yet, if you have encryption enabled, recovery and Google won't save you. Without encryption all data should be considered open to public anyway.

@gudishvibes I'm not much familiar with custom roms.

If pin can be reset from recovery, the security from pin is just a facade.

@eeee because android asks for pin when it reboots. I don't want to live under that kind of stress where i have to worry about reboots.

Also, android randomly asks to enter pin and won't accept fingerprint.

@gronostaj i think encryption is enabled by default in new versions. One of the first thing it did when i reset the phone was encryption.

@HoloDreamer IIRC yes, it's enforced by Google for devices that came out with Android 7 or newer and for high-ends with Android 6.

@gronostaj opt in since Android 5, mandatory since 7 or 8, file based (instead of full disk) since 9.