On 8/9/2014, 5:20, Paul Theriault wrote:
The challenge we had when talking through this situation previously was that its 
difficult to distinguish between the device's owner & someone who has just 
found your phone, and wants to take advantage of developer mode to compromise your 
phone and/or data.

Thanks for pointing this out, as it is an important distinction that is the heart of the problem.

Cons:
- A user must set  passcode at FTU (and remember it!), else they wont be able 
to use this mode without a factory reset

When they do a factory reset, is there a mechanism available for them to backup and restore their data? (I admit I'm unfamiliar with what the average user would use for this - a quick search online seems to indicate you have to use adb to do this). If there is a mechanism, what prevents the "malicious person who just found your phone" from doing this data backup and stealing your data? Is this somehow a less-bad scenario than the malicious person being able to enable os-developer mode?

I just worry that forcing a factory reset in this scenario is going to place a big barrier to allowing our users to organically grow from "users" to "webmaker". That is, they will find it much harder to learn and hack their phones in ways that we should be should be actively encouraging.

Seeing as the heart of the problem is distinguishing the device owner and Mr. Malicious, perhaps we could ask for some piece of information the device owner is much more likely to have. The SIM PIN might be such a thing, or maybe some other unique identifier that comes with the phone but isn't physically present or accessible on the handset itself.

Cheers,
kats
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