Note 20 5G Switched Off Then Sort of Reset By Itself

[rafhelp]

I have a Samsung Note 20 5g with latest updates and Android 13. Recently Ive had a new battery put in as the old one decided to inflate and wasnt holding charge.

Phone been working fine since then.

Today morning I was live streaming on Tik Tok and the phone went flat and switched off.

I then plugged it in for fast charging.

Then at 26% charge i took the phone off, switched it on and went out, thinking it was ok.

When i got home the phone said 0% again and i had to charge it again. Then straight away it was at 25%.

When i switched it on immediatly I knew something was wrong as the wallpaper had changed.

I had to enter my pin code.

It then logged in and took me to the welcome screen that you see when you start a new phone, where you select language and privacy options... eh?

So the phone settings gone.. Homescreen layout, widgets, app data, app caches, login data all gone.

The apps are all still there but wrong order. Whatsapp asking me to verify phone and had to restore from a backup.

The strange this is that it isnt a factory reset cos all the photos, google accounts, apps and biometric data is still there. It still recognises my fingerprint and pin.

So what is this? A soft reset or something caused by battery issue or glitch?

Never happened before.

Edit forgot to add I saw this on the screen when phone started:

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! I suspect that the phone did in fact do a factory reset, then did an automatic restore when you logged back in. The automatic restore might have been through Samsung's own backup system or Google's. These restores will typically reinstall all of your previous apps, but will not duplicate your homescreen setup -- you'll have to do that all over again.

As to the reason why this happened, I would be concerned about some kind of hardware instability, given the phone's repair history. It may be worth asking whoever did the repairs to reassess their work. In addition, going forward, make sure any important data is backed up or synced somewhere safe on a regular basis, in case this kind of thing happens again.

 

[rafhelp]

Im not so sure about this. The fact is it said someone made an unauthorised attempt to do a factory reset, its then asking me to connect to the wifi to verify my identity to then complete the reset. However it never asked me to verify anything, just took me through the welcome steps. So i never authorised anything.

I did a restore from smart switch, but the thing is even after you restore the apps, you still have to manually re-login and verify in those apps. I would have thought that the app data would be restored to then not need to login into every app again.

I was condsidering maybe it was a remotely triggered reset maybe hacker or something, but the phone was switched off before this happened

 

[B. Diddy]

Oh, I see what you mean. It may still be that some hardware instability triggered the attempted reset, and the system software was still considering this as an "unauthorized" attempt. Regardless, it's still worth bringing it back to the repair shop (or bringing it to another repair shop for a second opinion), and my advice about keeping your important data backed up still stands.