Samsung says there is only one fix for Verizon Galaxy S10 units bricked by the latest update
Samsung admits that a factory reset is the only solution for now
A poster on the Samsung community forum put the blame squarely on the manufacturer. “This is not a solution,” he wrote. “Absolute Incompetence by Samsung. This isn’t a simple glitch, Samsung removed the ability to remote unlock using ‘find my mobile’ and then releases a security update that changes some users Password/ PIN. This is a sad excuse for a solution and Samsung needs to correctly address this via a Password bypass remote unlock via tech support.”
When a Samsung moderator finally joined the conversation, he said the usual things about the issue being escalated with specialists but admitted that at present a factory reset is the only option. And unless you’ve backed up all of the data on your phone, this means starting from scratch and losing all of those important pictures you’ve taken.
“I’ve been on the phone with Samsung and Verizon for 2 days trying to do anything to fix this except a factory data reset. My wife had this happen to her, and we will lose 3 months of pictures of the kids, work documents and other files that don’t seem to be backed up. This would be easier to accept if it was an accident like dropping it in a lake or something, but it’s unacceptable to lose all this information because of negligence by Samsung. I don’t think I will be buying another Samsung Product after this fiasco.”-Longo92, Reddit member
The software update that apparently set off this mess is the June Android security update and while the Verizon branded Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10+ are both affected, it seems to be the former that is the subject of most of the posts. If we can take one positive thing away from this incident, we probably will see more people backing up the data on their handsets just in case something like this happens again in the future.