… and probably other Samsung / Android phones.

There’s varied information online around how to do this and it’s often missing a key aspect. Here’s the steps that worked for me when wanting to do a factory reset of a Samsung A70 when I didn’t have the password of the Samsung account signed in:

1. Phone starts in an on state.

2. Plug in the phone to a PC via USB. Without this, I couldn’t get this to work. I didn’t have to install any software but did get the Windows USB ‘ding’ sound

3. Power off the phone. Doesn’t matter if you hold volume down + power, or hold power and press the ‘Power off’ option on screen – just get the phone to a full ‘off’ state.

4. While holding the Volume Up button, also hold down the power button. The first Samsung splash screen should show, and before it gets to the second (that would normally just say SAMSUNG) you should be presented with the Unix looking options under an “Android Recovery” menu. You’re in!

5. Use the volume up/down buttons to navigate to the option ‘Wipe Data/Factory Reset’, and use the power button to select it. From the sub menu asking you to confirm if you want to ‘Wipe all user data?’ select ‘Yes’ (volume and power buttons again). You’ll see some on screen info telling you it’s doing the factory reset.

6. This should only take a second, then from the main menu select ‘Reboot System Now’

The phone should be in a proper factory reset state after this and forget the Samsung account. If it has a Google account still stuck that’s an entirely different problem that I didn’t have to solve sorry!