A couple of months back, we saw reports of Samsung rolling out what was called a repair mode for Galaxy S21 phones for its home market. Now, rather than being stuck in just South Korea, the feature is getting rolled out worldwide, under a new translated name of Maintenance Mode.
As explained before, this Maintenance Mode allows you to lock down your device for when you need to send your Samsung phones for repair. You get to choose what you want locked down and what you don’t quite mind leaving exposed. This allows you to skip the process of wiping your device before you send your device to the shop, and the very troublesome process of setting it up again.
It looks like the process of activating this Maintenance Mode has not changed. The feature is still being turned on from the Battery and Device Care menu from the phone’s settings. As Samsung explains, the process actually creates a separate user account for the repair personnel to use. Turning this on or off will require the phone to be rebooted.
The company says that the Chinese market got the Maintenance Mode feature a month ago. It’s unclear why Samsung needed to stagger the rollout this way, but at least we know now that everyone else is getting this feature.
Unlike the very specific rollout to Samsung Galaxy S21 devices, the South Korean tech giant says that it will first roll out to devices with One UI 5. Broader availability will then head to other devices in 2023. So unless you’re an owner of a very recent release, it might take awhile for your device to get this Maintenance Mode, if ever. Which is quite the bummer since barring freak accidents, older devices would be the ones that require it more.
(Source: Samsung)
