Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
For the past 15 years, I’ve switched Android phones more than 50 times, easily. Each time I did that, I performed the same action on my old phone: Go to settings, find the factory reset option, and tap it. Simple, right?
But in the past few years, I started noticing something a little different. It seemed like my old phone didn’t dissociate from my Google account entirely, and there were remnants of it in a few places. I recently started looking into these and realized something: There’s a crucial step I should always do before factory resetting any Android phone, and I’ve been skipping it for years.
How do you factory reset your Android phone? 53 votes I go to "Erase all data" and perform that. 36 % I remove my Google account then factory reset. 43 % I delete several things one by one, then factory reset. 15 % I've never factory reset an Android phone. 6 %
The problem with a simple Android phone factory reset When you factory reset an Android phone — in this case, my Pixel 9a — the phone itself goes back to its blank state. However, your Google account doesn’t seem to realize this has happened. What results are “ghost” presences of this phone across your Google account, i.e., it still shows up even after you’ve sold, donated, or thrown away that phone.
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority Screenshot
I noticed this at first with the Play Store. I would still see the name of my old wiped phones in the list of available devices I could install an app on. I tried to delete those phones, but there was no way to do so. The only solution was to go to play.google.com/library/devices and hide each phone I no longer wanted to see. This is what I first did with my Pixel 9a.
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority Screenshot
Then, I realized that these old phones were starting to litter my Find Hub web and app too. Instead of seeing a list of only active phones, buds, watches, and trackers associated with my account, I was also seeing ghost devices I’d long ago reset and donated or sent to my Android Authority colleagues. The Pixel 9a is still there, but it only shows its last seen location, never updates to the current one, and can’t be deleted. It’s basically a useless stub in the app. The only option for me is to ask for a factory reset, which never happens because the phone is already wiped and can’t be reached remotely via my account. Even after several futile attempts to reset it, the phone remains in my Find Hub despite not being trackable at all.
Google Fi users have also complained about seeing these old, wiped phones as “inactive” devices because they were never formally de-authorized from the network.
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