Welcome to what Payjoy and friends have been doing for a while now.

They claim to be "finance for the next billion" and ship a module that can be preloaded on OEM's phones (and placed into the Android 'nondisable' list) to allow the phone to be heavily restricted after you enable the "Payjoy lock" as a condition of financing for either the phone or some kind of microloan.

The one place I saw this being used in the US was Samsung phones being sold by Rent-A-Center; a lot of pictures of old Galaxy phones being disabled after the rent-to-own lease had expired or payment had lapsed are out there, too.

Also, a Google module for the same has been available for a while - https://9to5google.com/2020/11/07/google-device-lock-control...

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iamnothere 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks for the context. It’s just insane to me that things like this exist alongside $30 Android Go phones. A high end phone is an unnecessary luxury, and this infrastructure probably has some cost to the rest of us (bugs and diverted developer hours). I can understand why a “gig economy” worker might need a midrange phone, for instance, but decent used devices are very affordable.

I guess people finance other luxuries, too—rims are a great example—but those don’t seem to require digital repo men.

	▲	kotaKat 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		To add even more context: This is to finance those $30 Android Go phones. This is for the 'developing nations' schtick. They aren't Payjoy Locking some super high end phone here, it's gonna be the $40 no-name Android handset. It's also to reuse the phone later as collateral again on another microloan, almost like digitally pawning the phone off for twenty bucks each time.