OneUI 8 just bricked thousands of French Samsung phones

[insertsurrenderjoke]

I'm French, from France, with a French smartphone.

You may be wondering what I am doing on the US forums.

Well, according to Samsung official support, my smartphone, and the ones from most french who bought their smartphone on online stores, have no warranty and should see with the US support (spoiler alert: they won't care about EU customers, it's not their job).

Most of smartphones sold on online stores in France are from third party sellers, with some of them being smartphones from other countries with their country code changed so that we can use French SIM cards. Those third party sellers are all over the place on online stores, and I'm not talking about shady dropshipping websites, I'm talking about the big players - Amazon, Carrefour, etc - and listed on their main page, with thousands of sales.

Samsung is well aware of it, they sell trucks full of smartphones to those third party sellers. And they did not implement any check about country code changes on the smartphones' first boot to warn customers.

Yet, when receiving a completly functionnal smartphone, average Joe is supposed - according to Samsung - to check for CSC mismatch and send back the smartphone if there is one. This rule is conveniently written on the French community forum which 0.0001% of buyers visit.

And many of us found this rule the hard way.

With OneUI 8, the country code is reset, and changing it back is impossible, even with SamFW. Oh, and the bootloader is locked by the way! No other OS, no rollback.

So, people have been left with no calls, no SMS, no 2FA, no GPS... for two weeks.

Still no fix nor any statement from Samsung.

Nothing to warn users potentially affected so that they stop wasting hours with support.

Many affected smartphones were bought more than 2 years ago and the third party seller warranty is void.

And the OneUI 8 update keeps rolling on more French smartphones.

Another brand to cross off the list I guess...

[Mujibar]

Thanks for sharing, and really sorry you're experiencing this. We just had another user with the same story a couple days ago.

[Robin621k]

Samsung has a huge 3rd party vendor problem, all over the world. I don't know how they can fix this problem. They don't seem to give a hoot either.

[Mujibar]

Color me shocked 😐

[Robin621k]

Samsung needs to implement a Verified 3rd party vendor program!

[Mujibar]

Samsung needs to do a lot of things, but there probably isn't enough server space to get into all of it.

[Oxford]

This is why you always buy expensive items directly from the manufacturer.

[Robin621k]

People don't have the money to do that. The 3rd party vendor market is huge. What Samsung should try to do, which they won't, a verified 3rd party vendor program which will insure the phone you are buying will work in your region, will have carrier software removed properly.

[Robin621k]

Yes, this is a serious problem and Samsung should do something about this problem.

Samsung contracts out the used market of trade in devices. They should insure that their contractors properly reset a device to be able to be used in the market it is being sold in.

[Mags2018]

I'm dealing with this, too.