Were the courts not enough control for creditors? Since when are they allowed to lock you out of your purchased property without a court order?

I don't think courts are typically involved for civil repossession.

But it sounds like this is used when the device isn't your purchased property, but leased on contract.

I guess it makes sense for them to do this if people started leases, paid the first month to get the phone in their hand, then walked away with the nice new phone they paid like $35 for, to sell or just use off-network.

damn and no one at google saw this as dystopian?

Fuck the entirety of this noise.

What's stopping someone from enabling debug mode, downloading adb tools and running pm uninstall --user0 then the package name? Surely with the app removed, the app can't brick your phone. Or running a custom rom like lineage or graphine os?

Apple does it to, but I've only ever seen it happen when you buy your phone on a payment plan as part of your service agreement through your service provider. Kind of like if you lease a car and stop making payments they can lock the engine from turning over.

I'm in the US and it's not on my phone and even though it's listed in the Play Store it says it's not available in my region

Where did you buy your phone? What kind of phone is it?

Get Shizuka, get it running by following a guide somewhere, install canta, remove it... Bang bang.

Love the Chinese phones. None of this crap US stuff is enabled. It's baked into the system ROM so it is there. But on mine it has never transfered any data, not even ever been active. It's just dead code taking up a few megabytes.