SkieCan a thief factory reset a stolen child's phone and use it?
Resetting from Settings is blocked, and Android's Factory Reset Protection is on. A device that is wiped another way asks for the Skie organisation's Google sign-in before it can be set up again, which only Skie holds, so a reset device is of no use to whoever took it.
A thief's first idea is to wipe the phone and sell it. Skie is built to make that pointless. The ordinary route, Settings and then reset, is blocked by policy. Safe mode and developer options are blocked too, so the usual workarounds are not offered on the screen.
Beyond that, Android's Factory Reset Protection is on and tied to the Skie administrator account. If a device is wiped through some other route, such as the recovery menu, Android asks for the Skie organisation's Google sign-in before it can be set up again. Only Skie holds that sign-in, so a reset device cannot be activated by the person who has it.
We do not call this impossible, and no one should promise that. What it does is take away the value. A phone that cannot be set up has little resale worth. If anything ever did get through, you are alerted immediately, down to the exact device.
While the device is still managed, lost mode adds the lock, message and tracking on top. Remote erase is not available yet, and the team is working on it. Today the combination of lock, tracking and reset protection is what you have.
For more detail on how reset protection works on managed Android devices, see the blog post on preventing factory reset. If the device is recovered, you can mark it found.