Are you willing to monitor your kids, spouse, lover, or employees activities using spy apps? If yes then you must have a question in mind that what if you pay for a premium spy app and the target person removes it from their device. All your money will be wasted, isn’t it?. Don’t worry it’s not that easy to uninstall spyware from the target device because spy apps stay hidden in the background. Therefore hard to detect and consequently difficult to remove.
But what happens if the target person chooses to factory reset their phone? Will the spy app survive the hard reset? Let’s find it out in this article where I practically demonstrate to you what happens to spy apps after reset. So, without wasting any time let’s get started.
Table Of Content
What Is Factory Reset? How Does It Work?
A factory reset is a function of Android or iPhone that allows you to erase everything on it and go back to its initial state i.e. the time you first unboxed it. A hard reset will remove all the apps, photos, contacts, settings, etc. with just a click of the button. Therefore, it is advised that you should backup all your data before resetting your phone.
People generally reset their phones when they forget their passwords and are unable to unlock their devices. However, this practice is also popular for removing viruses and malware from one’s cellphone. Since spyware is also a type of malware so will it also get deleted after a factory reset? Let’s find out.
Will Factory Reset Remove Spy App?
For this test, I am going to use a Samsung M12 device that is running on Android 11. I have installed iKeyMonitor on it for demonstration purposes. It is hidden with a generic name of “Internet Services” on the target device. You can see it in the installed apps list of my phone.
Now I am going to hard reset the phone to check whether the app is removed or stays as it is. For that, I am going to the Settings of my device and selecting the factory reset option.
So the reset is complete and I have restarted the phone. Now let’s see if I can find the spyware in the installed app list. As you can see I have typed Internet Services in the installed apps section but found no results.
This means the app is removed from the phone and is no longer tracking the target device. So, you may have got your answer? A factory reset will most likely remove the spy app from the target phone.
However, the results can be different for a rooted or jailbroken phone. If you have installed the spy app on a rooted device and given it the system app permission then it won’t get deleted from the phone even after factory reset.
Conclusion
Factory reset is a feature that deletes everything including the spy app you have installed on your kid’s phone for their monitoring. However, the spyware is hidden and it’s hard for your kids, spouse, or lover to detect a spy app on their phone. Therefore it is less likely that they will take any action against it.
Also, there are always chances of data loss with the factory reset and no one wants to lose their data, therefore people generally refrain from it. But make sure you pick spyware that has less impact on the target device like battery consumption, heating, and lagging issues. If the app irritates the user then they will definitely know about it and will delete it from their device at any cost.
FAQs
Will A Factory Reset Remove Spyware?
Yes, a factory deletes everything including photos, apps, contacts, and spyware from the phone.
Can You Uninstall Spyware?
Spy apps basically stay in hidden mode and hence are not easy to find. If you can find the spy app then you can easily uninstall it from your phone.
How Can You Detect Spyware On The Phone?
You can make use of spyware detector and antivirus software to detect a hidden spy app on the phone.
