TL; DR
- Samsung’s Inactivity Restart reboots your Galaxy phone after 72 hours of inactivity, blocking unauthorized access completely.
- Post-reboot, the phone enters a hardened state — no notifications, no fingerprints, no entry without your PIN.
- Apple quietly did this first in iOS 18.1; Samsung just made it a visible, user-controlled toggle.
Picture this: you’re patting your pockets for the fifth time in two minutes, retracing your steps from the kitchen to the car to the couch, and quietly blaming the dog. Samsung can’t reunite you with your phone any faster — but it can make sure that whoever stumbles across it first walks away with absolutely nothing.
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Samsung Is Calling The Feature Inactivity Restart
Inactivity Restart is what Samsung’s calling it, and it arrived with the February 2026 patch like it was no big deal. Three days of your phone sitting locked with nobody touching it? It reboots on its own. That’s the whole thing. Simple, quiet, effective.
Here’s where it gets clever. After that reboot, the phone enters what’s technically called a BFU (Before First Unlock) state. In plain English? It basically becomes a very expensive brick for anyone who doesn’t know your PIN. Notifications stop showing on the lock screen.
Incoming calls don’t display. Fingerprint unlock is disabled until you enter your actual password. Someone who picks up your phone after three days of it sitting untouched gets nothing.
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It’s Located In The Security And Privacy Section
For most people, 72 hours of zero unlocks means the phone is genuinely lost or stolen — not just forgotten on your nightstand. That’s the sweet spot this feature is targeting.
You’ll find the toggle buried under Settings > Security and Privacy > More Security Settings — and yes, it’s off by default, so this isn’t something Samsung’s switching on without asking. Confirmed so far on the Galaxy S25 series running One UI 8.5 Beta and the Galaxy Z Fold 7, with S26 devices getting it through the February patch as well.
And Yes, Apple iPhones Have Had The Feature For A While
Credit where it’s due, though — Apple got there first. iOS 18.1, late 2024. Nobody knew it existed until police departments started filing complaints about seized iPhones restarting themselves in storage.
Turns out Apple had wired in the exact same 72-hour auto-reboot logic, dumping phones into that same locked-down BFU state. They never said a word about it publicly — no press release, no support page update, nothing. The feature just existed, doing its job in complete silence.
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Will it save your data if your phone goes missing? Not guaranteed. But it meaningfully raises the bar for anyone trying to access it. Sometimes the best security features are the ones you never have to think about — until the day you really, really need them.
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