I forgot my Android phone security lock pattern. Help!

It’s great to have a security code set up for your mobile device and goodness knows, most of us have an astonishing storehouse of information saved on our devices, but if you forget your code, a friend – or family member – changes it or something else causes it to be locked and it can be alarming. Now what? How do you get into your android phone if it’s all locked out??

Turns out that just about every mobile phone operating system, whether it’s Apple’s iOS 7, Google’s Android or even Windows Mobile, has a back door, a second way to get in through additional or alternative validation. Worst case, you can always plug it into a computer and reset the entire device or take it in to a store and have them help you out. Not a great solution, but functional, at least.

The HTC One running Android has a number of different possible locking systems, including facial recognition and, as you know, swiping your finger through a nine-spot grid in a specific pattern. Forget that and, well, let’s see…

Here’s my own HTC phone, locked:

Very attractive, time and date, and access to certain features even while it’s locked (depending on what you want to do, of course).

To unlock it, grab and drag the bottom ring onto the screen.

It then prompts you for the security input if you have a system lock in place. For a pattern, you see this:

Since it’s tracking the order that you reach those touch targets, top left to top right is not the same as top right to top left. So remembering not just the pattern but the order you created it is important.

Guess wrong and you’ll see something like this:

Frustrating, for sure.

Try a few more times, because you think you know it, but you’re just. not. quite. sure. and you could end up looking at this:

Well boo. That’s frustrating.

Turn the phone off and on again during that interim period, however, and you’ll see – finally – another option:

Tap on “Forgot pattern” on the lower right and you’ll learn that there’s a second way to get into the phone, by entering your Gmail credentials:

That’s the secret. If you don’t know your pattern and you also don’t know the Google account credentials, well, is it possible you shouldn’t be gaining access to this particular HTC One phone? 🙁  If you’re really stuck, you might need to wipe it and start over (I hope you have a recent sync or backup!) or take it into an AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or similar store for assistance.

Good luck, hope that helps out!