Face Recognition on ICS is greyed out and can't use it.

[gilkfrog]

Does anyone know how to get the unlocks for the phone out of pin or password? All of the options in the Security settings are greyed out and I am not able to use them, or change from my pin based unlock to facial recognition.

[melucero]

According to Motorola, Seems your phone may be protected by your IT admin at work.  I use my phone to communicate with my company's servers, they made me download an app.  I working on it to see if I can diable it.  If I figure it out I wll let you know.

[melucero]

Part II.

Okay.  I removed AFARIA APP, my company IT security.   Then I went to settings - security - device administrators and had only ADMIN NOTIFIER checked.   Nothing else should be there.   Restarted my phone and the face Recognition options were there not greyed out!   Have fun!

[melucero]

Part III

Once Face  lock is working, I reinstalled AFARIA.  Restarted Phone.   It still worked.   Next I went to settings - security - device administrators and clicked on AFARIA as well.   Result:  Worked Great.   So make sure you disable and uninstall  Company APP, in my case AFARIA, restart Phone,  setup Face Lock, reinstall company APP, restart phone.  Of course make sure the settings are set correctly.   Good Luck. 

[gilkfrog]

I tried the removing of my Security App and rebooting. This is not a work phone. The settings are still greyed out like before. This feature was the one feature I was looking forward to when ICS was updated to my phone. Since it was updated, the unlock features (all of them except Pin and Password) are all greyed out. I have Admin Notifier checked yet I can't find a way to make me the exclusive admin for my phone. I read somewhere sometime ago that the only way is to reflash my phone, which is something I do not want to do since this is already my third RAZR and getting it all set back up to my liking takes too much time. This is my last resource for this issue. I have checked through developer's sites and the only solution from them was to reinstall th OS. I have tried Verizon's customer service but noone knows the answer to my debacle. 

[jwk9 · Accepted solution]

I had the exact same problem.  In order to get the face unlock feature to work, I had to turn off all device and data encryption on the phone.  You can do this by going to Settings--->Security--->Data Encryption (that may not be the exact path, but you should be able to find it in the Settings menu).  Then, I had to uncheck all encryption options and reboot my phone to un-encrypt everything.  After the reboot, all unlocking options were enabled. If you use data encryption on the phone, the only option for unlocking the screen is using a PIN.  You'll have to weigh how much you want to use the feature vs. taking the risk of having an un-encrypted phone.

[gilkfrog]

Thank you! That worked, now I have to weigh my options over encryption or not. That kind of sucks.

[B33]

Good Info..

[vzw_customer_support]

I want you to get the most out of your device gilkfrog! Have you ever been able to use the feature? Here are instructions on how to use the feature: http://support.verizonwireless.com/video/devices/motorola/moto_razr_ics_face_unlock/index.html?sayt=... . Let us know if you are able to bypass the security in the options feature.

Thank you,

LenaA_VZW
Follow us on Twitter @VZWSupport

[gilkfrog]

This was not very helpful, but I eventually got the correct answer from a reply. After all that was done, I still ended up doing a factory reset.

[gilkfrog]

This was a major pain and I am now looking for an update for ICS to enable the Face Unlock feature and have data encryption. After initiating Face Unlock on my RAZR, I tried to encrypt some of my stuff such as emails and contacts. When the phone rebooted it hung on the encrypting screen for hours @ 0%. I had to call Verizon and did a factory reset. Now I am trying to get the phone and accounts back to the way they were and it will take days to get it all back. As "jwk9" answered, you can't have cool features and encryption at the same time.

[jwk9]

Looks like you and I are in the same boat.  I decided that I wanted encryption after all, so I turned off Face Unlock and tried to re-encrypt my phone.  The encryption hung, and I also had to do a factory reset.  I took my phone to the Verizon store, and it was, unfortunately, a negative experience.  The person helping me tried to reset it once, gave up, and insisted that I take a replacement phone, which is a refurbished phone that had to be shipped to me, and to top it all off, I had to pay the shipping charges.  Never mind that the store had more DROID RAZR's in the storage room - no, I would only get a refurbished phone.  Having had bad experiences with refurbished phones and equipment, I insisted that he ask his co-workers and find some other way.  He eventually found someone who could do a factory reset, but they wiped out all of my apps, as well as wiped my storage card clean.  So, I lost all my pictures, too.  I will now spend days trying to set up my phone just the way I liked it before I tried to use the features of ICS. 

[gilkfrog]

Hopefully you didn't go with the refurb. I have a refurb and the battery life is not what my new ones were. The good thing about the refurb is I don't have any glitches like my older ones. I bought the RAZR back in last Dec. when it came out and within two months of owning it I crushed it, peeled the glass right off in chunks. I got a new replacement and that one disappeared on me, so with the insurance I ended up with a refurb. Don't do the stores, they do not have high end knowledge at all. I can now do a recovery from the root and /or flash the phone from the instructions I got over the phone with Verizon. Their upper level tech support knows their s***. I had a problem with the storage card because somehow it got encryptewd and even Windows could not format the card. I finally worked it out with a forensic application I use and was able to get it cleaned off. In fact it just finished loading all my stuff back on there. The part that sucks is I buy a 32 GB card and if it fails due to the phone, Verizon only reimburses a 16GB that came with the phone. I always drag my stuff from my phone to my computer so I don't lose much when I go through crap like this. Gmail has a Play Store dashboard that has all the apps you dowloaded and installed on file and all you have to do is click on "Install" and the app gets puhed to your phone and installed.

[B33]

Google play store would have your Apps that you had Previous Just look in your Apps area of the Play-Store..