Recently when I tried to change the screen lock options in my Android smartphone, I found out that some of them were disabled. The message displayed under the disabled options read – “Disabled by administrator, encryption policy or credentials storage”. The options that were disabled were – None, Swipe and Voice Unlock. A little investigation revealed that Google had disabled some of the less secure screen lock options in the phone. At the same time other more secure options like PIN, Password and Pattern were still enabled. While this is a really good idea to use better and more secure screen lock options, you may want to bring back those easy to use screen lock options for your own personal reasons.
Here is how you can fix the problem of screen lock options getting disabled in Android:
- Open Android settings and then choose the Security section.
- Under the Security options, select Device administrators to see a list of device administrators.
- Deactivate all the device administrators one by one by unchecking the small checkbox next to them and then tapping on the Deactivate button.
- Again from under the Security options, tap on Clear Credentials to remove all the stored credentials.
- Reboot your Android smartphone and you will be once again able to choose any screen lock option as you want.
You should be careful when clearing the stored credentials as it will clear some of the certificates needed for you to access special online services over a secure connection. But it clears only the user stored credentials, not the system’s default set of certificates. When you clear the credentials, it could clear the credentials stored for the VPN (virtual private network) access, for web servers access, for email servers access or for proper working of some special apps (like the online banking apps).