By now the news of Samsung’s official Galaxy Note 7 recall is likely not news, as everyone should be aware of the situation surrounding what could have been Samsung’s most popular smartphone to date, if it were only able to stick around. It may have taken Samsung weeks and weeks along with quite a bit of effort to get most of the Galaxy Note 7 devices back into their possession after the recall, but most devices seem to have been returned at this point, with Samsung having sent out prompts to people’s phones to power down the device and return it if they hadn’t initially taken it back on their own accord when they found out about the recall. In an interesting turn of events, it seems that even phones which aren’t a Galaxy Note 7 are getting this message too.
According to a Reddit user named dominicedcel, they were issued the recall prompt on their Samsung Galaxy Note 4 which was running on a Galaxy Note 7 ROM, which seems to have caused Samsung’s system that sends out these message to think that the phone was actually a Galaxy Note 7. Samsung is not actually recalling the wrong devices, of course, but it isn’t too far of a stretch to think that a device which has an edited build.prop might receive such a message intended for the actual device type that the build.prop is meant to mirror.
In fact, users who frequently customize their devices could edit their build.prop for any number of other reasons, including tricking the Android system into thinking that your device is a different type of phone to gain access to a specific app or piece of software that is only compatible with that device. While dominicedcel doesn’t mention any other incidences following this one message, it does perhaps raise the question of whether or not Samsung could also issue the software update to older Galaxy Note devices running a Galaxy Note 7 ROM that would prevent from charging beyond 60 percent, which would be more of an issue than a simple message if it were to happen. Although not many users would be looking to change their device details like dominicedcel to run a Galaxy Note 7 ROM, it’s entirely possible that other users could have had the message pop up as well.