Bypass Android setup

From Kenny Root

!!! These are old instructions by I have kept them for posterity. !!!

I bought a T-Mobile G1 for testing ConnectBot, but it requires you to have an activated T-Mobile SIM card with data service to use it. I tried using two old Pay-As-You-Go cards, but they had expired. I figured there had to be a way to bypass this silly registration.

NOTE: These steps only work on phones that have RC29 and below. Newer phones are starting to ship with RC30 (or, possibly, newer revisions). If step 4 doesn't work, you will need to downgrade to RC29 (US) or downgrade to RC7 (UK).

I am on a Mac OS X machine, so the steps may vary slightly for other operating systems. Here are the steps I took:

1. Install the Android SDK
2. Connect your G1 to your computer via USB.
3. Boot up G1 and press the android when prompted to start the setup wizard.
4. Press enter on the keyboard, type the following, and press enter again: setprop persist.service.adb.enable 1
5. If you didn't get a warning from your computer about improper device removal, you probably mistyped it. Try it again.
6. You should be able to verify everything is working by doing adb shell to get a shell on the device.
7. Now press enter, type the following on the keyboard, and press enter again: telnetd
8. Using the Android SDK on your computer, type adb forward tcp:2323 tcp:23
9. Now open up telnet to localhost 2323: telnet localhost 2323
10. Bring up the wireless settings wizard and set up your wireless network:
    • adb shell am start -a android.intent.action.MAIN -n com.android.settings/.Settings
11. Use the back button to exit from Settings and get back to the Setup Wizard at which point you can register as normal.
12. You're done!

I had some instructions on here before that might render your Home and Back buttons unusable because of some problem with the way Setup Wizard works. I recommend not using these because the above instructions are simpler.

Here are the OLD instructions in case the above doesn't work:

10. Type the following once you're connected to the root shell:
    1. setprop ro.debuggable 1
    2. setprop app.setupwizard.disable 1
11. In the adb shell you have opened up, use ps to find the PID of com.android.setupwizard
    1. ps
    2. Look at the second column of the line that ends com.android.setupwizard and use that for the next line where it says PID:
    3. kill PID
12. You should see the home screen now. You can stop here and start using the device, but some of the apps will be screwed up until you actually go through the Setup Wizard.
13. Settings -> Wireless controls
14. In the root telnet session type: reboot
15. Once rebooted and at the home screen, a notification (yield sign) will appear in the upper-left corner.
16. Drag the bar on top of the screen down to see the notification entitled "Your account must be updated" When you click on that, the Setup Wizard will run and you can link your phone to your Google account via Wi-Fi!