Forgot your Android device’s lock screen pattern or password? Well, if you’ve a Google account set up on the device, then it’s easy to recover/setup a new PIN. However, in case you didn’t have a Google account set up on the device OR you don’t remember your Google account credentials to retrieve a new PIN, then bypassing the lock by unofficial means is one way.

XDA user Honestly Annoying just posted a nice little trick that you can use to bypass the lock screen security PIN, Password, Pattern or Fingerprint on any Android device running on Android 5.0/5.1 Lollipop and Android 6.0/6.0.1 Marshmallow releases.

However, there is a pre-requisite for this to work. You must have USB debugging enabled on your device. If not, a custom recovery like TWRP will be required so that we can issue ADB commands to the device using a PC.

How to Bypass Lock Screen Security on Android

  1. We need to issue ADB commands to the device. For this you should either have USB debugging enabled or boot your device into TWRP recovery.
    └ To get TWRP recovery for your device, check the official TWRP directory or Google search.
  2. Setup ADB on your PC.
  3. Connect your Android device to PC.
  4. Open a command window on the PC and issue the following commands (one-by-one): 
    adb devices
adb shell
cd data/system
rm locksettings.db
rm locksettings.db-shm
  5. Reboot device and the lockscreen security will be removed from device.

Happy Androiding!