(Fair warning - this is a massively long-winded post and should probably be cut up, if it’s too much in one please let me know and I can break it down)
Hello,
A few questions / issues here. Long time user of Brave (and Brave Rewards). After probably 8 months of not being able to claim my BAT (with no useful error) I eventually found out it was because my phone had an unlocked bootloader (had to unlock it to flash stock ROM as it was an international purchase).
Fast-forward another ridiculous number of months (and piles of unclaimed BAT) and eventually figured I’d lock my bootloader to claim it, which requires a factory reset.
Brave Mobile didn’t provide an option to back up the wallet (unlike on Desktop). I assumed this might have been because the wallet was technically ‘empty’ and unverified despite having probably ~100 unclaimed BAT attributed to it.
Backed up all of my phones data, including what should have been Brave Mobile’s user data and did my factory reset.
After restoration, Brave refused to restore any of my user data from the backup, only for me to find that Brave Mobile wasn’t exposing it’s data to backups to begin with. Is this a normal setting for Brave Mobile’s android app manifest?
I used THREE completely different backup methods (one of which was even a ‘get everything it possibly can from the underlying system without root’ method which scrubs through every accessible piece of storage) and NONE of them contain Brave’s data as it was apparently not being exposed to any unrooted backup systems, and as a result Brave Mobile doesn’t get included in the backup.
So after that long-winded explanation of the situation, my questions are:
-
Is Brave Mobile’s android app manifest not permitting Brave user data to be exposed to the user or to backups? – Exactly what backup methods are supposed to be supported? Is there supposed to be a way for all of this data to be backed up from inside the Brave app itself?
-
Where are ‘unclaimed’ BAT kept? I assume they’re attributed to the wallet but stored elsewhere and never actually moved into it if they’re unclaimed. (Note: This is just for my information - I fully expect that these BAT will never be seen again since I’m apparently unable to retrieve my wallet data, wasn’t aware of the ‘rewards-internals’ page to manually record my ID’s etc since the last time (admittedly a while ago) I tried to use any of the
brave://special pages on mobile they didn’t exist. - My fault, that’s fine.) - Overall I just want to know if these are permanently lost/wasted BAT, or if at least Brave themselves get to keep them. -
How are you meant to be able to back up a wallet if you can’t verify it, but can’t verify it due to a minimum required amount or because there’s an issue with your device and you have to secure it first? Is that virtual wallet then useless that entire time without warning the user beforehand?
-
For future reference - are BAT earned that aren’t claimable due to system vulnerabilities (ie, reasons you wouldn’t pass the safety check that prevents you claiming) ever actually able to be claimed even if you correct the issue after earning them?
Or are they just marked as ‘possibly earned illegitimately’? Is the issue preventing claiming a financial security one? (such as - you can’t claim it on an insecure device, but you’ve still technically earned them and can then claim them by securing the device)?.
After 14+ months of personally tracking this issue (and having to repeatedly trawl the community pages for updates or information, only to see claiming problems are extremely common) why is there still not updates to FAQ’s regarding these very simple and very easily explained issues?
It would be fantastic to have a list of explained pre-requisites to even be able to properly participate in the Brave Rewards ecosystem since there are MANY potentially lost BAT that will never be touched again due to issues like this. This works against, and erodes the entire ecosystem by effectively putting money into the system that will never be able to be used again by -anyone-. This helps nobody, and at some point costs somebody.