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My first post on here and hopefully a easy fun answer.

I'm looking for the location for failed login attempts on the device - I've looked on the device and it seems the logs are located in /dev/log/?

If this is the location of the logs, does this log the failed attempts at log ins? and if so what do these look like? I've download some logcat viewers but these seems to only read live log entries when in the app.

Would a app have access to read these logs?

Thanks for your help

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For information about seeing log messages, look at the answers to How can I view and examine the Android log? Note that the behaviour is different between and prior versions.

Android users don't work like users on a normal GNU/Linux system, so unlocking the lock screen is not a "login" in the same way that logging into a terminal session, through an X display manager, or via the network are on a GNU/Linux box. Failed attempts to unlock the lock screen are not logged.

The log is meant as a debugging aid, and log messages aren't stored forever, so the lock screen application would have its own way of storing failed attempts. In general, the Android engineers at Google like to keep the logs quiet on production devices, so system apps have a lot of logging that's turned off in the official build. There's nothing to stop a device OEM, or an unofficial ROM, having more logging for failed unlocks (or any other events). You could compile your own ROM to achieve this, but doing so is way beyond the scope of this site.

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  • Thanks for answering - I thought the action would have been logged somewhere as it has to know its a failed attempt
    – Grimlockz
    Commented May 8, 2013 at 9:48
  • I added more info in my answer.
    – Dan Hulme
    Commented May 8, 2013 at 9:56
  • Ahh I see - so the lock screen would be an application itself with its our logging - how would I find out about that?
    – Grimlockz
    Commented May 8, 2013 at 10:01
  • The xda-developers site and forum has a lot of information on building and customizing ROMs, but be warned that compiling a ROM from source is more than a day's work, especially if you're not familiar with programming tools and build systems.
    – Dan Hulme
    Commented May 8, 2013 at 10:07
  • Thanks for your help - Need to find out now if you can track failed attempts on the lock screen. I thought it would be like linux with a auth.log or something that shows it.
    – Grimlockz
    Commented May 8, 2013 at 10:12

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