Weird, I have project fi and don't have this app. It could be contractually required by your service provider that the app be installed on all the phones that they sell. That's a thing that they do.

Who is the carrier?

damn and no one at google saw this as dystopian?

Were the courts not enough control for creditors? Since when are they allowed to lock you out of your purchased property without a court order?

I don't think courts are typically involved for civil repossession.

But it sounds like this is used when the device isn't your purchased property, but leased on contract.

I guess it makes sense for them to do this if people started leases, paid the first month to get the phone in their hand, then walked away with the nice new phone they paid like $35 for, to sell or just use off-network.

What's stopping someone from enabling debug mode, downloading adb tools and running pm uninstall --user0 then the package name? Surely with the app removed, the app can't brick your phone. Or running a custom rom like lineage or graphine os?

Fuck the entirety of this noise.

I'm in the US and it's not on my phone and even though it's listed in the Play Store it says it's not available in my region

Apple does it to, but I've only ever seen it happen when you buy your phone on a payment plan as part of your service agreement through your service provider. Kind of like if you lease a car and stop making payments they can lock the engine from turning over.