Friends are bad.
Kids are worse.

This is the desired effect isn't it?

Oddly I never locked my phone until I got a phone with a fingerprint scanner (Pixel) and felt that security was convenient enough for me to put up with.

I don't know why I never locked my other phones, but I definitely wouldn't go back now.

I only locked my company phones when the group policy would update and require it. The iPhones I've had I've just used the home button to wake, and on the 6s and newer it is fast enough that it was never an issue. The same is true on the G6 I'm using now. When I had the S8 for the week I had to shut it off since it was so flakey.

Just shows that if it is fast and easy enough, people will use it.

Puzzled as in "what's this", not "what's the password".

ha.
I use a Blackberry Classic as personal travel phone. No screen lock, no nothing. (there's nothing of value on it, though). Nobody steals those things anymore.

Without intending offense, this attitude is quite depressing. Consider the fact that most people's phones contain not only their own personal information, but the often times include personal information of others, such as phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, etc. Unless someone's phone contains absolutely zero personal information, which is quite unlikely nowadays, consider the harm you might cause to others if your phone is lost/stolen/etc.

This latest major iOS update forced a password or finger print to unlock. Before that I have always just had swipe to unlock.

I don't lock my phone because the timeout is already annoying enough without having to enter a password 20 times an hour. But I also have pretty limited important information on there. I don't have any social media or financial info on the phone, and I never access the important email accounts (the ones I use to register with various sites) from my phone. GPS is almost always off. Browser is set to clear all private information on exit. So if I happen to lose my phone someone could get access to my work email (which isn't all that important) and a bunch of contact phone numbers. My important accounts all use 2FA that is not connected at all to the phone I either use dedicated hardware, or a secondary phone that doesn't leave the house and is locked.

All things being equal, I'd much prefer to be able to put a password on my phone. But I won't do that until Android makes a distinction between screen off and phone locked.

Several of the open-source ROMs (I can't remember if this includes LineageOS, the version FKA Cyanogen) have options to do exactly that, or to treat the "off" as a lock only after a certain amount of time... up to and including "only require a password at startup to unencrypt." I think some carrier ROMs have done so as well.

Even the non-customized versions have smart lock with various detections for "not locked under circumstance X." Getting a BLE token you keep elsewhere on your person, for example, would work for this, with the phone locking as soon as it was out of range of you, or a second phone (e.g. when I had a work phone and a personal one, if it had then supported it I could have used the BT presence of my personal phone to keep my work phone unlocked.)

Hmm...interesting. I'm running Cyanogenmod 13 on my older phone and Lineage OS on a newer one and do not recall seeing anything like this in the settings, but I'll need to investigate, because that would be the best of both worlds for me.

ETA: Apparently this is a GApps feature and not a ROM feature. I don't have GApps installed so that explains why I haven't seen it. I do need to reflash a new ROM on the newer phone since I've been having a lot of problems with Lineage, so maybe I'll actually break down and install a GApps package at the same time.

It makes sense that the smart lock is a GApps feature; it's worth playing with if you end up installing it.

I'm pretty sure the separate lock timer (and disabling auto-lock on screen off via power button) isn't GApps; my Nexus 6 doesn't have it, while my travel phone running an AOSP ROM (Krexus, based off 6.0.1) does -- under security in settings "Automatically lock? [___] minutes after sleep, except when kept unlocked by Smart Lock" and "Power Button instantly locks? [on/off]"

My Chinese Doogee T3
https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1toBkK...pg_640x640.jpg
has the ability to use bluetooth to keep the phone unlocked. So if I have my hifi bluetooth adapter on at home my phone can remain unlocked but if I go out it locks. Obviously if you've got a strong Bluetooth signal it'll stay unlocked for longer distances but with mine it doesn't go much beyond my front gate.

My Moto G4 has offered me something like that with regard to my car's bluetooth. I haven't bothered as so rarely do I want to unlock it in the car anyway.

I think that it is an android thing. I believe it uses the Bluetooth LE spec to do this so that it locks if the device goes too far from the BT item. I use it with my car so I don't have to fumble around trying to unlock it.