Global smartphone shipments hit 1.26 billion units in 2025, and that doesn’t count laptops, tablets, or the earbuds and smartwatches that come home in the same shopping bag. A huge number of those devices get set up the same way: not at a kitchen table with the home Wi-Fi password typed in carefully, but right there in the store, or at the coffee shop next door, because waiting until you get home feels like wasting half the fun of a new gadget.
The Ten Minutes That Matter Most
That instinct isn’t really a problem on its own. The moment it becomes one is the part right after unboxing, when a new phone or laptop asks to restore from a cloud backup and, in the space of a few minutes, quietly logs back into every account the old device had: email, banking apps, cloud photos, social logins, sometimes a password manager syncing its entire vault for the first time on the new hardware. It’s the single most login-dense ten minutes most devices will ever have, and it usually happens over whatever network is closest, not the one anyone actually trusts. It’s the same window where people are also pairing the new device with everything else in the box, headphones, a case, sometimes one of the travel gadgets meant to keep a connection reliable on the go, so a Wi-Fi network is already doing a lot of quiet work in the background before the setup screen even finishes.
The Network Doing More Work Than It Looks
That network is rarely as safe as it feels. Zimperium’s threat intelligence team has tracked more than 5 million unsecured public Wi-Fi networks globally since the start of 2025, concentrated in exactly the kind of dense, high-traffic spots, malls, retail districts, coffee shops, where people tend to open a new device for the first time. None of that means mall Wi-Fi is crawling with attackers waiting for a specific new phone. It means an unencrypted network gives anyone else on it a much easier shot at intercepting whatever isn’t otherwise protected, right when a device is at its most exposed.
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More than 5 million unsecured public Wi-Fi networks have been identified globally since the start of 2025. — Zimperium threat intelligence |
Fixing the Order, Not the Habit
The fix is less about avoiding public Wi-Fi and more about sequencing. A VPN encrypts the connection between a device and the internet, so a cloud restore or a fresh login doesn’t travel across a shared network in the clear. The easiest way to make that automatic is to treat it as step one of setup rather than something to think about later. It takes about as long as picking a wallpaper, and it’s worth knowing how to install ExpressVPN on your device before the restore screen even loads, not after.
None of this changes what makes a new gadget fun to use. It just moves one setting from “eventually” to “first,” in the same window where everything else about the device is already getting configured for the first time anyway, notifications, Face ID, which apps get to see the camera roll. A phone that’s been reset once already knows how habits form early; the network it first trusts is one of them.
