Comment by damisanet

"Magic hostname" mentioned in article (afwprovisioning-pa.googleapis.com) makes me believe this may be related to zero-touch enrollment of Android Enterprise/Android for Work (https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/7514005). I'm sure devices sold to regular customers and enterprises are identical and nobody is going to unbox and pre-provision them before shipment, so unboxed phone needs to contact provisioning server at least once to verify that there is no pending zero-touch enrollment configuration prepared for it (which may prevent bootloader unlocking if device is enterprise-owned).