As part of Apple’s new iOS 18, it appears that they are beta testing a feature called “Activation Lock.”  The feature, as previously described by Apple, links your Apple Account not only to your iPhone, but also to components such as the battery, cameras and display based on their individual serial numbers.

The goal is to put an end to the market for selling parts from stolen iPhones. With Activation Lock, when the iPhone detects a used part, it will ask for the Apple Account password of the owner of the original device.

Here’s how Apple described the change in April:

Apple will also extend its popular Activation Lock feature to iPhone parts in order to deter stolen iPhones from being disassembled for parts. Requested by customers and law enforcement officials, the feature was designed to limit iPhone theft by blocking a lost or stolen iPhone from being reactivated. If a device under repair detects that a supported part was obtained from another device with Activation Lock or Lost Mode enabled, calibration capabilities for that part will be restricted.

So, how (or will?) this impact the independent repair shops?

Paul Roberts of Fight to Repair wrote, “The practical consequences of that could be devastating for small, independent repairers.”

But is it that bad? Opinions seemed to be mixed. 

We talked with a few of our members who do repairs, as well as Matt Zieminski from iFixIt and who is the VP at The Repair Association. Here’s what they told us.

One NWIDA member who called us said this could “be the death of the independent repair shop” – but another shop owner told us: 

… For repair shops that are using OEM pull parts from phones that were activation locked – they’re gonna be in a world of hurt. Luckily we don’t use those parts. We use all aftermarket and occasionally from suppliers like mobile centric’s injured gadgets and phone LCD parts will use OEM pole parts if they have an a grade available or service pack Parts but that’s a few and far between.

I really don’t see it being too much of an issue. I know there’s a repair shop down the street. They are notorious for using used parts on customers phones, I think it will drastically affect them. But do I think it’s going to affect our industry in a very negative way for unethical practices at certain repair shops? Yes absolutely.

 

And, Matt told us: 
Matt Zieminski:

The intention of Activation Lock generally is to prevent theft, but the status quo has been more devices being disposed because repair isn’t possible for refurbishing into a secondhand device. The problem is people don’t disable their software lock when they get rid of the device, so when repair shops and recyclers receive it they can’t do anything with it. The latest iOS brings this “feature” to parts and worsens the problem rather than fixes it because of the bugs. Some of the engineers at iFixit tested the process on some iPhone 15s and found a lot of issues. The OS crashes, disables other functionality, etc. 

All of this means that If a repair shop or refurbisher would otherwise take a perfectly functional charging port, or screen, or rear camera, or any other part from a device running iOS 18, and the owner failed to disable their activation lock before getting rid of it, and then the repair shop tries to use that part on a different device (e.g. a donor part), the part now retains the activation lock that was previously only tied to the logic board. and try to install that on a different device, it won’t work without going through the new Repair Assistant process. That process is unacceptably buggy and unusable, which means the part swap fails and the device is useless. 

If it worked as expected and advertised, probably a good thing for the industry and consumers. 

iFixit wrote their own blog piece on it. We’ve linked it at the bottom of this post.

So, good for independent repairs shops? Bad? a death knell?  Leave us a comment and let us know your thoughts. NWIDA will (as always) be on top of this, and on the dealer/shop side – so drop a note below and give us your voice, so we can amplify it. 

And if you haven’t joined us yet – today is a great day to do so!

iFixit post on Activation Lock

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