Hey I'm planning on getting a SIM card here in Europe. Is it illegal to unlock an iPhone and what's easiest way? Sorry if this is in wrong thread.
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Is it legal to unlock iPhones?
- Thread starter michael31986
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It's not illegal to get your iPhone unlocked through the carrier for international use. All carriers will unlock your phone if you have a contract. For verizon iPhone 5 and later are unlocked.
If you don't have a current contract with the carrier it's going to be difficult to get your phone unlocked.
If you don't have a current contract with the carrier it's going to be difficult to get your phone unlocked.
From what I understand (going out on a limb here), it's Apple who provide the unlocking mechanism, not the carrier. You pay the carrier, they notify Apple & they provide the code/s (through iTunes). It's never been illegal to unlock phones in Europe, at least not that I can remember.
I guess that if you don't have a contract with a European carrier you might have problems...
I guess that if you don't have a contract with a European carrier you might have problems...
Yep, and the President signed it into law on Aug 1, 2014.
http://www.cnet.com/news/president-signs-cell-phone-unlocking-bill-into-law/
But the law seems useless:
1, though unlocking a phone was a illegal action in the last year, the carrier won't accuse a person. The carrier just accuse the profiteers.
2, the law don't force carriers to unlock the phone for consumers. They may just unlock your phone when you finish the two year contract.
3, Maybe the ultrasnow team could develop the software unlock. But it's of great difficulty. In other words, it's impossible to use software to unlock 5c/5s.
4, now for a locked phone and owner have no contract with its carrier, the only way is to try chronicunlocks or other unlock service. The price is high and it's very slow.
5, As a Sprint iPhone 5c owner and no contract with Sprint, I just use this phone as a touch. I'm going to use this phone in another country's cdma network. But I think under new law will not apple unlock CDMA baseband.
In my opinion, now 5/5c/5s supports lots of network type, they are really global phones. But Apple gives every iPhone an activation policy which decides the network they could use and lock some. The activation policy is stored in Apple's database with IMEI. For a iPhone, the unlocking is just to change the activation policy. Apple could unlock it but they don't do that, maybe just to protect the carrier's profit.
That's all my guess. In reality CDMA Lock is different from GSM. Carriers like Sprint locks its phone individually. Japan carriers like SoftBank and KDDI do not provide unlocking service.
