My wife and I have iPhone 5s’s under contract with AT&T. We have been trying for 3 weeks to get AT&T to unlock the phones, as we will be spending 6 months of this year in China, and want to use a local carrier’s SIM card with our existing iPhones (I do not want the hassle of carrying two phones, or of setting up another complete set of phones/apps/email/calendars/etc.). Needless to say, AT&T has been nearly useless.
I’m giving them until Monday to get it done through proper channels. After that, we’re taking it into our own hands. So tell me, how do those shady cell phone stores that have signs saying they’ll unlock your phone actually work? What do they do? Will the phones really be unlocked, and we’ll be able to pop in another carrier’s SIM card? Will they be jailbroken? (Is that even a thing anymore? I haven’t heard of anyone jailbreaking iphones for like 4 years…)
Unfortunately, the only real unlock that works for the iPhone that I know of, is that the carrier sends a signal to the App Store. Next time you connect, the update from the App Store will unlock your phone. Only your carrier can do this. (Rogers in Canada, for example, charges $50 to do this.)
Unlock could work, but again, you may or may not be able to do some things with a jailbroken phone. Note that there’s “jailbreak” which allows you to install apps etc. from other sources than Apple, and then there’s “unlocking” which after some jailbreaking processes, is an additional process that can be done without the carrier’s permission.
Also, I assume you know/have dealt with this, but I looked into this when I went to China several years ago. While you could buy SIM cards over the counter and do voice/text phone service, any internet data service at that time required you to register and could take up to a month to get a SIM card and approved plan.
I have unlocked iPhones that were out of the two year commitment window with AT&T. As best as I understand it, AT&T will refuse to unlock iPhones that are still within the two year contract, because the whole point of the discount on buying the phone for $200 (instead of the $500 full price) is that AT&T will make up the $300 discount over that two years.
For the two iPhones I have unlocked that were outside of the two year contract, I went to this web page, filled out the information, and the deed was done in the next day or two. That was as easy as could be.
Yeah, we paid a hefty early termination fee to make the under-contract phones capable of being unlocked. But the money is just sitting in our account as an account credit. AT&T hasn’t applied it to the ETF yet, despite three unlock requests.
Yeah, that’s why I came here, Duckster—it’s nearly impossible to search for how to unlock you iphone info., because the first 20 pages that come up are all news articles telling you that it’s finally legal to unlock your phone (or older stories that it was legal, then it wasn’t, then it was) and hey, here’s the exact same link to AT&T’s unlocking web page over and over and over.
None of that stuff is working for me. I’m following AT&Ts procedures and getting nowhere. I’m looking for alternatives.
I did a Google search with “unlock iphone” and came up with several possibilities. I chose not to link here because of the apparent dubious nature of several of the links.
If you don’t get it unlocked the thou the proper channels, then your phone might stop working.
However, running a 2 phone setup is not as bad as it sounds. They should syn the calender, app, contacts and email between them once you get online, at least my Androids do that with ease.
Can I just offer a bit of unsolicited advice? There is no way in hell that I would take a phone to China that I would either plan to take back to the United States, reconnect to my own computer at some point, or would link to any online accounts that I own, whether that be email, some cloud service, or anything else. Every electronic thing I would take to China would be completely disposable, from cell phones to email accounts and anything in between, and would literally thrown in the trash as I left the country. YMMV, but I thought it would be helpful simply to put that thought in your head.