Google Fi bricked my iPhone 11 Pro Max (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Google Fi bricked my iPhone 11 Pro Max (2020)

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177 pointscft96 comments

No carrier should be able to brick a phone without it being locked to the network. I did some research online, and it seems that the culprit here is actually Best Buy (and Apple) for selling phones as unlocked although they actually aren't: Apple sells iPhones to third parties under a 'US Reseller Flex Policy' [1], which means that they are automatically locked to the first carrier they are activated on.

Nothing on the Best Buy website gives me any indication of this happening. If this is really true, it's deceptive advertisement. I'm not a lawyer, but this looks illegal.

[1]: https://swappa.com/faq/answer/us-reseller-flex-policy

Try to buy a phone from best buy and not have them set it up for you. It's impossible, they will refuse to sell you the phone.

They charge extra if you don’t activate the phone at the store.

Few people will argue that freedom is free, shoulder the cost and enjoy liberty. It is absolutely a crummy business tactic however, I find myself spending huge amounts of time to buy directly from source instead of retailers / amazon / et al. The high-quality magnetic USB cables I originally discovered through amazon got pulled and I discovered ordering from their site directly was more painless than amazon.

If this was the case, then it is actually Apple to blame. Hard to believe there was such incessive practices. Under such scheme, the operator the device was locked(you will never know which as myself have multiple services and sometimes switch SIMs between devices, I assume I'm not alone) to might completely have no idea what was happening and I don't see a way that they can help the user easily.

Google Fi (originally Project Fi) was amazing when it first came out, but at some point they switched to contracted support with no ability to resolve issues (it's not even the support people's fault, as they literally don't have the power to do anything). For awhile Google people used to hang out in the Google Fi subreddit but they seem to have mostly moved on to other projects or companies. Besides locking phones like this example, their insurance has turned into a flat out scam- they either lose the phone completely, claim that the ID doesn't match the one in their system, or tell people there are no replacements available so they have to pay a fee for an "upgrade".

Between this and the GCP price increases today is a pretty solid reminder that relying on any Google service is likely a mistake.

Google is turning into a complete sh*tshow across seemingly all product lines. Aside from Ads (I mean Search) I can't think of anything that hasn't fallen into disrepair or been EOL'd.

Ads are just as bad, and Search is little more than Ads these days.

They've outsourced Google Ads "account strategists" to contractors abroad who hound Google's advertisers by any and all contact methods they can find -- not those you've given Google -- to force you onto "account review" phone calls in which they talk you through ways to spend more on Google Ads. Then those ads get reviewed by people that don't have the time or knowledge to apply Google's ad policies properly, so they're constantly deactivating years-old ads for vague and very wrong reasons, until you resubmit the same ad and it's approved again, at least until the next random review.

Google has no core competency any more.

Our CTO had to get involved when some GCP SDR wouldn't stop hounding several ICs in our engineering org. We're an exclusively AWS shop and they didn't seem to be targeting decision makers. Multiple please-do-not-contact emails was not enough for them to stop.

It was weird because you'd think they'd at least target decision makers based on LinkedIn titles.

Sounds a bit like my Google Fiber experience (support not being able to do anything). I had a weird problem where my Google Fiber "account" wasn't linked to my real Google account and Google closed that other account (I'm not even sure why) so I literally couldn't pay them, and it took them a long while to figure it out. I essentially had to sign up from scratch and pretend the hardware was transferred to me... from me. Thankfully only a few hours of downtime there.

At least I had my outstanding bill as a small motivator. Google really freaking sucks at customer service.

They are actually thinking of their paid customers as their users, and they make their paid users hate them. Despite their monopoly power, there might be opportunities to build on this genuinely increasing hatred by their users, like Protonmail and Fastmail

Google lost it's way as a company long ago. They used to be the ones defining what it meant to be in a progressive workplace, eschewing the corporate workplace. Now they are that corporate workplace, getting passed up by all the startups. All their products are half-baked, where it's painfully obvious no thought was put in to making a product that was intended to last.

I met some amazing Google engineers - network and SRE peope - early in my career and idolised them for a long time. Recently I got to work with Google on the commercial side and I was shocked by the incompetence, apathy and fear. No idea what’s going on in engineering but rarely have I worked with commercial folks who were so under-qualified and disempowered.

I think when you are no different than the next corporate giant, and you begin to pinch the pennies as a result, then you attract talent that is no different than the rest. I remember at my last job it was always: "Well, our formulas and market research say this position is only worth $X, so that's what we're going to pay." They failed to realize that a large portion of the best qualified people simply would not accept such low compensation. Frankly, I felt a bit insulted coming in, when their pay offer was so low, but my field was so niche in the area that I begrudgingly accepted it.

Kind of regretting storing all my photos on Google Photos. Downloading takeout data always has missing photos :(

Support told me this directly once - almost everything is automated and they have no control over it.

My two month old pixel had the microphone die suddenly. After battling for a week, they refused to send me anything but a refurbished phone. Then they didn't scan the return in when received and charged me the full, brand new price for the refurb. Another couple days of useless support tech I got my money back.

> I learned that Google Fi exclusively uses the T-Mobile network for iPhone customers, and activating a Google Fi SIM with an iPhone causes T-Mobile to lock the phone to the T-Mobile network (which is illegal, since the user hasn’t entered into any service agreement with T-Mobile).

Wow, carriers can just remotely lock an unlocked phone? How does this even work? Is this some kind of command that the SIM card sends the phone that the phone recognizes?

I would expect this to be the case. If they can remotely unlock it, they should be able to lock it as well.

It really depends on what you mean by "should be able". If you mean "I would expect it to be physically possible to implement something like this", then obviously. If you mean "I think manufacturers should design phones in a manner that allows this"... that one is not so obvious to me.

They're cell phone carriers. They're going to want as much control as possible regardless of how many engineers and customers whine about it.

I wonder if the obvious solution would be a warranty return (if bought in a country/state with reasonable customer protection laws).

Beyond Google Fi and T-Mobile, this story has made me suddenly much more apprehensive about picking up SIM cards from some local MVNO when traveling. What’s to stop a local operator from locking my phone and leaving an unpleasant surprise waiting when I get home?

And now I also have to wonder: do eSIMs have the same vulnerability to bad-actor carriers? Is this a risk with any of the companies Airalo has partnered with?

It can only ever happen when the phone is first activated. So if you have already used the phone with another carrier's SIM card, you are good to go.

It's not an issue of the carrier locking it. Right now there is no mechanisim for an arbitrary carrier to issue a lock command through SIM or otherwise. The issue is that the iPhone hardware itself was watching for insertion of a SIM and locking itself to the first SIM inserted.

An unlocked mobile device cannot be locked to a carrier because the SIM lock mechanism is disabled, which basically tells me he got a phone that he thought was unlocked but was actually locked to T-Mobile.

> An unlocked mobile device cannot be locked to a carrier because the SIM lock mechanism is disabled

If it's a Best Buy "unlocked" iPhone it can! It was unlocked when he bought it, but locked onto the first network it was activated (Fi is T-Mobile[1] MVNO)

1. and AT&T too for fully supported Fi phones - you can get seamlessly handed over between T-Mobile, AT&T and wifi. However, iPhone are not fully supported, so they exclusively use T-Mobile.

Keep in mind that Apple’s modern SIM lock implementation is built into the OS and has nothing to do with the modem being locked, so all assumptions about modem locks no longer apply.

Apple’s SIM lock “feature” checks in with Apple over the internet (including over the disallowed SIM, since the modem itself is always unlocked) and refuses to let you proceed if the current SIM doesn’t match the policy returned by the backend.

Obviously the policy can be changed at any time. This is also how this “flex carrier lock” is implemented.

The phone wasn't remotely locked; Best Buy's entire new iPhone stock uses "flex activation" which will automatically lock the phone to the first SIM card that's inserted. Fi's primary network is T-Mobile, so for a Fi SIM, this means T-Mobile.

The blame here lies on Best Buy (for not making it clear that this occurs) and Apple (for designing and supporting "flex activation" -- which will still carrier-lock the phone even if a MVNO SIM, such as a Fi SIM, is inserted).

Agree. Such practice was dumb and incessive. If it was made clear, why would someone buy it in the first place?

Ah I see, thanks for the explanation.

To simplify: Best Buy sells locked phones.

The locking is already there, but the operator is chosen at the activation so that Best Buy can sell one model for any operator.

So the blame is actually Apple’s for blindly allowing this behavior, Best Buy’s for not advertising it, T-Mobile’s for allowing this through MNVO’s, and Google’s for not knowing that this happens and not allowing unlocks.

And they said my Node dependency tree was a mess!

But what is the point of this flex activation scheme?

Easier inventory management for stores like Best Buy. Instead of having to carry SKUs for the T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, etc. carrier-locked variant of each phone (which, I'll admit results in some combinatorial explosion), they can carry 1 SKU for each truly different hardware configuration. Then it magically "becomes" an AT&T locked phone when they insert the SIM in the store.

If you buy it subsidized or through a carrier payment plan, this works as intended (and they'll refuse to let you have the phone before the SIM is inserted). If you meant to buy an unlocked phone, you've been given an annoying lesson to buy directly from the manufacturer.

This happened to me with a nameless Canadian carrier. I bought an iPhone, unlocked, from Apple. It worked great with many SIMs in different countries. At some point, the screen broke on the phone, and Apple did an "AppleCare express replacement" where they sent me a replacement phone and I sent my broken one back.

The next SIM I put in the phone locked the phone to that carrier.

It took like 5 minutes with Apple support to have Apple unlock the phone.

So perhaps that's a route the author could take?

This is the correct answer - Apple can unlock and may even do so - and if not there are darker methods of doing the unlocks.

Not sure I wouldn’t try it for a $1,100 brick …

Apple will unlock it if it’s an obvious mistake like this case - seems like the replacement phone’s activation policy wasn’t set to what the original phone had.

However in the OP’s case it won’t help - this isn’t a bug, it’s Best Buy scamming customers by selling them locked phones and passing them off as unlocked. Apple will just tell you to contact Best Buy.

I hope this was before December 2017[0], this behaviour hasn't been legal in Canada for half a decade.

[0]: https://www.canada.ca/en/radio-television-telecommunications...

This happened to me with an unlocked iPhone, bought at Best Buy, that I activated with a T-Mobile SIM card as well. Tried Apple support first, Apple couldn't care less. In the end T-Mobile themselves unlocked it after 2 full months of calling them almost daily and escalating, reaching out on social media, etc. This has nothing to do with Google Fi, and, if anything, I blame this on Apple for such a stupid fucking design that lets carriers unilaterally lock a brand new phone with no recourse.

At the very least Apple should’ve had big visible warnings displayed right on the boot screen for locked devices so that scummy carriers can’t “accidentally” sell locked phones as unlocked to unsuspecting customers.

But then again it took them ages to even introduce a settings menu to be able to tell which carrier a given phone was locked to; previously there was no way to know without bruteforcing with all the SIMs and Apple Support explicitly refused to tell you.

Apple may look like the good guys on the outside but they’re absolutely in bed with the carriers.

This is due to buying the phone from Best Buy. Best Buy's new Apple phones (even if claimed to be "unlocked") are configured to automatically carrier lock to the first SIM inserted. Fi's primary network is T-Mobile, so they lock to T-Mobile.

See the many complaints in these search results: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=best+buy+lock+to+first+SIM&...

This isn't bricked at all. They suspended the cellular service and it's carrier locked. Needs a re-title, pretty clickbaity.

Word usage changes, but it's super frustrating when a very specific term gets stretched and stretched until it barely means anything anymore.

Bricked mean it's literally as useful as a brick - maybe it's recoverable via a JTAG interface or something similarly obscure, but it's otherwise dead. It doesn't mean "temporarily disabled until I make enough annoying phone calls".

Breaking: "Bricked" bricked

Pretty much bricked for now for the author as he is oversea and there is no (easy) way to use it (at least for now).

Keep in mind that unlike legacy modem-level carrier locks that merely disable the modem, Apple’s implementation won’t even allow you to proceed past the setup screen without satisfying the SIM lock system first. The phone is literally a brick without it.

> causes T-Mobile to lock the phone to the T-Mobile network (which is illegal, since the user hasn’t entered into any service agreement with T-Mobile

I'd check the fine-print on your Google contract. It's probably spelled out in there. Say what you will about Google, their legal team usually covers all the bases.

Neither Google nor T-Mobile locked the phone.

_Apple_ programmed it to lock _itself_ to the first carrier with which it was used.

This is 100% the correct answer! The user can also log into his Apple account and unlock the phone. The reason T-Mobile customer service won't do it is because without a service plan they can't verify ownership.

Are you confusing the Find My iPhone feature or Activation Lock?

None of these depend on the SIM besides a SIM change triggering a re-check of the activation lock status (it’ll just ask you for your Apple ID credentials).

Carrier lock is not something the user has easy visibility on (until recently it wasn’t even possible to tell which carrier a phone was locked to without trying them all) and definitely no control over.

> it looks like you’ve been predominantly using Fi abroad over the past 3 months

I used my Fi SIM and international roaming continuously outside the US for 13 months over 2020/21 and never received a message like this or had my service cut. Makes me wonder if I just slipped through the cracks in their detection or something.

I just got an email last month booting me off after 22 months continuously abroad with no problems. This coincided with a lot of other people complaining online that they also just got cut. They definitely don't have any "detection" for you to slip through, they just check and enforce this manually occasionally.

If what he says is true, then legally, the issue is with Google. It is Google he had the contract with. The contract allowed Google to terminate his data service, which they did. However, it is Google to which he pays his money and with which the contract exists. The fact that under the hood they use T-Mobile, doesn't matter.

I was tempted to switch, but now. No. Staying far and wide away. Not for the locking, but the terrible customer support.

Did he try to do anything in a small claims court? Get a consultation with a lawyer? This is such a slam dunk it seems infinitely worth pursuing.

Obviously yes you'd rather not, but I never see updates on if the issue gets solved.

If you sue google they'll close your entire google account, which in turn can cause a lot of issues for a lot of people. I personally refuse to use gmail in part because of this- if you have a problem with one google service you risk losing access to all of them.

This is generally news to the hyper-libertarian HN clientele but I am pretty sure enforcing your rights as a consumer isn't supposed to open you up to retaliation in the US.

It’s not unusual. They decide that they don’t want to do business with you anymore. It can be included in their TOS that pre-arbitration is mandatory. By you going directly to civil courts you are breaching their TOS which is a reason for termination.

> By you going directly to civil courts you are breaching their TOS which is a reason for termination

That's a novel theory. So if I sue the power company because a cherry picker rear-ended my 1978 land yacht they can just shut me off in -20 winter weather because I sued them?

I didn’t say that. In your example, you are a consumer of a public service. In the Google case you are a user of a private service.

No, I'm a consumer of a giant publicly traded company that rides on some amount of publicly funded infrastructure. Hmm... sounds like Google a bit doesn't it?

> That's a novel theory.

This is not novel at all - patent cross-licensing has been using similar language for decades: "Your license to our bag of patents is valid unless you take us to court - then all bets are off". It's a very short jump from patent licensing to Terms of Service, I bet there's a lot of related case law.

Quite different as disputes between businesses are seen quite differently from consumer and business disputes.

The protections in the US are not nearly as strong as, say, Germany, where it's entirely possible that a grocery store can't ban you because they're the only place to shop. The right to do business with who you wish is more protected in the US. At the same time, there are laws about and the courts look poorly on retaliating on a weaker party for seeking legitimate redress.

There’s more to the story though - Google is actually collateral damage in this case and had nothing to do with locking the phone.

Best Buy scammed them by selling them a phone that automatically locks itself to the first carrier it sees, which is T-Mobile since Fi runs on that.

A small claims court case against Best Buy or even a warranty claim should sort it.

How can this even be a thing? My simplistic understanding is that if the phone is locked to a given carrier (down in the baseband part of it) sending a particular magic string of digits to it (the baseband) will clear that flag and it will henceforth be unlocked. Permanently. Is there really a corresponding re-lock operation?

In Canada at least, we went through three stages. 1. Buy locked second-hand phone, send $20 to shady operator somewhere to get unlock code, unlock. 2. Buy locked second-hand phone, call up the carrier it is locked to and demand the unlock code, which (after the law changed) they had to legally give you free of charge[1], enter digits, unlock. 3. No more unlocked phones since carrier locking is now illegal.

Doesn't that mean that in Canada, reaching down and "re-locking" a phone is also illegal? And since we're generally a bit behind here compared to the USA, how can such a problem even exist any more?

Note[1]: My mom loves her landline phones and refuses to use a smartphone. So she has one of those cellular-to-phone-jack gateways. I procured a spare replacement via classified ads. It was locked. Called the carrier, got the digits. Entered them via DTMF keypad on an old fashioned phone. I could hardly believe this would work, but it did! The thing unlocked and henceforth worked with any SIM.

I think there's more to the story than what's being said. It seems the customer is having trouble and either Google or T-Mobile should be better about handling the issue but I don't think we're receiving the entire story. I have used T-Mobile exclusively for many years now I have used it when they were being resold by harbor mobile. I'm very happy and satisfied with their service but I have moved both my sim and have placed other Sims from other carriers into my phone and I have never once received a message that my phone has been locked to T-Mobile as a carrier.

Edit: so I had given this some more thought and I don't believe that this is Google or T-Mobile that's put the carrier lock on his phone it's something that Apple allows you to do. It's something that users of iPhone devices can enable or disable in their Apple account. Because I've actually gotten iPhones from family members who are tech savvy who verify that it's an unlocked phone but it would not accept my SIM card saying that it was locked to a carrier. What they needed to do to fix it was log into their Apple account and release the carrier lock that allowed the phone to take a new sim. So this is really Apple anti-theft protection that he's got going on.

T-Mobile was one of the first bring your own device companies where they separated service plans from devices payment plans. I hope he gets his problem fixed and updates his medium post to indicate that this really isn't a Google fi or a T-Mobile issue.

This is from 2020.

OP here. I came across this article while researching what to do: evacuated to Spain from Ukraine just before the war, with Covid and... Google Fi suddenly disconnected my phone!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678249

Google bricked by LG v35. They had absolutely no remorse and support told me there was nothing they would do. (Notice I used the word would, because they absolutely could do something but that would interfere with $).

Mind expanding on how they bricked it?

As mushyhammer have said in here:

“blame is actually:

- Apple’s for blindly allowing this behavior,

- Best Buy’s for not advertising it,

- T-Mobile’s for allowing this through MNVO’s, and

- Google’s for not knowing that this happens and not allowing unlocks.”

5 years ago I used Google Fi and it was just awful. I bought a Nexus 5x on a Google Fi deal. Fi was super unreliable, customer service was dumpster fire garbage, and multiple hardware issues with the Nexus 5x and the sim card for whatever reason. There were even recalls and class action lawsuits with the 5x and the 6p that I missed out on. Not at all surprised that Google Fi is still terrible.

the 6p was a great phone though and at the time the ease of use with international travel was a real treat

I didn't own one. I ended up choosing the budget option. But if it was known for being bricked because of the boot software like multiple Nexus 5x that I owned, then I am skeptical.

the solution would be to find someone with a t-mobile sim, borrow the sim/lend them the phone and get the phone unlocked.

"Hey, I just bought a used iphone that is locked to t-mobile, which is normally fine, but I'm about to go overseas and need to use it with a local sim card, can you unlock it for me"

I've done this multiple times (spread out by years so not abusing anything).

I had such a terrible experience with Google Fi for 3 months, I never thought I would be this happy switching back to T-Mobile.

For those who live outside the states but go to visit every once in awhile, what do you do for sim cards? I live in Japan and currently I switch to a google fi sim card when I visit, but it's far from ideal.

eSIMs are super easy - I was able to get a T-mobile eSIM online.

I used Airalo, no hassle eSIM setup and roams onto AT&T and T-Mobile.

As a disclaimer(I work at Best Buy and) we don’t sell phones unlocked unless they are refurbished which tend to be much older models so something does seem a miss slightly.

Wow. Especially galling given Apple's activation lock already exists and is more effective.

That’s pretty messed up. Sometimes local phone shops can unlock your phone for you.

Pretty much impossible with Apple unless they know someone crooked within Apple or the locking carrier.

It’s not like modem locks where calculating an NCK code is sufficient - here the phone will regularly check in with Apple and the response tells it whether the SIM is allowed. It’s enforced at the OS level, and ironically, the modem itself is never locked.

Avoid google.

Noted

why would you use an iphone with google? asking for trouble...

They purchased a T-Mobile locked iPhone from Best Buy. Best Buy don't sell new unlocked iPhones (only used store with reviews saying they're sometimes locked). They then activated the phone on a T-Mobile MVNO which allowed the phone to work.

They had an unrelated issue with Google Fi (terms of service violation), purchased a foreign SIM card, found out they had purchased a locked iPhone and then contacted Google Fi support accusing them of causing it.

Google Fi's support rightfully said that they don't sell locked phones (least of all iPhones), and that they couldn't unlock a T-Mobile locked phone. The writer accuses them of acting illegally.

People seem to be under the mistaken impression that cellphone operators just have this red "unlock" button, whereas the reality is that T-Mobile is the only one capable of generating an unlock.

I just went to Best Buy's website. There's unlocked phones. It's typically the carrier branch stores that don't sell unlocked devices, though they often do in my experience (you'll get the phone cheaper somewhere else).

If you read carefully, the carrier selection on the website is really just for carrier compatibility; you are offered the option of paying the entire price upfront.

The shocker to me here is you can pay the entire up front cost and have your phone remotely disabled.

Those are used phones you're looking at. If you checked the reviews you will see that "not really unlocked" is a common complaint on top.

If you go look at their new inventory even if you "activate today" you still need to select a carrier.

Nope, brand new. You can pay entire sticker price up front and get them unlocked.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/apple-preowned-iphone-x-with-25...

What's this?

The authors story sounds plausible and they're right that iPhones on Fi use T-Mobile. And I say this as a very long term, happy Fi customer myself.

That is a used iPhone with multiple reviews saying it was locked when it arrived e.g.:

> Phone was Locked

> I bought this phone for my son so that he can reach me while he's at school. The product description for this phone said "unlocked" which was a major reason I chose it. It is a beautiful phone and like new. However, I quickly realized that it was an AT&T phone meaning it is locked. That was disappointing because I had planned on using Verizon. I didn't want to go through the trouble of returning it and waiting for a different phone, so I decided to keep it and get an AT&T plan.

And:

> Locked preowned phone. Garbage

> Zero stars. Bought a preowned Iphone X that was still locked from previous carrier. Could not be hooked up to new carrier. Terrible customer service, no resolution of our problem. Spent 2 hours on the phone with best buy, apple, and sprint. Best Buy sold us junk. DO NOT BUY PREOWNED FROM HERE.

And:

> Unusable phone (and arrived late)

> Not only did the phone arrive 3 days late, it arrived locked and unusable. Was not able to activate with tmobile as they said the phone was not in their system.

Best Buy don't sell unlocked new iPhones, never have. And all of their used inventory has similar reviews.

Here's a brand new one https://www.bestbuy.com/site/apple-iphone-11-with-64gb-memor...

The author purchased a 12 Max, where is that to buy unlocked? All you've found is an out-of-stock older model.

No even the title say 11 Max, not 12. In 2020. And Best Buy does sell new unlocked iphones, see link above.

The title was edited to that (both 2020 and "11 Max."). Best Buy doesn't sell unlocked iPhones 11 Max see links above.

They sell used iPhones "unlocked" with multiple reviews saying that they received a locked phone instead.

You right

They sell plenty of unlocked iphones

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?_dyncharset=UTF-...

As a Best Buy part time employee the correct answer is that we don’t sell the newest iPhone models unlocked in stores. Refurbished models are the only iPhones we sell unlocked in our store. Online that’s is a different matter entirely and yes there are some newer models we sell unlocked online but it’s minimal because of fraud.

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