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Recent iOS Update Kills Functionality On iPhone 8s Repaired With Aftermarket Screens (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Apple released iOS 11.3 at the end of March, and the update is killing touch functionality in iPhone 8s repaired with some aftermarket screens that worked prior to the update. That means people who broke their phone and had the audacity to get it repaired by anyone other than Apple is having a hard time using their phone. "This has caused my company over 2,000 reshipments," Aakshay Kripalani, CEO of Injured Gadgets, a Georgia-based retailer and repair shop, told me in a Facebook message. "Customers are annoyed and it seems like Apple is doing this to prevent customers from doing 3rd party repair." According to Michael Oberdick -- owner and operator of iOutlet, an Ohio-based pre-owned iPhone store and repair shop, every iPhone screen is powered by a small microchip, and that chip is what the repair community believes to be causing the issue. For the past six months, shops have been able to replace busted iPhone 8 screens with no problem, but something in the update killed touch functionality. According to several people I spoke to, third-party screen suppliers have already worked out the issue, but fixing the busted phones means re-opening up the phone and upgrading the chip. It remains to be seen whether Apple will issue a new software update that will suddenly fix these screens, but that is part of the problem: Many phones repaired by third parties are ticking timebombs; it's impossible for anyone to know if or when Apple will do something that breaks devices fixed with aftermarket parts. And every time a software update breaks repaired phones, Apple can say that third-party repair isn't safe, and the third-party repair world has to scramble for workarounds and fixes.
Well, now we know that the touch chip is a vector for unauthorized access.
When you reverse engineer stuff you pay the price when things change. If it's only one vendor having the problem then you bought your stuff from the wrong vendor.
Oh noes! I kludged in unsupported hardware and now it doesn't work! How dare Apple not know about and support every piece of hardware made by other companies in the world! It's an outrage!
Back when Apple introduced the first iMac they also introduced the "G3 Blue & White Tower". Some months later, when everyone knew a new machine from Apple with a G4 processor was planned, some aftermarket outfits began selling a G4 upgrade kit. You could buy & install the upgrade kit and have a G4 Mac without the wait and without having to buy a new machine from Apple.
Apple released a firmware update (remember the "programmer's button"?) disguised as something I can't remember. That update broke all of these G4 upgrade kits.
This is simply the way Apple does business.
follow the specs that Apple releases
Sarcasm? They don't release any such thing.
Looking at the history of Apple and the fact they want to have it all in their own garden, I am going for option one, until they can prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that it was option 2. At that moment I will still go for option two as the correlation and still believe it is option one.
Remember: these are the guys blaming their customers that they where holding their phone wrong.
The thing is that they will get away with it. In three weeks they will state that they reversed it. The bad thing will already have happened and less people will be willing to repair their devices elsewhere.
As they will not be punished in any way, they will be doing this again and again. Nice to have no accountability whatsoever. What should happen is that each person that is affected gets the money to buy of the price of a new phone AND a new phone. That for all people that have bought said phone, regardless if it is broken or not.
That would make it that this will NEVER happen again. Not with phones, not with anything else.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.