How to check if your iPhone 12 has been replaced with a camera

At the present time, owning an old iPhone 12 or iPhone 12 Pro / "surfing" is relatively safe, because the new iPhone 12 series does not ship long, there is still warranty and most of the machines are still have not experienced such breakdowns that the parts must be replaced.

However, the higher the age of an iPhone line means there will be more and more "built" and poor quality machines appearing on the market. iPhone 12 will not be an exception to this, so users need to have certain knowledge when buying old machines.

Besides the popular machine testing tips, on the iPhone 12, Apple has added a feature that allows users to know if their camera has been replaced with a camera.

First of all, it should be mentioned that this feature only works on the latest iPhone 12 series (including iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Pro Max and iPhone 12 mini) and not available on older iPhone generations. . So if you want to test the camera of an iPhone 11 and earlier, you'll need to use a different approach.

Second, the iPhone 12 will need to run iOS 14.4 or higher, because iOS 14.4 is the version where Apple started adding camera detection that has been replaced.

If you've done both of the steps above and your iPhone 12 unfortunately has a camera replacement, in fact, you won't have to do much to find out. Because, right from the lock screen, there will be a message saying "Can't verify that this iPhone has a genuine Apple camera". This message will also appear every time you restart your device.

The message appears when the iPhone 12 is replaced with the camera (photo: Hugh Jeffreys)

According to Apple, this notification will only appear on the lock screen for the first 4 days, and with the Settings app within 15 days. So, if you want to make sure your iPhone hasn't had the camera replaced, go to Settings> General> About.

Here, the user will see some basic information of the machine such as name, capacity, serial number . If the user's iPhone has been replaced with a camera, this notification will also appear. If there is no such announcement, the user's iPhone is still original.

Besides the camera, this can also be used to test two other components of the iPhone 12, the battery and the screen. Likewise, the notifications for the non-genuine screen and the non-genuine battery will appear on the lock screen and in the Settings app.

However, users should also note that the battery, screen and camera notification "is not genuine" will appear even when an iPhone is replaced with "peeled" components from another iPhone. This is because Apple has assigned each monitor / pin / camera a unique serial number, and if the system detects a monitor / pin / camera with another serial number attached, an alarm will be triggered. News appears. Therefore, if the user takes the device to repair the battery, screen and camera at third parties and this message pops up, that is completely normal.

Marvin Fry

Update 15 February 2021