Apple support experiences.

[Imapancake22]

Bit of a backstory, I got locked out of an apple ID I've had for 14 years and got locked out of my Gmail account I've had for 17. Because I don't remember the security questions that I set up when I was 8 and don't have access to the email apple phone support says they can't help me get it back. If anyone has been in a similar situation as me have they said the same thing to you?

[WhitetailAni]

7 hours ago, Imapancake22 said:

Bit of a backstory, I got locked out of an apple ID I've had for 14 years and got locked out of my Gmail account I've had for 17. Because I don't remember the security questions that I set up when I was 8 and don't have access to the email apple phone support says they can't help me get it back. If anyone has been in a similar situation as me have they said the same thing to you?

No, but this is correct. If you don't have access to the email that the Apple ID is tied to, there is nothing you - or Apple - can do.

[CoveWolf]

Apple kinda sucks sometimes. Had a family member a few years back try to reset their iPhone since it was running slow and got locked out of their iCloud. Major pain to get it unlocked. The account had a phone number on it as a recovery for the password if it was forgotten. The catch was this person right before had reset their iPhone and was activation locked. That phone was the one with the number on it and we didn't have any other device to put the sim into so it there was no hope really at that point of getting it unlocked through "normal" measures. I was given the project to try and fix and so I called Apple. The Apple ID was a child account and it was attached to an adult account so I thought there must've been something they could do since the adult account kinda has admin rights over the child account and I figured we could prove it was our Apple ID and reset it. After hours of calling and yes HOURS of calling. They determined that while they knew it was OUR Apple ID. They could do nothing about it on their own. They directed us to a website where we could fill out some info on the account and the serial number of the devices used and in most cases, with the correct info you could reset the password. This was great except for the fact that it would TAKE UP TO 40 DAYS to verify the information. In the end after the complete 40 days passed we were able to reset the password and unlock the iPhone from activation lock but this was truly unacceptable in my opinion. Making someone wait 40 days without a phone is almost undoable in todays world. I read tons of horror stories about people facing the same issue while in college or working that literally depend on the phone and couldn't use it. Also if it's a child Apple ID why can't the parent or adult just reset it themselves? You can pretty much control the entire account from there so why not be able to reset it if they get locked out? And on top of that. Activation Lock I feel should not be turned on by default since most don't even understand what it does, at a minimum they need to allow you to make phone calls and send/receive texts even while locked since that is the whole point of a phone and if we could have received texts then we could have reset the password normally. Like I said it worked out in the end but we made sure to put extra emails and other phone numbers on all of our apple ids in case this happened again and I recommend you do the same. Thank you for listening to my rant. Good luck out there to anyone having Apple ID issues, they truly suck.

[WhitetailAni]

18 hours ago, CoveWolf said:

Apple kinda sucks sometimes. Had a family member a few years back try to reset their iPhone since it was running slow and got locked out of their iCloud. Major pain to get it unlocked. The account had a phone number on it as a recovery for the password if it was forgotten. The catch was this person right before had reset their iPhone and was activation locked. That phone was the one with the number on it and we didn't have any other device to put the sim into so it there was no hope really at that point of getting it unlocked through "normal" measures. I was given the project to try and fix and so I called Apple. The Apple ID was a child account and it was attached to an adult account so I thought there must've been something they could do since the adult account kinda has admin rights over the child account and I figured we could prove it was our Apple ID and reset it. After hours of calling and yes HOURS of calling. They determined that while they knew it was OUR Apple ID. They could do nothing about it on their own. They directed us to a website where we could fill out some info on the account and the serial number of the devices used and in most cases, with the correct info you could reset the password. This was great except for the fact that it would TAKE UP TO 40 DAYS to verify the information. In the end after the complete 40 days passed we were able to reset the password and unlock the iPhone from activation lock but this was truly unacceptable in my opinion. Making someone wait 40 days without a phone is almost undoable in todays world. I read tons of horror stories about people facing the same issue while in college or working that literally depend on the phone and couldn't use it. Also if it's a child Apple ID why can't the parent or adult just reset it themselves? You can pretty much control the entire account from there so why not be able to reset it if they get locked out? And on top of that. Activation Lock I feel should not be turned on by default since most don't even understand what it does, at a minimum they need to allow you to make phone calls and send/receive texts even while locked since that is the whole point of a phone and if we could have received texts then we could have reset the password normally. Like I said it worked out in the end but we made sure to put extra emails and other phone numbers on all of our apple ids in case this happened again and I recommend you do the same. Thank you for listening to my rant. Good luck out there to anyone having Apple ID issues, they truly suck.

Holy wall of text Jesus.

Quote

Apple kinda sucks sometimes.

 

Had a family member a few years back try to reset their iPhone since it was running slow and got locked out of their iCloud. Major pain to get it unlocked. The account had a phone number on it as a recovery for the password if it was forgotten. The catch was this person right before had reset their iPhone and was activation locked. That phone was the one with the number on it and we didn't have any other device to put the sim into so it there was no hope really at that point of getting it unlocked through "normal" measures.

 

I was given the project to try and fix and so I called Apple. The Apple ID was a child account and it was attached to an adult account so I thought there must've been something they could do since the adult account kinda has admin rights over the child account and I figured we could prove it was our Apple ID and reset it. After hours of calling and yes HOURS of calling. They determined that while they knew it was OUR Apple ID. They could do nothing about it on their own. They directed us to a website where we could fill out some info on the account and the serial number of the devices used and in most cases, with the correct info you could reset the password.

 

This was great except for the fact that it would TAKE UP TO 40 DAYS to verify the information. In the end after the complete 40 days passed we were able to reset the password and unlock the iPhone from activation lock but this was truly unacceptable in my opinion. Making someone wait 40 days without a phone is almost undoable in todays world. I read tons of horror stories about people facing the same issue while in college or working that literally depend on the phone and couldn't use it. Also if it's a child Apple ID why can't the parent or adult just reset it themselves?

 

You can pretty much control the entire account from there so why not be able to reset it if they get locked out? And on top of that. Activation Lock I feel should not be turned on by default since most don't even understand what it does, at a minimum they need to allow you to make phone calls and send/receive texts even while locked since that is the whole point of a phone and if we could have received texts then we could have reset the password normally.

 

Like I said it worked out in the end but we made sure to put extra emails and other phone numbers on all of our apple ids in case this happened again and I recommend you do the same. Thank you for listening to my rant. Good luck out there to anyone having Apple ID issues, they truly suck.

Because they don't have access to your Apple ID. At all. All they can see normally is a fragment of your email.

Attaching an Apple ID to a Family doesn't make it "owned" by the parent Apple ID.

[CoveWolf]

3 hours ago, WhitetailAni said:

Holy wall of text Jesus.

Because they don't have access to your Apple ID. At all. All they can see normally is a fragment of your email.

Attaching an Apple ID to a Family doesn't make it "owned" by the parent Apple ID.

In my opinion at least I still think that you should be able to reset it. Yea technically it’s another Apple ID but through the parent account I can literally control what they can download, what services they can access, track their devices using find my, what purchases they can make and much more. I can control the whole Apple ID. Children are more likely to forget their passwords anyway so why does Apple make it super difficult? At a minimum if apple would just automatically add the parents email as a recovery address that would be fine to since some will forget to do so. They just need to add a way where your not totally screwed if that password is forgotten. I literally helped set up that Apple ID and not one time during setup did it ask for a recovery email, hence why it didn’t have one. It’s fine if Apple doesn’t want to unlock accounts on their end but I would like to see a change where you are forced to at least have one form of recovery that isn’t a phone number. Maybe I’m totally wrong but that’s my opinion.

[WhitetailAni]

2 hours ago, CoveWolf said:

They just need to add a way where your not totally screwed if that password is forgotten.

The attached phone number, or set a Rescue Email.

[CoveWolf]

57 minutes ago, WhitetailAni said:

The attached phone number, or set a Rescue Email.

Well yea, that would be great except in the circumstance that your phone is activation locked and can’t receive the text. You’re in limbo in that situation, you need your Apple ID password to unlock the phone but you can’t reset your Apple ID password because you can’t receive the text on your phone. That’s what happened in my situation and not everyone has another device they can pop their sim into.

[whispous]

I'm super glad that apple aren't more lax with account recovery. That's the entire point of security.

[CoveWolf]

39 minutes ago, whispous said:

I'm super glad that apple aren't more lax with account recovery. That's the entire point of security.

I’m glad to, I just think that they need to require at least one measure of recovery while setting up an Apple ID. For example, if you have a new google account and you don’t have a recovery option, google will hound you to do so usually when logging in. At a minimum why can’t apple just do that? Also they need to allow the ability to receive calls and texts on a iPhone that’s activation locked. How can you expect users that have a phone number as a recovery to receive texts if their device is locked? I’m not asking for apple to reduce their security. I’m asking for apple to require their users to have better security practices when using their products. Having recovery options doesn’t decrease security and while you could argue it’s not their responsibility to do so, you seriously can’t expect non technical users to remember to do it, at the end of the day they just want to use the phone and don’t want to hassle with it.

[WhitetailAni]

6 hours ago, CoveWolf said:

not everyone has another device they can pop their sim into.

Ask to borrow a friend's, neighbor's, or family member's phone

Swap the sim for a few minutes, done

 

This really isn't that hard and there are many solutions.

[CoveWolf]

I know this is an issue within an issue. But at least in my case, not everyone had the same carrier and so we didn’t have a compatible device. So again, why can’t Apple just allow an activation locked device to receive texts? It isn’t a security issue really and it doesn’t encourage theft.