- Metropolitan Police calls on tech companies to make stolen phones harder to reset
- They are working with Apple on this and have already seen phone theft in London drop by 18% compared to the previous year.
- Apple enabling stolen device protection by default has probably made a big difference, and there’s also evidence that another anti-theft tool is in the works.
Smartphones are a major target for thieves. After all, they are probably the most valuable device most people carry with them, and their value increases even more once thieves export them to countries like China, where devices without local government restrictions are highly sought after. But the UK’s Metropolitan Police is working with Apple to make smartphones much less desirable to thieves.
As the BBC reported, the Metropolitan Police is urging tech companies to make stolen phones harder to reset and reuse, and they are working with Apple to achieve this. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley emphasized the strategy, saying: “If stolen phones cannot be reactivated, their value collapses, as does the incentive to steal them.”
And progress is supposedly already being made on that front, with Apple said to have “solved” the engineering issue that previously allowed thieves to factory reset devices using illicit software.
It’s unclear if Apple has made changes behind the scenes, but one thing it has definitely done is enable stolen device protection by default in iOS 26.4. With this feature enabled, there is a delay before things like passwords can be changed when the phone is not in a familiar location such as a user’s home. The idea is that the user has time to reach another device and mark their phone as lost or stolen before thieves can gain access.
There is already a big drop
As a result, Sir Mark claims that “the vast majority of phones” stolen in recent weeks in London have not been factory reset.
But even before this software update, progress had been made: the Met reported that 14,000 fewer phones were stolen in London between June 2025 and May 2026, representing an 18% drop compared to the previous year.
This isn’t just down to Apple’s work, as the Met has also done things like using e-bikes, drones and live facial recognition to combat theft in recent months. But everything is making a difference.
And Apple appears set to soon employ other technology to thwart thieves, as there is evidence in the iOS code of an upcoming feature that would use an iPhone’s sensors to detect when it is likely to have been stolen and then automatically lock it. It’s a feature that looks a lot like the theft detection lock on Android, and in fact the Met noted that Google and Samsung are also working to combat phone theft.
So while we will never “get to zero crime”, as Sir Mark noted, “this will make a huge difference”.
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