How to unlock your jail-broken iPhone in 12 easy steps

Hate having your iPhone 4S (or any other iPhone) locked to a carrier? Don't want to wait until you're off-contract for AT&T to unlock it for you? For those of you comfortable with a bit of iHackery, you can now unlock an iPhone of any stripe. This requires a jailbroken device and the procedure, while not difficult, it isn’t without risk.

Actually, it's good that this requires that your iPhone be jailbroken; if you aren’t comfortable jailbreaking your device, you probably shouldn’t be attempting this either. If you have already jailbroken your iPhone, this shouldn’t he hard to follow. That said, as with any hacking or modification to your device, don’t do it if you aren’t willing to accept responsibility for what could happen to your phone!

If you’re still with us, here is the 12-step program to an unlocked iPhone:

1. Head over to Cydia and add repo.bingner.com as an app respository. Search for Sam Bingner’s Subscriber Artificial Module (SAM) package and install it.


2. Once installed, launch the SAMPrefs icon.


3. Head to Utilities, and select “De-Activate iPhone”. Check under “More Information” to ensure your device is listed as deactivated.


4. Under method, open up “By Country and Carrier” and select your current carrier.


5. Click on “More Information” again and copy the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) under “SAM Details”, then click on “Spoof Real SIM to SAM.”


6. Head back to the main SAM menu and change “Method” to manual. Paste your IMSI number into the appropriate field.


7. Connect your iPhone to a computer and let iTunes reactivate your device


8. Double click “Phone Number” in iTues to make sure the ICCID matches your SIM card. If not, start over and repeat the above steps before continuing!


9. Disconnect your iPhone from your computer and quit iTunes when reactivation is finished.


10. Open up SAMPrefs again on your phone, and disable SAM. Ignore any warnings about uninstalling or deleting files.


11. Connect your phone to your computer again, and watch with amusement as iTunes tells you it can’t activate your phone. Shut down iTunes after it “fails”.


12. Smile, and launch iTunes again. It should activate your phone successfully this time, leaving you with an unlocked device.

This unlock should survive powering your device down and turning back on, or most anything else except for Apple pushing a fix for it. It will only work for the SIM card you used in the process above, so don’t go trying to swap in other SIM cards. Also, if you have any problems with push notifications, you can reportedly fix this by launching SAM and selecting “Clear Push” before connecting to iTunes one more time.

There you are. Have fun, and be careful!

source: Gizmodo via 9to5mac