- Met Police call on tech companies to make it harder to reset stolen phones
- They are working with Apple on this and have already seen an 18% reduction in phone thefts in London compared to the previous year.
- Apple enabling stolen device protection by default has likely made a big difference, and there’s also evidence of another anti-theft tool in the works.
Smartphones are a major target for thieves. After all, they’re probably the most valuable device most people carry with them, and their value increases further once thieves export them to countries like China, where devices without local government restrictions are highly sought after. But Britain’s Met Police is working with Apple to make smartphones significantly less desirable to thieves.
As the BBC reported, the Met Police is urging tech companies to make stolen phones harder to reset and reuse, and it is working with Apple to do just that. Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley highlighted the strategy, saying: “If stolen phones cannot be reactivated, their value plummets and so does the incentive to steal them. »
And progress is already being made in this area, Apple is said to have “fixed” the engineering problem that previously allowed thieves to reset devices to factory settings using illicit software.
It’s unclear if Apple has made any behind-the-scenes changes, but one thing it certainly has done is enable stolen device protection by default in iOS 26.4. When this feature is enabled, there is a delay before things like passwords can be changed when the phone is not in a familiar location like a user’s home. The idea is that a user will then have time to access another device and mark their phone as lost or stolen before thieves can access it.
A big drop already
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, with the Met reporting that 14,000 fewer phones were stolen in London between June 2025 and May 2026, an 18% drop on the previous year.
This won’t just be down to Apple’s work, as the Met has also been doing things like using e-bikes, drones and live facial recognition to combat theft in recent months. But it all makes a difference.
And Apple is expected to use other anti-theft technology soon, as there is evidence in iOS code of an upcoming feature that would use an iPhone’s sensors to detect when it has likely been stolen and then automatically lock it. It’s a feature that’s a lot like the theft detection lock on Android – and indeed, the Met noted that Google and Samsung are also working to combat phone theft.
So while we will never reach “zero crime”, as Sir Mark pointed out, “it will make a huge difference”.
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