RetireJapan

As the title suggests, has anyone had success unlocking their pre-2015 iphone for use with one of the smaller companies?
I am tired of paying a ton of money every month when I mostly use line.

I went to the AU shop but they won't unlock my iphone since i bought it before the new law came into effect.

there are a bunch of sites on google that say they can unlock the phone, but I am a bit skeptical.
Any advice would be appreciated!

Mineo are pretty cheap and offer an au sim (most other cheap providers use the docomo network). You can probably use your locked au phone with them, but I'd call them and check first

There's been a lot of progress on the jailbreak side of iPhone lately, and I assume sim unlock is a formality once you have a jailbroken device. If you're not on the very latest firmware, your best option is most likely to do it yourself. Jailbreaks are available up to iOS 11.1.2 AFAIK (you can probably start here: http://wololo.net/2018/02/27/electra-ja ... -iphone-x/)

I would not trust online services that offer to do it for a fee: either they're using free tools to do something you could do yourself, or they're doing something shady for which you have no guarantee it will work long term*, or it's just a pure scam. Scammers are also reasonably good at building fake reviews of their services on facebook, etc... so there is no easy way to tell if a service is legit, unless a person you know in real life can recommend one.


* Not being an Apple owner I don't have details, but to give you a parallel, I'm very familiar with shops that sell PS4 consoles full of "free" games. What they don't tell you is that they use pirated Playstation accounts. As soon as Sony figure out the account's activity is suspicious, they ban the account, and sometimes the console. The user ends up with a console that's mostly useless (if they intended to use it online, for example)

Thanks for the replies!
All good advice I wasn't aware of and will be looking into both options.
I think the option I'm really going to hope for is using MINEO without having to tinker with my phone!

I'm a bit late to comment on this, I know, but IIJMIO also offer the option of going with them on the Au network.

Hi everyone, sorry this is coming through so late, but I thought I would just give an update in case anyone is interested.
I ended up going with UQ Mobile because they use the AU network and therefore I was able to use my phone without having to do any jailbreaking or unlocking.

I looked into both unlocking and jailbreaking, but for various reasons, neither seemed to be ideal for my situations.

Thanks again for all the help! I figure I will save quite a bit every month just by switching providers. Between my wife and I, it is looking like that savings will be close to 10,000 yen a month, which is quite exciting!

Awesome. Just make sure you sock that extra money away