- The Met Police are calling on tech firms to make stolen phones harder to reset
- They’re working with Apple on this, and have already seen phone theft in London reduced by 18% compared to the previous year
- Apple enabling Stolen Device Protection by default has likely made a big difference, and there’s evidence of another anti-theft tool in the works too
Smartphones are a major target for thieves. After all, they’re likely the most valuable device most people carry around 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 the UK’s Met Police is working with Apple to make smartphones significantly less desirable to thieves.
As reported by the BBC, the Met Police are urging tech firms to make stolen phones harder to reset and reuse, and they’re working with Apple to achieve this. Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley emphasized the strategy, stating: “If stolen phones cannot be reactivated, their value collapses, and so does the incentive to steal them.”
And progress is supposedly already being made on that front, with Apple being said to have “cracked” the engineering problem that previously allowed thieves to factory reset devices using illicit software.
It’s unclear whether Apple has made changes behind the scenes, but one thing it definitely has done is enable Stolen Device Protection by default in iOS 26.4. With this feature enabled, there’s a delay before things like passwords can be changed when the phone isn’t in a familiar location like a user’s home. The idea is that a user will then have time to get to another device and mark their phone as lost or stolen before the thieves can gain access.
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, there was progress being made, with the Met reporting that 14,000 fewer phones were stolen in London between June 2025 and May 2026, which is a drop of 18% compared to the previous year.
This won’t purely be down to Apple’s work, as the Met have also done things like using e-bikes, drones, and live facial recognition to combat theft in recent months. But it’s all making a difference.
And Apple looks set to employ another thief-thwarting technology soon, as there’s 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 sounds a lot like Theft Detection Lock on Android — and indeed the Met noted that Google and Samsung are also working to combat phone theft.
So, while we’re never “going to get down to zero crime,” as Sir Mark noted, “this is going to make a massive difference.”
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