Show HN: Carrier-Explode: iPhone, Pixel and Galaxy carrier settings decoded

226 pointsposted 9 hours ago
by simplyalec

29 Comments

isomorphic

7 hours ago

I saw this linked from MacRumors during the AT&T iPhone 18 Pro Max lockup news discussions. It was interesting to see what AT&T/Apple did to try to get ahead of the issue. So far it looks like they disabled 5G Standalone mode, possibly just to prevent a bug from literally destroying the hardware (possibly only on one batch of phones).

Apple/AT&T still haven't released any kind of statement addressing the issue other than to replace affected hardware.

etatester

7 hours ago

This is super cool. Particularly for the fact that it just showed my country's operators rather than the usual America First.

jakobdabo

2 hours ago

I wonder which field is responsible for disabling the Personal Hotspot feature? About a year ago mine suddenly got disabled in the phone's UI. Since then, the only time it got enabled was when I was traveling and using a travel eSIM.

It's sad that phone companies allow carriers such anti-user things.

mitxela

2 hours ago

Did you buy your phone through the carrier?

There are apps that can act as a SOCKS proxy for limited hotspottivity. Probably mostly on Android.

jakobdabo

2 hours ago

> Did you buy your phone through the carrier?

No.

seba_dos1

8 hours ago

It would be great to contribute whatever's applicable to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mobile-broadband-provider-inf...

KetoManx64

2 hours ago

Probably not a good idea if you used AI in any way to help with obtaining this info, they will ban you at the tiniest whif of you using AI

mitxela

2 hours ago

Best is to contribute the info, make sure it's accurate, and if they ban someone for contributing accurate info, let them.

GNOME is a circus.

mycofunguy

8 hours ago

What do you use the info you have gathered for? It seems comprehensive but curious as to how you use it?

roundup

5 hours ago

Can I use these settings to disable incoming calls? Does GrapheneOS have this option at the android level?

KetoManx64

2 hours ago

No, but you can automate rejecting an incoming call with Tasker

rustcleaner

an hour ago

Nice! Thank you for this public service. Phone makers & carriers should be ashamed of themselves for hiding such important configuration behind proprietary formats. If you [lurker] are a decision maker who decided to make our world this way: for shame, for shaaame!

denysvitali

7 hours ago

What's more useful, or at least was a while ago, is the CA combos list - basically showing which bands can be aggregated and how.

A while ago I built a decoder for that (Qualcomm only!), it was fun and helped me improve the support of my device for my carrier.

https://github.com/denysvitali/ca-combos-editor

tantalor

6 hours ago

How did you build the UI? Is it custom?

simplyalec

4 hours ago

plain old CSS w/ svelte (and their new-ish remote functions)!

tylergetsay

8 hours ago

Reminds me of the CDMA days when the qualcom software got leaked

mrweasel

8 hours ago

Not really sure what to do with the information, but I love the UI.

willio58

3 hours ago

Also interested in this - what does this information unlock?

chiefwilsion

3 hours ago

nerd tier 8. and after that you get nerd tier 9

ahmedfromtunis

8 hours ago

Are these configs read-only on the phone or is it possible to manipulate them using the data here to de/activate any service?

simplyalec

7 hours ago

You can trick iOS into running different bundles for your carrier up until the most recent beta (just fixed)

A very common thing to do in Russia for instance where WiFi calling isn’t available: https://github.com/ios-bundles/CarrierSIM