Nobody Can Unlock the Phone: What Your Family Can and Cannot Reach

The phone is on the table. It still charges, it still lights up when a message arrives, and it is still the place where years of their life are kept. Nobody in the family knows the code. Somebody has already tried their birthday, the dog's name and the old house number, and the screen is now counting down a wait before it will let anyone try again.

Here is what a locked phone will and will not give back, in Apple's and Google's own words. If you want the wider picture afterwards, our digital legacy planning guide covers the whole layer, accounts and all.

The Phone Nobody Opens

It is almost never about the device. Nobody grieving wants a handset. What is behind the passcode is every photograph they took, the thread where they were still making plans, the voice notes they sent from the car, and the practical half: which bank, which insurer, which subscription is still taking money out every month.

So the search starts, and it is a bad search. Half of what comes back is a forum thread where somebody in the same position was told to try a paid service, and much of the rest is selling something. The honest answer is this: if the phone is locked and nobody knows the code, the phone itself is not going to open. What can be recovered is the data that lived somewhere other than the phone, and there is often a great deal of it.

What a Passcode Protects

On a modern phone the passcode is part of the encryption itself: the contents are scrambled in a way that only the code unscrambles, and without the code there is nothing to pick. Apple says so plainly on its own support page: "Devices locked with a passcode are protected by passcode encryption, and Apple can't help remove the passcode lock without erasing the device."

Google's position on an Android handset is the same in practice. Google's Android help page for a phone you cannot unlock says "If you can't unlock your phone, you'll need to erase it," and, about the reset options, "These options erase all data stored on your phone, such as apps, photos, and music." Erasing is the opposite of what you want: a factory reset does not open the phone, it empties it. And on Android it may not even leave you a usable handset. Google says that to reset a protected device "you'll need to either unlock your screen or enter your Google Account password," and that if you cannot give that during setup, "you won't be able to use the device at all after factory reset." Erasing can cost you the contents and the phone.

A repair shop cannot do it either, because the encryption is not a shop-level problem. Nor can the phone company: it never held the code. It can cancel the line, port the number and send a new SIM, none of which touches what is on the device.

What Apple Will Do

Apple has two routes, and the difference between them is mostly how long it takes.

The easy route exists only if the person set it up in advance. A Legacy Contact is somebody they named while they were alive, who was given an access key at the time. To make a request after the death, that person needs the access key they were given plus a death certificate, and Apple notes that the paperwork varies by country: in Japan, for example, a family certificate showing the death of the account holder is used instead of a death certificate. Apple also confirms you can have more than one Legacy Contact.

The hard route is for everyone else. Apple says it "requires and verifies legal documentation before we can assist with a deceased person's account," which "generally includes a death certificate, and might also require a court order or other documentation." A court order naming you as the rightful inheritor is a real legal process with a real cost and a real waiting time. There is one piece of relief on the same page, worth knowing before you instruct a lawyer: "In some jurisdictions (such as France, Germany, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand), alternative documentation and process instead of a court order are accepted."

Either route ends with the account, not the handset. There is one useful side effect: Apple states that "After your Legacy Contact request or account deletion request is completed, Activation Lock is automatically removed," which at least means the device can be set up again by a living person rather than sitting in a drawer as a brick. And there is one hard limit stated just as plainly: "Some data might be end-to-end encrypted and Apple isn't able to decrypt it." Nobody can hand over what nobody can read.

What Google Will Do

Google's advance tool is called Inactive Account Manager, and it is the quiet workhorse of this whole subject because it can be arranged in one sitting. You choose a waiting period of inactivity, and you choose who hears about it. Google's help page says: "You can select up to 10 people to receive this data, and choose to share all or only specific data types."

Your contacts do not get your account. They get an email that, as Google puts it, "will additionally contain a list of the data you have chosen to share with them, and a link they can follow to download the data." A download, not a login. And Google adds its own one-line caveat: "Note that some information can't be shared."

If no plan was set up, there is still a form. Google says it can "work with immediate family members and representatives to close the account of a deceased person where appropriate," and that "in certain circumstances we may provide content from a deceased user's account." It is careful about what that is not: "We cannot provide passwords or other login details." And it is a request, not a right, decided "only after a careful review." One warning matters more than the rest, because it cannot be undone: "If you select to close the Google account, Google is unable to process any request to turn over the contents of the account at a later date." Ask for the content first. Close the account afterwards, or not at all.

There is a clock running underneath all of this too. Google "reserves the right to delete an inactive Google Account and its activity and data if you're inactive across Google for at least two years." For a living person that is housekeeping. For an account nobody can sign into, it is a deadline, and the same deadline quietly undoes a lot of well-meant plans; we wrote about the two year clock and what it eats.

Passwords Nobody Inherits

A Legacy Contact does not receive everything. Apple's list of what they cannot access includes "movies, music, books, or subscriptions you purchased with your Apple Account, and data stored in your iCloud Keychain (payment information, passwords, and passkeys)."

The saved passwords do not transfer. The passkeys do not transfer. Passkeys are the newer replacement for passwords: they live in the keychain rather than in your head, and there is nothing to write on a card, which makes them wonderful against thieves and unhelpful against death.

Then the trap closes: the account you most want to reach, the bank or the email, will send a verification code to confirm it is really them. The code arrives on the locked phone. You need the phone to get into the account and the account to get into the phone, and the loop has no door in it. This is not a flaw somebody will fix. It is the security working exactly as designed, on the one day the design has no answer for.

Photos, Messages, Voices

Now the better news, because there is some. Most of what a family is grieving for was being copied elsewhere the whole time: photographs to iCloud Photos or Google Photos, documents to a drive, attachments sitting in email. For an Apple account that material is reachable through the routes above, slowly and with paperwork, but reachable. For a Google account with no plan set up in advance it is a request, not a process.

Messages are the hardest case. iMessage and WhatsApp conversations are end-to-end encrypted, which means Apple and Meta cannot read them and so cannot hand them over to anyone, court order or not. Messages that were backed up unencrypted to iCloud or to a Google account can come through the official routes. Which of those you are in depends on settings the person chose years ago, and there is no way to find out from the outside.

Voices are the urgent one. A saved voicemail is not a file on the handset, it lives on the phone line, and the phone line is often cancelled soon after a death by somebody being helpful about the bills. If there is a voicemail from them that anyone in the family has ever re-saved, deal with it before you deal with anything on this page, and our guide to saving a voicemail has the steps. Nothing else in this subject has a deadline that short.

If You Are Holding It Now

A short list for this week.

1. Stop guessing. Wrong attempts make the phone wait longer and longer before it will listen. An iPhone can also be set to erase itself automatically after ten failed passcode attempts, and Apple says that even without that setting the device has to be restored on a computer after ten tries. You cannot tell from the outside which one you are dealing with. Put it down.
2. Keep it charged, and do not reset it. A phone that has gone flat and stayed flat for months is harder to work with, and a factory reset ends the story for good.
3. Look for the paper. An extraordinary number of people write the code on something: the back page of a diary, a note in the bedside drawer, the inside of a passport wallet, a card in a purse. Look properly before you pay anyone.
4. Find the other screens. A laptop, a tablet or an old phone still signed in to the same account is often sitting in the same house, unlocked or with a code somebody does know, and it can show you the photos while the requests grind on.
5. Order several copies of the death certificate. Every institution wants one, and both routes described above start with it.
6. Cancel the phone line after everything else on this list. See the voicemail point above.

None of this is legal advice, and inheritance rules differ sharply from country to country, so if a court order is going to be involved, ask somebody qualified where you actually live.

Twenty Minutes, Once

Everything above is expensive and slow because it is being attempted after the fact. Done in advance, the same ground takes about twenty minutes and costs nothing.

Name a Legacy Contact on your Apple account, and name more than one, because the first person you think of may be travelling, ill, or the one who is too upset to deal with paperwork that week. Set up Google's Inactive Account Manager, pick your waiting period, and list the people who should be told. Then do the part no settings screen offers: write the device passcode itself down somewhere a specific living person can reach it, and tell that person where it is. A sealed envelope with a solicitor, a home safe whose location somebody knows, a sentence in a letter that is only delivered when it is needed. If you keep a folder of practical papers already, this belongs with it, and our when I die file checklist is the binder version of the same idea.

What the Tools Still Miss

Both of those tools are better than what most families have. Be clear-eyed about what they are, though: a delivery mechanism for data. They hand over a download.

None of them will ever say which drawer the safe key is taped behind, or that the accountant is called Ruth and that she has the paperwork for the flat. Nothing in a download tells your daughter that the photographs from 2011 are in the folder with the wrong name on it, or that the ring in the cupboard was your grandmother's and is meant for her. They pass on files. The things families actually stall on are sentences, and a sentence has to be written by a person who knew. That is also true of the personal half, the letter that says what all of it meant, which is a separate job with its own ways of being delivered.

Where to Write It Down

Those sentences need somewhere to live between now and the day they are needed, and a note on the locked phone is not it. Neither is an email drafted to yourself. It has to be somewhere private now and certain later.

That is what Goodbye App is for. It is free, on the web and Android, and a goodbye letter in it is laid out in sections so you are never facing a blank page. One of those sections is Device Passwords: for each device, what it is, where it is kept, and the code needed to get into it. You can record your voice as well, so what arrives is not only words on a screen. Then you name the recipients by email and choose when it reaches them, from this evening to thirty years out. Until that moment it is private, including from the people it is addressed to. An optional inactivity safeguard can move the delivery date forward if your account goes quiet for a long time.

It is not a password manager and it is not a document vault: it will not hold your passport scans, your deeds or your account statements. What it keeps is the sentence that tells a trusted person where to look and how to get in. And you should use judgement about what goes in writing at all. Your bank login does not belong in a letter. Where the passcode is written down, which drawer, which solicitor, which safe, almost always does. Write the first letter free and give your family twenty minutes of yours instead of the paperwork on this page.

Common Questions

Can Apple or Google unlock a deceased person's phone? No. Apple's own support page says it "can't help remove the passcode lock without erasing the device," and Google's says that if you cannot unlock the phone you will need to erase it. Apple has a documented process for handing over account data to a Legacy Contact or a court-named inheritor. Google is more guarded: it says it "may provide content from a deceased user's account" in certain circumstances, and only "after a careful review." Either way, that is not the same as opening the handset.

Will a court order open the phone? No. A court order is how you get Apple to act on the account, and it is worth asking a lawyer whether your country is one where Apple accepts other documents instead. But no order compels a company to produce a key it never had. The judge can order Apple to open the account; nobody can order the encryption to co-operate.

What happens to the photos? Photographs that were backing up to iCloud or Google Photos can often be recovered through the official routes, reliably on Apple's side and case by case on Google's, which is why so many families eventually get the pictures and never get the phone. Photographs that only ever existed on the handset go with the handset.

Do passwords and passkeys pass on? Not through Apple's Legacy Contact. Its list of exclusions names the data in iCloud Keychain, including payment information, passwords and passkeys. Assume anything in a keychain stops with the person, and plan around it.

We do know the code. Are we allowed to use it? That is a question for a lawyer in your country, because inheritance law and the service's own terms both have something to say and they do not always agree. What is not in doubt is the practical advice: if somebody in your family still knows a code, write it down properly today, while it is only a piece of admin.

Is there any service that can crack it? Not one you can buy. The tools that sometimes succeed are forensic equipment sold to law enforcement, tied to particular models and software versions, and they are not available to a family. What is advertised to the bereaved is usually an unlock that turns out to be a factory reset, which erases the thing you wanted. Before you pay anyone, ask them to state in writing that your data survives. Spend the money on certified copies of the death certificate instead.