Help! Recurrent "activation required" message after upgrade to iOS 8.1

I just went through 24 hours of **** that started with this, then led to being stuck within any app. Home button seemed nonfunctional, but using the accessibility version (on-screen, not mechanical), results were the same... so it was not the home button. Ditto the power button, once that no longer would let me just quit. Seemed clearly software-related. I hooked to desktop, backed up and restored... multiple times, long story short. Nothing worked. But that activation thing lurked in my head, so.... well, if you've been at this Apple game for awhile, you know that through dot-mac and dot-me and iCloud and so on (none of which really worked well, till I suppose probably recently, since everybody else has mastered the cloud... though Apple has made theirs more invasive than useful)..... at any rate, if you've been at it awhile, you probably have one ID-password for mac-me-cloud and one for your Apple account. And they'd always act as though that was normal, desirable, useful or smart, but it was none of those things. Well, my failing device was the last one that still had "that other ID-pw," the one that USED to be required for iCloud and its predecessors. But I know I've set up more recent devices with my regular Apple ID-pw, same as the one for Apple Store, iTunes and so on. So... I bit the bullet and restored the iPad, but did NOT restore its contents from backup. I just reinstalled things, which is actually not as bad as it sounds. (Just make sure you take "your stuff"... photos, notes, recordings, whatever that are not in Apple's cloud... and dump to your desktop before you do all this.) The apps are easy to reload via the iTunes desktop interface. In fact, it's a heck of a lot quicker than trying to fix the unfixable any other way I found in forums, discussions and/or just tried. So... old iPad, new ID-pw from my Store/iTunes account to set up iCloud, NOT the old iCloud ID-pw... and it works. Could be just the clean slate approach, but... so many discussions blamed the 9.3.x and up upgrades, but this is now still on 9.3.5 and working. If you can find a way to change your iCloud ID-pw for that device via the desktop, that might work... but I wasn't able to access that. Good luck.

oijulia wrote:

So you're saying that this activation process is something related to the carrier network?

Yes. Somehow your carrier is not completing the activation process for cel use on the network. That is why it is repeatedly asking you to activate the phone.

Because that's what the Apple store guy told me, but my carrier says activation is for sure an iPhone issue.

Carrier support is usually terrible. The carrier support staff are often ignorant or just outright lazy. When they cannot trouble shoot the problem the easiest thing for them to do is to blame the iPhone.

No. Your account/phone number is probably not provisioned correctly. It could be a problem with your number only. As razmee209 has suggested: talk to someone at the carrier who is higher up in the chain and who probably knows what he is talking about/doing.

Getting a new iPhone will not really solve your problems as it is highly likely that the problem is not at the iPhone end.

Hello,

I am having the very same problem. iphone 5 & ios 8.1.

When the phone is searching for carrier signal it comes with the "Activation Required" message. Without wifi or itunes connection it is impossible to activate?

I cannot rely on this phone anymore. Whenever I need the phone in the city, I am facing the "Activation Required" screen.

Tried many many things: restore, DFU restore, geek squad, check with carrier... Still no solution...

Did you guys solve your problems? What is your status about this problem? If you have solved it, please help...?

Thanks,

john

i am planning a trip to the genius bar .. although not optimistic of a solution .. probably a carrier problem .. but so difficult to get any sense from help line with carriers. i use uwclub atm fyi .. i simply cannot carry on like this, so will have to change from iphone in a few months time

i am not sure if i have the energy or time to try and resolve this problem. i am wondering if it is related to the combination of iphone update and carrier. when my contract expries it will probably be safer for me to move away from iphone. i suppose i could change my carrier - uwclub is my carrier and they simply use one of the well known companies - not sure who they use at the moment. i will keep an eye on this thread for any true solutions. there are some days i am activating my iphone 7/8 times a day. if i am away from wifi or then my phone becomes unusable.

Hi All,

Several days ago my iPhone 5 (updated to ios 8) began to do this same thing. Continuous "activation required". I see it as an open question on multiple threads. Has anyone discovered a/the solution?

in my case i had a friend who is a director of a apps company and he had a spare iphone 5 with ios7 that i could use until my renewal date in august 2015 .. i transferred the sim card and the problem was solved. my friend thinks it is a software problem between the sim card and ios8, which is unlikely to be solved by chat lines or the genius bar. i dont think you can reverse the updates once they have been made, so a new iphone 5 was the only solution for me.otherwise, my phone was almost useless. hope you can all find a solution. would be interested to know if there was another solution other than a new iphone not upgraded to ios8.

I'm experiencing the same exact problem too, the problem arises after a few days after getting IOS8.1.2 onto my iPhone5. You guys pretty much described what has exactly happened to my iPhone. It would drop it's telco reception before it starts searching again, and then it would find my telco and resumes. It happens in a loop and would occasionally ask for my icloud activation. I've tried to reset, restore and remove my account from icloud but it's still the same. I've not faced these problems before the iOS update. I hope Apple could personally respond to us as to what is going on, and provide an update for this bug. Thanks.

I'm now a new victim of this same problem. Coincidently or not, this problem started for me after a trip abroad this January. I live in Rio de Janeiro, and while I was visiting the US I replaced my regular Brazilian carrier SIM card by a local provider sim card (T-mobile). Once I was back to Brazil, I moved back to my Brazilian SIM card and upgraded my iphone to the latest iOS version 8.1.3. Then the activation problem started. I am telling this whole story because, to me, it seems the issue has to do with both iOS and iCloud configuration issues within Apple servers. It seems that after all these SIM cards exchanges, something went wrong with iCloud configuration and whenever my iPhone now loses connection with the carrier, iCloud services somehow understands that someone else is trying to reactivate my iPhone. I have the feeling that this issue is affecting a very few people, so I am not sure if Apple is going to address it in a near future. My hope is to see it solved in future updates of iOS or iCloud. Anyway, what I did so far as a workaround was to disable the "find my iPhone" feature. As far as I understand, Apple only asks for an iCloud account and password to activate phones if the find my phone feature is on. I know it's not a solution and not ideal either, but at least I have been using my iPhone in the last 4 days normally, with no 'activation required' messages, which freezes your phone until you get connected to a wifi network so it can be reactivated. So far so good, and of course I will have a problem only if I lose my phone or get it stollen, which for a person who lives in Rio de Janeiro means a real big threat.

That's an update on how the workaround I described in my post behaved after a few days. Differently from what I had thought, disabling the find my phone feature didn't prevent the occurrence of further "activation required" messages, bringing with it all the inconveniences we already know about. I then moved my carrier chip to an old iPhone 4S I still happen to have, and then all went ok with no more error messages. I then had an appointment with a genius who told me he was sure it was a hardware problem, being a phone replacement the only solution for me. So I've got a new phone now and everything is working as it should be. Just making clear that even though the tech guy told me it was a hardware issue, I decided NOT to restore a backup. Hope this helps.

been having this problem as well ... been through 2 replacement iphone 6 from Verizon ,they thought it was a software issue , still didnt help ,i updated to 8.2 and so far these past 2 days i havent had the problem , anyone still having the issue after updating to 8.2 ?