I bought an IPhone X from Dammam (Saudi Arabia) where the FaceTime was working fine, now when I got the phone back in India and installed a local sim the FaceTime app has vanished any suggestions?

hareenfrommumbai122 wrote:

What kind of sorcery is this... they allow FaceTime for specific telecom operators in Saudi, whose SIM card are flagged, but India where its never intended to be banned won’t work as the SIM cards are not flagged (coz they never banned it in the first place) 🙄

This is simply the risk you take (buyer beware) when you buy a phone intended for one region, but you live in another region. There's no sorcery involved. Apple builds their phones to be sold in a region, based on the laws in that region. If you buy a phone built for the Japan or South Korea market and you want to mute the camera shutter sound, you won't be able to. Because the laws in both countries prohibit camera shutter sounds from being muted.

Those phone will have FaceTime in a Middle Eastern country where FaceTime is legal. The restriction on removing FaceTime in other parts of the Middle East and outside of the Middle East still applies. Phones with a region code of AH will have FaceTime disabled outside of the Middle East.

The gray market for iPhones is the Middle East is huge...

The information in my first post above applies to it.

For a rundown:

iPhones originating from Israel will all have HB as the country code and unrestricted FaceTime.

Fairly recent iPhones originating from Egypt, Qatar, Oman, Jordan, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Kuwait will have AH as the country code and unrestricted FaceTime. Older ones will have AE and are FaceTime-restricted.

Except for some very recent units, iPhones originating from Saudi Arabia will have AE and are FaceTime-restricted.

iPhones originating from the United Arab Emirates will all have AE and are FaceTime-restricted.

iPhones originating from Pakistan will all have UR and are FaceTime-restricted.

(161549)

hareenfrommumbai122 wrote:

Thats what my point is... if its allowed in Saudi why does it get regionally blocked when taking to another country whose rules don’t ban it anyways.

Because the governments in the Middle East require that they be configured that way to prevent them from being used with FaceTime in other countries.

It is never a good idea to buy an iPhone for use in a country other than the one where it is originally sold. Occasional travel abroad is one thing. Permanently taking it elsewhere has a lot of downsides.

It's because the SIM card doesn't contain the flag to enable FaceTime on iPhones for which it's restricted. There isn't a workaround.

KiltedTim: Many of the iPhones sold in the Middle East, including all of those originating from Israel, aren't subject to the regional lockout.

(161512)

Niel wrote:

KiltedTim: Many of the iPhones sold in the Middle East, including all of those originating from Israel, aren't subject to the regional lockout.

(161512)

The phones sold there that don't have any restrictions on FaceTime are imported and re-sold illegally. All phones sold legally in the Middle East are subject to the FaceTime lockout policy.

The AH region code has been used for years. Phones with AE, AB, and AH are the ones that have been coming up on these forums ever since the iPhone went on sale in the Middle East. The UR code is relatively new as Pakistan only got the iPhone recently.

No, they won't. These iPhones were originally sold after the FaceTime ban was lifted in the country in question; this Knowledge Base article only mentions AE ones. The AB code is very old, and UR is for Pakistan.

As far as I can tell, nobody has actually reported having the regional restriction on an AH iPhone.

(161547)

No, they're not. It applies to iPhones with AB, AE, or UR as their country codes; those from Israel use HB, and many of the countries which previously banned FaceTime are now selling iPhones with the AH region code.

(161545)

It's because you bought a phone intended for sale in the Middle East. FaceTime is restricted by law there and the governments in the Middle East require that it be disabled under certain circumstances, including when the device is used outside of the Middle East.