I had an iPhone I was fixing up. I backed up what was necessary, disconnected the old iCloud account, and created a new one to use when updating the OS. I created a spam-blocking address (mailgw) for this account. It created fine and I logged in from the phone without problem. I did the OS update, but then I got a dreaded error that it couldn't log in. I tried to log in with the account on the PC and it has been deleted. Apple deleted the account out from under the phone and now it's iCloud locked, all within less than half an hour. I called but they said I'd have to go to an Apple store and produce the original receipt. If this was really about theft, why couldn't I just regain control from the AppleID that had been logged in for years from the phone? I checked from that account but it had no option to report that the phone was fine. This was a many-year-old phone and the receipt was long gone. So Apple basically bricked the phone, with no recourse. I will never buy an Apple device again.
> Maybe Apple is doing this in an automated way to prevent people using several accounts for storage.
And Apple's attempt to stop people from "stealing" a few dollars a month in storage somehow justifies bricking a $1000 piece of hardware?
Google doesn't care, because Google has WAY better anti-abuse features which cost money and so has weighed the risk of the "Google carelessly wrecks someone's online identity" headline against "someone might squeeze us for an extra 5GB of space."
Yeah personally speaking I created a separate account just for my WhatsApp backup, but once that breached 15GB as well... I caved and bought the 100GB google one plan.
Maybe it does but the poster was still engaging in behavior similar to someone who has stolen the phone. That said, Apple should add some controls that prevent legitimate users from triggering security checks by accident.
Oh, I am not saying that apple should be able to brick your device if you log in with a throwaway account, I was just wondering why one would bother doing it.
