Understanding WipeOS Mobile Operations Define All Terms and Unique Acronyms

 

Firmware – Between Hardware and Software, normally immutable. This is how we describe the very large files we download from Apple, as they have the iOS, and baseband firmware, and touchscreen firmware, and camera firmware, etc. 

 

Firmware Storage – A drive installed in a WipeOS Client used to save the large firmware files from Apple’s servers.

 

iOS – Apple’s Mobile operating system name. At the time of writing, the latest version is 16.4.1. They sporadically release versions, and things usually change when they do. Certain models have a cut-off point, for example, an iPhone 4 will not install 16.4.1, as it was deprecated years ago.

 

Formatting a drive – We format the storage above via computer to an EXT4 filesystem mounted to /mnt/images. 

 

Normal mode – This is active when the phone is what you would consider usable – has a login screen, can interact with normally.

 

Recovery mode – This is when the display shows a USB or Lightning port on the device. 

 

Activation Lock – A kind of lock which requires further interaction with 3rd parties to unlock. This is detectable in WipeOS if and only if these three things are true:

UDID – Unique device identifier. Each mobile device has one of these. This is only retrievable in Normal mode.

 

ECID – Exclusive Chip Identification. Only available in Recovery mode.

 

IMEI – International Mobile Equipment Identity. Devices which can connect to mobile networks must have one of these. Some iPads do not have this value.

 

SIM card – Physical card which stores authentication for accessing global mobile networks.

 

SIM tray – Small tray which holds a SIM card. We can sometimes detect the presence of this.

 

Battery state of charge – Value from 0 to 100 inclusive representing the current charge of the battery. 100 is completely full.

 

Trusted Host – iOS devices beyond 15.0 now require additional “Trust this host?” prompt before we can see the device at all in WipeOS. This is annoying, and all the user must do is select “yes”. If prompted for a password and they do not have one, they must manually enter Recovery mode. There are a TON of resources documenting how to access that mode based on the phone you currently have in your hand. 

 

Models – Apple has a ton of ways to reference models. We get the “A number” like “A2111”, “Hardware model” like “N104AP”, and “model number” like “MWJ362”. Those three numbers describe one single phone – an iPhone 11 Black 256GB. We supply all of these values and let our customers use what they want. 

 

Battery degradation percent – Difference of the last full charge vs the factory full charge. If the “design capacity” is 1000 milliamps, but the last full charge was 900 milliamps, then the “Battery degradation percent” is 90%, aka 10% of the battery’s capacity is lost. There is no good way to phrase this percent, as whatever you call it, someone will want the inverse of it.

 

Battery Cycle Count – Measures how many times the battery has effectively gone from 0% charge to 100%. This means that if you never let the battery fall to 50% and charge it up to 100% this would equal ½ of a full charge. If you did this 2x this would equal a 100%, so the battery cycle count would increment by 1.  If you cycle the battery 4x with a 25% charge, the counter will also increase by 1. The key item to note is that the counter will cycle when the accumulated cycle charges equal 100%. NOTE: This is the way APPLE calculates the battery cycle count.