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Disable Activation Lock on Apple devices with Intune

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Tip

You can now turn off Activation Lock directly in Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager. Learn more on Apple's User Guide site. Microsoft Intune can help you manage Activation Lock, a feature of the Find My iPhone app for iOS/iPadOS and macOS devices. Activation Lock is enabled automatically when a user sets up the Find My iPhone app on a device. After it's enabled, the user's Apple ID and password must be entered before anyone can:

  • Turn off Find My iPhone
  • Erase the device
  • Reactivate the device

Supported platforms:

  • iOS/iPadOS 7.1 or later (supervised through ADE)
  • macOS 10.15 or later (supervised through ADE)

How Activation Lock affects you

While Activation Lock helps secure Apple devices and improves the chances of recovering a lost or stolen device, this capability can present you, as an IT admin, with many challenges. For example:

  • A user sets up Activation Lock on a device. The user then leaves the company and returns the device. Without the user's Apple ID and password, there's no way to reactivate the device.
  • You want to reassign some devices to a different department during a device refresh in your organization. You can only reassign devices that don't have Activation Lock enabled.

To help solve these problems, Apple introduced the ability to disable Activation Lock for supervised devices, without the user's Apple ID and password. Supervised devices generate a device-specific Activation Lock bypass code, which is stored on Apple's activation server.

Tip

Supervised mode can be configured through Apple Configurator to lock down a device and limit functionality to specific business purposes. This action is only supported on Supervised devices enrolled using Automated Device Enrollment program. Apple's web site.

You can read more about Activation Lock on Apple's web site.

How Intune helps you manage Activation Lock

There are two methods to disabling Activation Lock on devices:

  • Manually entering the Activation Lock bypass code on the device

  • Using the Disable Activation Lock device action

For supervised devices, Intune stores the Activation Lock bypass code, which can be entered on the device to manually disable Activation Lock. If the device has been wiped, you can directly access the device by using a blank username and the code as the password. Additionally, Intune can directly issue the bypass code to Apple's activation server to disable Activation Lock without having to interact with the device.

The business benefits of using Intune to manage Activation Lock are:

  • The user gets the security benefits of the Find My app.
  • You can enable users to do their work and unlock it when a device needs to be repurposed, without needing the previous username or password.

Before you start

Before you can disable Activation Lock on Apple devices, you must enable it by following these instructions:

  1. Configure an Intune device restriction profile for iOS/iPadOS or macOS devices using the information in How to configure device restriction settings.
  2. In the device restriction settings for iOS/iPadOS, or in the device restrictions settings for macOS, under the General settings, enable the option Allow activation lock.
  3. Save the profile, and then assign it to the devices on which you want to manage Disable Activation Lock.

How to use Disable Activation Lock

Important

After you disable the Activation Lock on a device, if the Find My app is started, a new Activation Lock is automatically applied. Because of this, you should be in physical possession of the device before you follow this procedure.

The Intune Disable Activation Lock remote device action removes the Activation Lock on a device without requiring the current user's Apple ID and password. After you disable the Activation Lock, the device turns on Activation Lock again when the Find My app starts. Disable the Activation Lock only if you have physical access to the device.

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Intune admin center.

  2. Select Devices > All devices.

  3. Next, select the device for which you'd like to disable Activation Lock.

  4. In the Overview pane for the device, select the action Disable Activation Lock from the Device action menu.

  5. Select Hardware,then find and copy the Activation Lock bypass code value under Conditional Access.

    Note

    Copy the bypass code before you wipe the device. If you reset the device settings before you copy the code, the code is removed from Intune and is inaccessible.

  6. In the Overview pane for the device, select Wipe.

Note

In order to return activationLockBypassCode property using graph, it needs to explicitly included in the request. If you send an unfiltered query to Graph API for the device object, a set of default values is returned and activationLockBypassCode will be null.

How to use the Activation Lock Bypass Code

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Intune admin center.
  2. Select Devices > All devices.
  3. Next, select the device for which you'd like to disable Activation Lock.
  4. Select Hardware, then find and copy the Activation Lock bypass code value under Conditional Access.
  5. In the Overview pane for the device, select the action Wipe in the Device action menu.
  6. After the device is reset, you're prompted for the Apple ID and password. Leave the ID field blank, and then enter the Activation Lock bypass code for the password. This step removes the account from the device. On a macOS device, select Recovery Assistant in the menu bar and then select Activate with MDM key option to enter the bypass code.

Next steps

You can examine the status of the unlock request on the details page for the device in the Manage devices workload.