Sell your broken phone.
If your broken or damaged phone is an iPhone and it still switches on, we will buy it, cracked screen and all, with free tracked postage and payment within 48 hours of arrival. We buy iPhones, and only iPhones. If the broken phone in your drawer is an iPhone you are in the right place and there is a page with its exact figures on it. If it is not, say so now rather than four screens in: there is nothing here to sell it to, and the last section tells you where to take it instead.
What makes a broken phone worth anything
A phone is not one thing that either works or does not. It is a board, a battery, a camera stack, a chassis, a set of flex cables and a display, and a fall almost always damages exactly one of them. The display is the part that breaks because it is the part facing the floor. Everything behind it is usually untouched, which is why a smashed handset still has most of its parts in working order and why anybody telling you it is worthless is telling you something about their business rather than about your phone.
What decides the number is how much the working phone was worth to begin with. Fitting a screen, testing a handset, erasing it and getting it back out of the door costs roughly the same whatever the phone is. On a cheap one those fixed costs swallow the value. On an expensive one they are a small share of it. The middle of our own range keeps 58 per cent of its working price with the picture gone, and the dearest phones keep considerably more than the cheapest do.
Which grade your damage falls into
Two questions, in this order, and they settle it. Does it power on? Can you see a clean picture?
- Powers on, picture perfect, glass cracked or back glass shattered or a camera that has stopped working or a button stuck: that is the higher of the two damaged grades. The word people use for it here is picture fine, and it means the display works, not that the phone is tidy.
- Lines, blots, patches that ignore your finger, a colour cast, a screen that stays black, or a panel somebody has already replaced: that is the lower grade, picture faulty.
- Will not turn on at all: we cannot buy it, because we cannot test it or erase it. Your council recycling centre or any Apple store will take it free.
- A battery swollen enough to lift the screen out of the frame: do not post it and do not charge it. That one goes to a recycling centre that takes lithium batteries, in person.
Both damaged grades accept any number of faults on top of the one that put you in them. Nothing is deducted separately afterwards, which is the practice that gives this trade its reputation and the reason our price is stated as one number for the whole phone.
The data on a phone you cannot unlock
This is the part people put off, and it is the part that actually stops a sale. A phone still signed in to an Apple Account cannot be resold by anybody, so it has to be removed from yours, and you do not need the screen to do it. Sign in at icloud.com from any computer or another phone, open Find My, select the device and remove it. That is the whole job.
Everything else we handle. Every device is erased to recognised standards after it is checked, and the record of the erasure is kept against the order, so a phone whose screen you could never see again is not a phone whose photographs are anybody else's business.
If it is not an iPhone
A broken Samsung, Pixel, OnePlus or anything else is genuinely worth something to somebody, just not to us. The places to try are a specialist that names your model on its own price list, a local repair shop, which will often buy a broken handset for parts over the counter, or your network's own trade in if the phone is recent. If it is old and badly damaged, a council recycling centre or a supermarket collection point will take it, and that is a better end for it than a drawer.
We are not going to pretend to quote on a phone we do not buy in order to keep you on the page. Saying no quickly is the more useful answer and it is the one we would want.
Questions people ask
Do you buy broken Android phones?
No. We buy iPhones and nothing else, and that is a decision about what we can grade, repair and resell properly rather than a view on anybody's phone. A buyer who will take anything is a buyer who has to hedge every price, and the hedge comes out of what you are paid.
My phone is broken and locked to a network. Does that matter?
It is worth less than an unlocked one and it is still worth buying. Tell us when you order, because a locked phone discovered at the bench means a revised offer and a slower week for everybody. A phone locked to somebody else's Apple Account is different: that one cannot be resold at all and has to be cleared before you post it.
Is a broken phone dangerous to post?
A cracked screen is not, and the free pack is made for it. A battery that has swollen enough to push the screen out of the frame is a different matter: do not post that one, and do not charge it either. Take it to a shop or a recycling centre that accepts lithium batteries, in person.
Should I get it repaired first and then sell it?
Almost never. A third party repair costs you more than it adds, because the damaged grades already account for the state of the screen and a panel fitted outside Apple is a job we often have to redo. The exception is a phone you want to keep using, in which case repair it and enjoy it, and sell it when you are finished with it.
What happens to a phone that cannot be repaired?
It is taken apart and the parts that work go back out into other repairs, which is most of what is in a phone. Nothing is landfilled and nothing is shipped abroad to be burned. Every device we buy is erased to recognised standards first and the record of that is kept.
Broken iPhone, model by model, with what each one keeps: the broken iPhone list. Working after all: every model and every price.