Broken iPhone Screen? Heres How to Repair & Get it Fixed

Broken iPhone Screen? Heres How to Repair & Get it Fixed

Have you broken your iPhone screen before? Its not a particularly pleasant experience. I recently dropped my $950 iPhone 7 Plus onto a dirt trail from about three feet up and the screen completely shattered, to the point where glass shards were sticking out. Uh oh, a broken iPhone screen! Now what!? If you break your iPhone screen and the glass has cracked or shattered, youre probably wondering what to do, and what comes next.

Having just been through the broken iPhone screen experience myself and with a friends iPhone too, I figured I would share some details and what I learned regarding options to get it fixed. OK so you broke your iPhone screen, likely from a drop or some other impact. Stuff happens. If you break your iPhone screen, dont panic. Assess the damage, watch out for broken glass, investigate your repair options, and then get it fixed.

Here are the steps: Give the iPhone a good assessment, how bad is the screen? Is there just a single hairline fracture in the glass, or is the display glass completely shattered? Some cracked screens really arent that bad, while others are terrible. Ive seen some cracked iPhone displays with a single minor crack or two that dont take away from the devices usability whatsoever, and in those situations its much easier to ignore, and you may not even want to replace it if a minor crack is not impacting device usage and is not a hazard.

And then theres the broken iPhone screens like mine, where the glass has completely shattered and the display is beyond destroyed, with protruding glass shards. When an iPhone screen is broken that badly, youll want to do something about it. Be careful of broken glass! If your iPhone screen has shattered badly enough for glass shards to lift away from the display unit, watch out. Those broken screen glass fragments are freakishly sharp, small, fragile, and splintery, and are less than pleasant to get stuck in your skin.

Personally I use a plastic and that kept a lot of the smaller glass shards in place, but nonetheless some of the glass pieces splintered out and were falling off around the edges and where the screen protector did not hold the broken glass together. If you have a screen protector on the iPhone, do not remove it. If you try and peel off one of the plastic screen protectors that is overplayed on shattered glass youre going to send broken glass pieces all over the place.

Dont do that. If you have a case on the iPhone, be very careful when removing that case, since glass may come off with it. This is and you should absolutely not do this, but here is what I did to reduce the splintering hazard: I put on some glasses and hovered the iPhone over a garbage can and then gently wiped the small protruding shattered glass shards away from the screen using a disposable paper towel (it gets the glass stuck in it, you wont want to keep whatever you wipe the screen with).

My aim was to dislodge any of the broken glass that was protruding or going to fall out anyway. Its literally rubbing a paper towel against shattered glass, admittedly stupid and I am not recommending anyone else do this, but that is what I did. I investigated various screen repair options, and for my purposes and my device (an iPhone 7 Plus) I came to the conclusion that getting it repaired through Apple was the best option.

You can find the prices to repair broken iPhone screens , the screen repair price chart below is borrowed from the Apple website: For my situation, the cost is $150 for a new iPhone 7 Plus screen replacement plus $7 for shipping, but the cost of screen repairs varies on the particular device. Not surprisingly, the Plus models with larger screens cost more to repair and replace than smaller screen devices.

No its not cheap to replace a broken iPhone screen (unless you have the extended AppleCare+ warranty anyway, in which case its only $29) but the benefits of going through Apple are that youre practically guaranteed to have good service by a savvy tech, and they will use Apple OEM components. While you certainly dont have to go through Apple directly to get your iPhone screen repaired, I personally would at least recommend going through an Apple Authorized Service provider.

There are many screen repair and replacement services out there, but some of them may use lower quality third party components which can result in poor touchscreen performance. For some older iPhone models it may not matter quite as much, but for newer iPhones I think its worth it to have a high quality Apple screen installed properly by a certified tech.

Because my iPhone 7 Plus was still under warranty, I ended up and going for the express repair service. The express service is excellent and very convenient. Apple puts a hold on your credit card for the full value of a new iPhone and then they send you a new iPhone. When the new iPhone arrives to you, you restore your (broken) iPhone to that new iPhone, then package up your broken iPhone and send the broken device back to Apple.

Yes, you keep the new iPhone. Once Apple gets the broken iPhone, they release the hold on your credit card, and then bill you the price of the repair. This is fast, easy, efficient, and perhaps more importantly youre never without a phone throughout the entire repair process, and you can easily transfer all of your data and stuff to the new device.

I had never used the express repair service option until now, but it worked so well that its hard not to recommend. The screen broken iPhone is sent off to Apple: And the same data is restored to an iPhone with a perfect screen: You can also take your iPhone into an Apple Store and initiate repairs that way, whether its fixing it the same day (sometimes an option), swapping it out in the Apple Store, or whatever other repair options are available to you and with your iPhone.

Or you can take your iPhone to an Apple Authorized repair and service center and have them take a look and give you options. What you do is up to you. If your iPhone is not under warranty and you have the broken screen repaired through Apple, you may be without an iPhone for a few days while it is being fixed, or you may be given a loaner iPhone during the repair period.

This really depends on multiple factors, contact Apple or an authorized repair center to learn your options since each situation is unique. As a DIY kind of guy (how is that for a cheesy rhyme!), my first inclination was to find a repair kit and fix the screen myself. After searching around and finding at various prices, I noticed many of them are not OEM components and have mixed reviews in terms of quality, which is a bit off-putting.

While you can get a screen from Amazon, iFixIt, or elsewhere, its often more expensive than having Apple just replace the screen for you, plus youll still need a set of tiny screwdrivers and various tools for the job, and a fair amount of patience. This is the second iPhone screen Ive broken and Ive had nearly every model since the iPhone debuted.

The screens are generally pretty tough, but nothing is perfect and they can still break, even when theyre in a case. If the iPhone falls screen down or against a hard object, the glass is probably going to break. If the glass breaks and the , the entire phone might be toast. And a few things to help for the future: Have you ever broken your iPhone screen? Did you get it fixed through Apple or a repair center? What was your experience? Let us know in the comments!