iPhone and Colibri

This is interesting story about problem I was able to solve and how correlation does not always imply causation.

Ok, sometime ago my wife dropped her iPhone and broke screen. Initially I thought to repair it via 3rd party service but at the end I went to Apple and for $120 they did replace screen. And as story unfold you will see that it was totally worth it.

Few days later after Apple fixed screen (and it took only one hour) my wife started to complain that phone is started to freeze for few seconds. And after few days it became quite bad. So, I did backup phone and my wife went to Apple and they simply replace phone to new one. At home I restored backup and few days it was fine and then freezes came back.  After another few days we together come back to Apple and after short chat we got new phone again but this time they asked us to do not restore phone from backup.

Guess what? Freezes come back again. Then I started to think: what is probability that three different phones have the same issue? And one of them worked fine before screen replacement. I would say probability is extremely low. There should be something else.

And then as we do watch movie, I do realize that problem always happens when somebody calls my wife. That time you had to swipe to unlock and she simply cannot do it as iPhone freezes and it takes few seconds (sometimes up to 10 seconds) to unfreeze. As you can imagine it was annoying my wife a lot.

Then I took phone and started thinking. Phone had case that looks like small book, so you have to open it to use phone. And once it freezes after I opened it. I tried again and there were no freezes. It took quite some time to realize that if I leave it closed for some time and then open then it freezes. If I just open it again it will work fine. So, key here - that case should be closed for some time. But why closing case leads to that problem? That case was there way before my wife broke screen and everything was normal.

I started to examine case and realized that case closed by magnet. Top part of case has something metallic inside and bottom part have peace of leather that comes from top to bottom and overlaps top part and it has magnet inside to keep case closed. But again, that case was like that before screen was broken and nothing changed. And then I realized that my wife put Colibri sticker on inner area of top part, right under magnet. And I thought that sticker was plastic but in fact it was made from metal foil. So, after it kept close for some time it became magnetized and confuses touch controls. And after someone opened case touch will be still confused until magnetic field dissipates and then everything come back to normal.  And after someone opened case looks like sticker also lost all or some magnetic charge so when someone tries to close and open it will work fine.

Removing that sticker fixed all problems and I actually felt bad for myself that it took so much time. After all I could find solution much earlier. But it was too easy to think that it is Apple fault because screen changed.

I hope it helps someone