Hardly just an Android issue. North American bought iPhones don't work - these can also end up as refurbished models sold locally. This doesn't just affect grey market imports but also tourists.

iPhones all come with the same radios and they work globally that’s one of the great things about iPhones assuming they are carrier unlocked which I’m pretty sure they have been for many years globally

That's only partially true for recent iPhones. Even the latest ones don't have LTE band 71 support outside of certain countries. North American iPhone 11s don't have LTE band 28 support and so are getting banned.

Older but still otherwise perfectly functioning iPhone models have also stopped working. Let's not get into a platform war here.

The original iphone SE still works fine for voLTE. That's an 8 year old device. Any older and yeah they won't work.

However, Android it's not so clear since it's possible to buy a recent cheap chinese phone without the correct carrier profiles that would be falling back to 3G for calls.

It's iPhone 6 with iOS 10 or later, and someone in a different comment is saying their XR isn't working.

If we'd assume that's honest and true, then this isn't an age or practical software compatibility, but arbitrary whitelisting issue.

> arbitrary whitelisting issue.

This is what the original article is mostly furious about.

The way this has been implemented by at least some of the carriers is:

1. Do we sell this device AND we know you can use VoLTE to call emergency services with this: allow 2. computah says no.

So the device being capable of VoLTE and/or emergency calls VoLTE is not enough.

A functionally equivalent iphone might be from an IMEI prefix that was not sold by that operator and denied even tho everything would work.