Chosen Solution
Hi, My iPhone X, which was in a silicone case and had a screen protector, was dropped onto a hard surface. While it sustained no visible physical damage, both front and rear cameras, flash light and face ID stopped working afterwards. When I switch on the phone, it says “Unable to Activate Face ID on this iPhone”. When I try to set up Face ID (in settings), it says “Face ID is not available”. When I go to the camera app, it just displays black screen, both for front and rear cameras. When I press the flashlight button (in the lock screen or control screen), the light does not come on. Everything else works though. I opened up the phone to see if I can spot anything obvious but I couldn’t really see any damage. I tried re-seating all flex cables but that didn’t help either. Any idea what might be broken? Thanks in advance.
You can’t really expect to see anything on an iPhone board without a microscope and even with that available, most times damage is not visible and can be identified only through testing board circuits, not a DiY job. If you want to make a bet, you can try buy and replacing the rear camera, but there’s really no way to tell if that will fix the issue, as it might as well be a board fault. Front and rear cameras, as well as flash light, are all interconnected and a faulty rear camera alone may prevent all the rest from working.
