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US Cellular: Automating the iPhone Activation Process

March 27, 2014

As you probably already know, U.S. Cellular has finally received the iPhone. We’ve seen a pretty strong adoption of the iPhone already in our area and U.S. Cellular’s excellent network coverage should definitely improve that even more.

One of our clients, a U.S. Cellular branch, was working through the process of activating their customers’ new iPhones and it wasn’t going as smoothly as they would have liked. One of our Technicians, Nathan Norton, wrote a script and re-engineered the process to be simple, easy, and fast for any representative. Read on to find out how he did it!

U.S. Cellular uses iTunes to activate the customer’s new iPhone. There is nothing special about this version. It is the same free version you download from Apple’s website. It is all about special command line switches, which you pass to iTunes to start an activation-only mode.

So instead of making a one-click solution that would be straightforward, US Cellular has their agents hacking their way to iPhone activation. Emails were sent with instructions on how to do this. Seems simple enough right? Wrong.

The directions were a bit vague and some steps were not correct. For instance, the directions suggest that agents uninstall previous versions of iTunes, then download and install the most recent version from Apple’s site. Note that this is a 64-bit installer, but the installer puts the 32-bit executable in the x86 directory. I noticed that the directions always referred to the 64-bit program files folder, but since iTunes is not installed in this directory, the instructions were not working.

Now, if an agent could not get this to work (unsurprisingly), US Cellular suggests another method: Just use the command line in Windows!

Here are the three “easy” steps outlined in the documentation to activating an iPhone:

STEP 1: To begin, iTunes cannot be running in the background for the command to work. (Ok, so go looking for a program – hopefully with iTunes in the name – to shut down using the task manager. And no, they did not bother specifying the name of the exe to stop, that would have been too easy.) Turns out, the program needing to be shut down was the “iTunes helper service”. Once that was done, the agent could start typing.
STEP 2: Type in this command: iTunes.exe /SetPrefInt /StoreActivationMode 1
STEP 3: Start iTunes

Note: It is not specified how to tell whether or not the command succeeded.

I found out that you can find out by clicking on “Help”, then “About”. If this worked, you should see “Activation Mode Only” under the build number.

NOTE: Once you have this working I suggest you leave iTunes up and running if you need to activate multiple phones… because once you shut down iTunes, you start the process all over again. This seemed a bit barbaric to us. I mean, this is the 21st century after all!

In the interest of simplification, I decided to make two simple batch files, one to turn on activation mode & another to turn it off. I wanted to make sure it was easy to disable it as well as enable it because, while iTunes is in activation mode, you can only activate phones – nothing else.

These are the commands in the batch files:

To Turn On:
Taskill /IM /F iTunes.exe
C:\"program files x86"\iTunes\iTunes.exe /setprefint /StoreActivationMode 1

To Turn Off:
Taskill /IM /F iTunes.exe
C:\"program files x86"\iTunes\iTunes.exe /setprefint /StoreActivationMode 0

Happy activating!