Everything on a modern Android is encrypted.

The case nobody can recover

Android has encrypted its internal storage out of the box since version 7.0 in 2016. The encryption works file by file, and the key is built from two halves: the passcode, and hardware inside the phone that never gives its half up. Data is scrambled before it reaches the flash chip, so the chip itself holds nothing readable.

That sets up the one verdict no money moves. If the phone cannot be brought to boot and nobody knows the passcode, the storage can still be read, and it returns noise. Desoldering the memory chip and reading it directly in a lab produces a perfect copy of the same noise. It is the same wall a dead iPhone hits, and the honest labs all say so.

Look at what the verdict requires, though: a board past reviving, and a passcode lost. Most broken phones fail neither test. Smashed screens sit on working boards. A fair share of dead boards will run again for long enough. And the PIN usually turns out to be findable. The rest of this page is about the majority.

A smashed screen, and why it is the most recoverable case

A phone with a destroyed screen and a live board is a working computer with a broken window. It rings. Alarms go off. A laptop sees it when it is plugged in. Nothing about the storage, the encryption or your files has changed. People write these phones off because they have stopped being usable, and they are the ones we most like to see come in.

Two things decide the job: whether it powers on, and whether you know the PIN. With both, try it yourself first. A USB keyboard or mouse on a phone-to-USB adapter will drive a handset whose touch is gone, and the keyboard can type the PIN in with the glass black. Many recent Samsungs will also mirror their screen to a Windows laptop or drive a monitor over the charging port, which turns an invisible phone back into a visible one for as long as it takes to copy everything off. None of this needs a backup to exist: the photos come off the handset itself.

Where the display and the touch are both gone and the shortcuts fail, the lab route is a known good screen connected in place of the broken one, long enough to unlock the phone and move the data out. What you get back is your files on a drive you can open, and the handset as it came in.

“Will not turn on” is four different phones

Dead is a symptom with four causes, and they carry different odds. The free assessment exists to tell you which one yours is before there is a quote to consider.

• Battery and charging faults. The healthiest kind of dead. A worn battery, a corroded charge port or a failed charging circuit keeps a good phone black. Powered another way on the bench, it boots, asks for its PIN and hands everything over.
• Water. Recoverable and time-critical, because corrosion keeps working every day the phone sits in a drawer, and the first well-meant fixes can do the worst of the damage. What to do in the first hour is its own page: water damaged phones.
• Board faults. The job is bringing the phone’s main board up for one boot. Once it starts and accepts its passcode, the data comes off the ordinary way. The phone does not have to survive as a phone for your files to survive.
• Dead and locked. The verdict from the top of the page. A board past reviving plus an unknown passcode returns noise for us and for everyone, and you will hear it plainly at the assessment, free.

What the recovery apps can and cannot do

The undelete apps for Android carry one limitation their marketing leaves out: reaching deleted files in internal storage takes root access, and a modern phone out of the box refuses it. Without root, an app can scan what any file manager sees, which excludes the deleted data you installed it for.

Many fill the gap with what they can reach. Cached thumbnails and copies get presented as recovered photos, and the paid export turns out to be small versions of pictures the phone was going to show you anyway. On a phone that still works, the honest first stops are the gallery app’s own trash, which holds deleted photos for thirty days or more, and the cloud account the phone backs up to.

If there was a memory card, start with it

The best news on this page belongs to the microSD card. A card the phone treated as portable storage is ordinary removable flash, and none of the handset’s encryption touches it. Whatever is wrong with the phone, the card comes out and is recovered on its own terms, and it is often where the camera was writing all along. Card recovery is its own page, and the work starts at $249, carving included when the card no longer presents a filesystem.

The exception is a card the phone formatted as internal storage when it was set up. That card is encrypted to the handset and shares the handset’s fate.

Check the backup before you call anyone

Sign into your Google account from any computer and look. If photo backup was ever switched on, the pictures may be sitting there at full size, recoverable with a password instead of a lab. Samsung owners should also check Samsung’s own backup service and Microsoft OneDrive, which Samsung galleries have synced to at different times. If the account holds what you lost, you never needed us, and finding that out first costs nothing. That is the correct order to do things in.

If the backup comes up empty, the phone can be dropped off in Sydney or sent by tracked courier from anywhere in Australia.