Sometimes, buying a second hand iPhone can be the best compromise when getting a good quality phone at a price that won’t hurt your pocket. If you’re getting your iPhone from an aggressive reseller, from green hills, or from anywhere other than the Apple store, it’s important to be mindful where your phone actually came from.
For some, having a phone with a shutter that can’t be put in silent is no big deal. After all, it’s not really a defect, just a limitation. But there’s of course a market who finds this as a big hindrance to their productivity. There are those millennial students who love taking pictures of PowerPoint slides. There are those reporters doing press coverages that require silenced phones. There are fellow commuters in trains wishing to take innocent screenshots as reminders who could be accused of covert photography. A frown, a curse, or a shameful slap would be highly probable in that predicament.
And then there are the perverts—the reason why you can’t silent your iPhone shutter sound.
If you’ve missed it, ever since the early 2000s, iPhones sold in Japan, or any phone for that matter, are being specially manufactured to solve the country’s concern with covert, voyeuristic photography. To discourage and reduce the number of occasions of secret filming or photography, manufactures have cooperated to produce phones with shutter sounds that can’t be disabled. Although there is no Japanese law that requires manufactures to comply, they have since did so, voluntarily. Neighboring Asian countries, like Korea, have also started this scheme.
A lot of second hand phones land in developing countries by bulk, and this includes the Philippines. If you’re wondering why you can’t put silent the shutter sound of the default camera app even if you’ve turned on the mute switch, it’s because it was either shipped from Japan or Korea. Yes, you can always use another camera application, but nothing compares to the convenience and quality of the default camera app.