Why your APN settings are greyed out and disabled

Correct Access Point Name (APN) settings are needed to connect your mobile device to the internet over your carrier’s cellular network. When you can’t connect to the internet, use your hotspot, or send mms picture messages you may need to update your APN. However, when you go to update your device’s APN you may find that your settings are disabled or grayed out, making it impossible to modify them to fix your problems.

Unfortunately, despite what may be claimed elsewhere on the web, there isn’t a simple solution to fix this. We’ll take a look at some of the options you can try to make the APN settings editable, but you should expect most or all of them not to work or to be difficult to do. We’ll also look at why the settings are locked and greyed out in the first place.

Potential fixes

1). Update your phone’s operating system or “carrier settings profile” if you have an iPhone. This may or may not make your APN editable, but it can fix whatever problem you are having in the first place so that you don’t need to manually edit the APN.

2). Reach out to your carrier for support. Your carrier isn’t going to make the APN profile editable for you but what they can do is push a new APN setting to your device that may fix whatever issue you are having.

3). Get a new SIM card. If you have an older SIM card, switching to a newer one, or even to an eSIM may allow you to edit your APNs. This is more of a fix for Android phones, not iPhones.

4). Temporarily take out your SIM card and insert a different one. This is a trick that may work on some Android phones, but not iPhones. With the APN settings setting opened on your phone, remove your SIM card and insert a SIM card into your phone from a different carrier. Put in your desired APN settings as found in the mobileapns database. But don’t save the APN until you put the original SIM card back into your phone. If you are lucky this will work but most likely though you will see the phone revert back to the un-editable APN and the one you added will be deleted.

5). Root your Android phone or Jailbreak your iPhone. Be aware, if you try this method you may cause other apps and services to not work on your phone as well as open yourself up to security vulnerabilities. I’m not going to provide instructions for how to root or jailbreak your phone. The methods can vary based on the specific phone model you have.

Rooting your Android phone and installing a different firmware or ROM on it may allow you to edit your APN again. You may also be able to edit your APNs with root on Android by using a file explorer to go to the path /etc/apns-conf.xml and adding your settings to the file there and saving it. Then you can go to your APN settings and “reset to default” to hopefully see your new profile loaded. Instructions for this can be found in the official documentation for Android.

BE AWARE, that you aren’t going to be able to simply download an app from your app store to fix this problem. There are persons around the web spamming blog posts and forums claiming that a very specific app fixed this problem for them. IT WILL NOT! They just want you to download the app so that the app’s author can earn income from your use of their app.

Why are they disabled in the first place?

Carrier restrictions

The primary reason they are disabled in the first place is your carrier doesn’t want them to be edited. Many carriers lock the APN settings to help ensure that their network settings remain optimized and stable and that their customers don’t mess up their devices so they can’t connect to the network.

Your carrier may have started offering new SIM cards or eSIM profiles. The new cards and profiles may have locked APNs whereas their old ones didn’t. The opposite can also be true, where old SIMs cause the APN settings to not be editable.

Device-Specific firmware

Some mobile devices come with firmware that restricts access to APN settings. Manufacturers might implement these restrictions to ensure compatibility and stability with specific carrier networks. In such cases, even if you change carriers, the firmware might still prevent you from accessing the APN settings. This issue is more prevalent in devices that are heavily customized by the manufacturer for certain carriers.

Administrative policies

In some cases, especially in corporate environments, administrative policies might restrict access to APN settings. If your device is provided by your employer or is part of a managed mobile fleet, the IT department might lock certain settings to ensure compliance with corporate policies and security protocols.