I can't activate Face ID after my screen broke.

Hi Andrew,

Unfortunately, as of the iPhone 12, Apple has begun pairing the front camera itself to the logic board, so it is no longer possible to replace the front camera if it's damaged; thus there's no repair possible to fix your Face ID, at least not one you can do yourself.

In order to get your Face ID working again, you only have two options.

1) Pay Apple to replace your front camera assembly. They will pair the new camera to your phone and restore Face ID.

2) Use the Self Repair program to do the job yourself. You still have to buy the camera assembly from them and use their tools to do the repair, but it will allow you to use their "calibration tool" to pair the new camera and thus restore your Face ID.

That this all assumes that the damaged camera is the cause of the Face ID failure. If it's something else, then this information may not apply.

Note that you can still replace the display yourself; that won't affect the operation of Face ID, but will give you a non-genuine parts warning and may disable some minor functionality on the screen such as things like True Tone and/or automatic brightness adjustment. Again, thanks to Apple's anti-repair policies, the only way around this is to pay Apple to replace the screen or use their self repair program.

Of course, you also have to consider the possibility that it's not necessarily the front camera that's causing the Face ID issue, since the earpiece speaker assembly that's actually mounted on the display could have easily been damaged as well, and if that's broken then Face ID won't work in that case either.

So it's important to identify exactly what part is causing the Face ID failure before you start trying to fix it. If it's an issue with the earpiece speaker assembly, then that can only be fixed by paying Apple for a full screen replacement (or use the self repair program). When you buy a replacement screen from Apple, it comes with the earpiece speaker already mounted, so it just has to be paired to the phone in order to restore Face ID if it's been lost due to damage to the earpiece speaker assembly. Apple doesn't sell just the earpiece speaker assembly by itself as a repair part.

There are not a lot of repair shops that are sufficiently technologically advanced enough to be able to identify and fix these sort of issues, but there are a few. Ultimately, it might be easiest to get a diagnosis from an Apple store, then you can decide what to do next.