27 July 2016

2 Ways to Disable SIM Card in Android Without Unplugging It

2 comments
Being a product of Google, Android is undoubtedly the best and even most popular OS for mobile platform. It has many amazing built-in features with easy customization feasibility. You can change anything as per your own choice. Everything is on your fingertips and this is why people buy Android smartphones.

You might have come across the situation where you need to disable the SIM card in your Android phone for some reasons. As an example, say If you're getting continuous calls from unknown number, that you don't want to pick up and don't even wants the person to call back you again for some time period.


Disable SIM card in Android

It would be a time-consuming process to uncover the phone and then unplug the SIM card manually every time when you wants to remove it. Now tell me how it would be to disable the SIM card directly from your phone without unplugging it physically. Sounds good? That's pretty much easy. Here are two different ways to do this ASAP!

Disable SIM card using Android's built-in option


Some manufacturers (or maybe Android itself) provides an option to disable SIM card right from your phone settings. Here's a step-by-step guide to try this method -
  1. First of all, go to "Settings".
  2. Now click "Dual SIM settings" option.

    Settings
  3. Under Enabled/disable SIM cards section, switch off the button next to the SIM card you wants to disable. (See below picture)

    Dual SIM Settings
  4. If the current SIM is active for data traffic, you'll find a pop up box asking you for the permission to disable it. Simply click OK button and that's it.
For this tutorial, I have used Sony Xperia phone. However these steps and screenshots may be slightly different in your case. Once you've disabled the SIM card successfully, you'll not get messages and calls any more. Someone calling on your number will find as if your phone is switched off. This way, you can manually enable and disable SIM cards any time and good thing is that, there is no need to unplug them physically.

Additional tip: From the same settings window, you can customize SIM card names and other general settings such as SIM card for data traffic and Dual SIM reachability feature (again for Sony Xperia users only)

Apart from this, there are a couple of third-party apps available on Google Play Store for free which claims to disable your SIM cards manually. You can also try them. Though I don't recommend using such apps as we have other better options.


Use Airplane mode


Another evergreen method is to use airplane mode. So what it actually do? When your phone is in airplane mode, it will turn off all the wireless and connectivity features such as mobile data, NFC, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Hotspot. Here's a step-by-step guide to turn on the airplane mode -

Swipe the screen from top to bottom (or in other words, open notification bar). Now find and click the airplane mode icon as shown in below picture.

Airplane mode

Alternatively, go to "Settings > More" and switch on the button next to the airplane mode option.

After enabling it, you'll find an airplane icon in the notification tray which simply means that the airplane mode is active. Another benefit of using this feature is that, it saves battery life. Reason is very simple. It will turn off all the power-consuming features (as mentioned above), which are the main culprit to drain battery life.


So this is how you can easily disable SIM cards in your Android phone without unplugging them physically. Do share the reason why you're disabling it and If you've some questions, feel free to drop them in the below comment box. Is there any other way you know?

2 comments:

  1. M nt able to switch both the sims off at the same tym since it is mandatory to keep one as default... Bt yeah airplane mode did help... I knew abt it earlier bt it waz like slipped out off my mind 😅 thnks for reminding... It wrked 👍

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  2. i only use on sim in my dual sim phone. when i want to turn it off it says ''cannot turn off all sims'' .. i need to atleast have one active? its like my phone is denying me. its my choice,yeah? is there a way to bypass this ? anybody

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