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If you are wondering how to unlock a deceased person's iPhone, the honest answer is that Apple will not do it for a spouse, an executor, or a death certificate. A store reset is often the expensive mistake. Treat the passcode as an estate item, write "do not factory reset" in your delivery, and align named people before anyone "helps."

Passkeys and hardware keys stop phishing for the living, but they often die with the device. A single-phone passkey, iCloud Keychain (excluded from Apple Legacy Contact), or one YubiKey can leave a family with a lock and no spare. Build a survivable second path: synced vault access, two hardware keys, recovery codes, and a note in your delivery.