3rd way: Kill-switch is OS-based. e.g. you tell Apple that your iPhone has been stolen. You give them the serial/IMEI, (or they can match up the device based upon your itunes account). If someone wipes the phone through an exploit or jailbreak, the device is still practically useless as whenever it needs to communicate with an apple service, apple sends back a 'you are stolen' message and the phone locks up again.
End result: either the phone stays blocked or you end up with a crippled, limited-usage device that can't use many of the services that you'd expect it to (app store, etc). Re-sale value would plummet.
It would work with Android too. Stolen phones (that are reported to Google) could refuse to use the play store or accept a gmail account.
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3rd way: Kill-switch is OS-based. e.g. you tell Apple that your iPhone has been stolen. You give them the serial/IMEI, (or they can match up the device based upon your itunes account). If someone wipes the phone through an exploit or jailbreak, the device is still practically useless as whenever it needs to communicate with an apple service, apple sends back a 'you are stolen' message and the phone locks up again.
End result: either the phone stays blocked or you end up with a crippled, limited-usage device that can't use many of the services that you'd expect it to (app store, etc). Re-sale value would plummet.
It would work with Android too. Stolen phones (that are reported to Google) could refuse to use the play store or accept a gmail account.
You can load your own OS on Android, so this would be pretty easy to bypass. The baseband firmware isn't immutable either, just harder to modify.