Carrier-Explode: iPhone, Pixel and Galaxy carrier settings decoded
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Details
- External ID
- 50024499
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Carrier-Explode: iPhone, Pixel and Galaxy carrier settings decoded
- Website domain
- carrierexplode.com
- Launched
- Oct. 9, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 430
- Upvotes percentile
- 1.00
- Tags
- —
Description
Showing off carrier-explode, one of my side projects that continuously archives carrier settings for all major phone brands.carrier-explode also contains decoders and explanations for all the common baseband configurations, etc.There’s still quite a bit of work to be done in checking my assumptions, but the tool has already been proven useful for a few enthusiast groups.
Enrichment
- Niche
- mobile operating systems and development tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- decoder tool for smartphone carrier settings files
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While the web frontend and API are straightforward to build, reverse-engineering, unpacking, and decoding proprietary baseband/carrier bundles from diverse smartphone OS firmwares requires deep reverse engineering and telecommunications expertise.
What it would actually take: The stack consists of a SvelteKit web application and an ingestion pipeline that crawls firmware images from Apple, Google, and Samsung, mounts complex filesystem formats (e.g., APFS, EROFS, ext4), and parses proprietary carrier bundle formats (like iOS IPCC plists, Android carrier configs, and Qualcomm/Samsung modem NVRAM items). The critical hard part is continuously extracting and reverse-engineering proprietary cellular baseband configurations across different chipset vendors and firmware releases without vendor documentation.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ca-combos-editor, CarrierSIM, GNOME mobile-broadband-provider-info
Concerns raised: unclear practical utility of the gathered data, potential carrier bans if AI was used, settings may be read-only on device
Feature requests: contribute data to GNOME mobile broadband repo, option to disable incoming calls
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 26 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #2 of 27 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 294 days after the earliest competitor.
- Secret Codes: IMEI & Carrier · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- iOS-Carrier-Switch · github · 2026-09-29 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- CaseFinder · ph · 2026-10-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Offshot · ph · 2026-10-07 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- CarrierSIM · github · 2026-09-28 · 171 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Gbyte Recovery · ph · 2026-09-23 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Mobile Parts World · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Number Harbor · ph · 2026-10-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.34
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.