How do I replace my back glass

Hi Daniel,

Unfortunately, from the iPhone 7 to the iPhone 13, this has been the ugliest repair there is on an iPhone. The problem is, the back glass is glued onto the main chassis of the phone with very strong glue, and to complicate matters the camera bezel overlaps the glass, which means you can't just set down a replacement piece of glass onto it without removing the bezel. Which is bad, because the bezel is spot welded onto the chassis.

So you have two options for replacing the back glass.

1. Replace the entire midframe housing. That means gutting the phone; taking every single component out of your old phone and transferring them to a new chassis. It's a big job with lots of opportunity to break something that only Apple can fix.
2. Painfully and laboriously chip out the glass from the existing housing. Generally it's professionally done with a precision laser that burns away the adhesive and makes the job doable. At-home repairs are usually done with the help of a heat gun. The problem with that is that it's very easy to overheat interior components such as the rear camera, flash and charging coil, rendering them non-functional. You can also end up damaging any of the flex cables that run across the rear of the chassis, including the lightning port, side button cable, power button cable, WiFi cable and cellular antenna cable.
   Once you have all the glass out, you're then faced with another choice; how to get the replacement glass back on over the camera bezel. Two choices here as well:
   1. Buy a glass with an oversize hole that will go over the bezel. Since the bezel will no longer overlap the glass, water tightness is compromised but can be at least partially compensated for by using some kind of sealant in the gap.
   2. Break the welds on the bezel, place the glass, then replace the bezel. I've never heard of anyone being able to reweld the bezel, so your next best option would be to use some kind of adhesive to secure it in place.

You can mitigate the possibility of heat damage to the internal components by removing everything before you start, but if you do that you're basically in the same situation you'd be in with replacing the entire rear housing.

Oh, and replacing the glass is only an option if your case is intact; if it's bent then you'll definitely want to go back to option 1, replacing the entire housing.

Now, I haven't looked into this for a 2020 iPhone SE, but my daughter-in-law broke her iPhone X and after some diligent searching I was able to find sellers on eBay that were offering to use a laser machine to replace broken rear glass for something like $35 USD. I thought that was a pretty good deal and would have tried it, except for the fact that the frame was bent, meaning the straight glass replacement wasn't possible so I ended up replacing the entire housing. It went fairly well, but somehow the ambient light sensor stopped working so I had to replace it and lost the ability of the phone to do Face ID. With your phone that's not an issue, fortunately.

Good luck; let us know what you decide to do, Daniel.