What is Apple MFi Certification
From the iPhone12 to the future generation of iPhone models, Apple has decided to cancel the additional cable that has been bonded with iPhone. Literally, it means that most of the customer are going to purchase their own cable for their phone that will significantly lift the market of the charging cable and charger.
When we are going to talk about accessories of Apple products, MFi certification is the inevitable topic. MFi is the abbreviation of Made for iPhone/iPad/iPod which is initially adopted by Apply in 2005 during which this icon is only used on the iPod.
It is said that Apple will charge an extra fee of 10% as the commission of using the MFi icon during the early time of MFi certification. With the introduction of the new product line(iPhone, iPad), MFi gradually become a mature and wide covered certification which spans not only from charging cable and charger but also to the territories of adapter, wired earphone, TWS earphone, wireless charging pad.
With the release of lightning interface, Apple has fully updated the internal handshake protocol which strictly confined the normal implement of the third party accessories on Apple devices that any accessories without the MFi certification will be refused by the devices and a popup will be shown to indicate the danger of using unauthorized third party accessories.
Reasons of why Apple holds enthusiasm about MFi certification are obvious. From Apple's self-developed system, to the various hardware and accessories, to the maverick interface. Apple has been different from Android since the beginning, it is a huge self-sufficient product ecosystem, Apple can ensure that the cost and profit of each level are under its own control.
As one important gear of this enormous machine, MFi certification set up the boundary between the authorized product and unqualified one which can not only extract a huge amount of profit by disseminating their authorization all over the world but also appease the third party manufacturer who wants to legitimately share the market volume of Apple accessories. The second reason may lie in safety consideration. When we take the charging cable as an example, to manufacture a MFi certificated cable requires to import the original C94/C89 interface plug along with internal chip from Apple. Therefore a charging cable that has underwent MFi interface adopted exactly the same interface with original iPhone charging cable which means that the charging or data transmission environment can be assured.