It's genuinely impressive to me that you can tool up the Shenzhen axolotl tanks and make any kind of unofficial screen for any phone, let alone an iPhone, without vendor support, and have it work and fit, and get to market in time. That's some pressure on the guys who get a new phone on their bench and get told to crack out the logic analyser and get going.
Why wouldn’t they, honestly? The displays are presumably mostly standard display interfaces with some custom protocols around some control. Year over year I doubt there are truly major changes to the protocols and mechanics, it becomes a form factor and fitting statement. Also, given most of this stuff is manufactured in that region… the domain knowledge is there.
I mean rationally I kind of know, but it's hard enough to get something hardware-y designed, built, tested, debugged and out on schedule and in spec when you have every scrap of information in front of you, let alone when it's a black box and you hope that there's no special sauce in the protocols.
