As you may recall, Apple recently released two different versions of iOS & iPadOS 17.6.1. Both builds of this are now unsigned as of Monday afternoon, which ends Apple’s official support for downgrading to this particular firmware by way of iTunes on Windows or Finder on macOS.
By unsigning an older firmware, Apple’s servers automatically reject users’ requests to downgrade to it from a newer firmware version. In this case, that would be the now-available iOS & iPadOS 17.7 or 18.0, whichever you may have chosen to install (if any).
Firmware downgrades were once frequently used by jailbreakers to install hackable firmware on their iPhone or iPad so that it could be jailbroken with a newly released tool, but those days have been gone for a while. Apple’s frequent software updates, paired with rapid unsigning of older firmware and more aggressive security patch releases have made the aforementioned process mostly obsolete.
Apart from jailbreakers, however, firmware downgrades are also a powerful tool for ordinary iPhone and iPad users, who can sometimes suffer from incomprehensible bugs in new firmware releases and affect daily usage of a device. When this happens, returning to a once known good firmware can remedy the issue, but Apple only gives users so long to do this, and they generally issue a software fix shortly after any issues surface.
Recent examples of such issues occurring include the following:
- iPadOS 18.0 bricking M4 chip-equipped iPad Pros
- iOS 16.0 over-prompting users on clipboard access when pasting copied content into another app
- iOS 14.7 breaking the Apple Watch’s ability to be unlocked with the host iPhone’s Touch ID sensor
- iOS & iPadOS 13.2 imposing incredibly aggressive background management on backgrounded apps
Even a company as big as Apple with the large sums of resources and financial backing for beta firmware testing isn’t invulnerable to the occasional bug. That aside from what we believe should be everyone’s choice as to what firmware they put on their rightfully owned device is why we think Apple should allow firmware downgrades, not block them.
Unfortunately, Apple is a company of control. The brand has long enjoyed building artificial walls to keep their users from doing certain things with their devices, and firmware downgrades are no exception to this rule, as is jailbreaking. It seems unlikely that Apple will change their tune on this issue without bring reigned in on by government entities, and it remains to be seen if there’s any real federal motivation to do something like that.
For now, the best we can do is monitor what firmware is or isn’t being signed for our devices by using the helpful ipsw.me online utility and downloading firmware files for iPhones and iPads from our dedicated Downloads page.
Are you upset to see that iOS & iPadOS 17.6.1 are no longer being signed by Apple? Let us know in the comments section down below.