Running Unsupported iOS on Deprecated Devices

https://nyansatan.github.io/run-unsupported-ios/

by OuterVale • 8 months ago

220 117 8 months ago

nyansatan.github.io

thisislife26• 8 months ago

Yes, we definitely need something like this for the iDevices - it's outrageous that an old but capable device like iPad Air (1st generation) has to become e-Waste simply because Apple has decided not to support it any longer and won't allow other Operating Systems to run on it. Mac's already have the OpenCore Legacy Patcher - https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher - that allow you to run newer macOS versions on older and even unsupported Macs.

dzhiurgis• 8 months ago

Not sure this would solve much as new iOS would be far too slow for these devices.

Better they allowed installing linux on old devices. But even then it wouldn't move a needle - it's such a niche case.

Maybe some would end up in extremely poor countries, but even there people can afford $30-50 for a brand new computer and Apple rather get those old devices recycled properly.

FridayoLeary2• 8 months ago

I don't understand that. 98% of devices over 15 years old have either died of old age or are completely obsolete. Something can be said about unlocking deprecated devices, but it would only ever be used by a tiny percentage of people. Apple devices in particular last a very long time anyway, as you should expect from a premium brand.

excalibur• 8 months ago

I don't understand that. 98% of devices over 15 years old have either died of old age or are completely obsolete. Something can be said about unlocking deprecated devices, but it would only ever be used by a tiny percentage of people. Apple devices in particular last a very long time anyway, as you should expect from a premium brand.

This comment gave me whiplash

Joe_Cool• 8 months ago

I am typing this from my 2009 Win7 PC I use for older Windows games...

Huh?

_fzslm• 8 months ago

It's the larger point. A device with a 64-bit SoC, higher-than-HD display, battery, gigabytes of RAM and storage being consigned to landfill is bonkers.

baubino• 8 months ago

Something can be said about unlocking deprecated devices, but it would only ever be used by a tiny percentage of people. Apple devices in particular last a very long time anyway, as you should expect from a premium brand.

Used by a tiny percentage only because Apple has made it as difficult as possible to not upgrade, which is especially egregious precisely because their devices are long-lasting.

(This comment brought to you via a perfectly functioning iPhone 8 running the latest possible iOS that supports it.)

Fnoord• 8 months ago

They did the same for the iPad Pro. My kid is using the hand-me-down of my mother (so from grandmother to granddaughter). I put a case on it to protect against bumps, protect screen (has a couple of burn-in marks but it is still very usable) and put tape on top of the camera (the mics likely still work). I also put it on my IoT VLAN. She uses it for YouTube Kids and Disney+, mainly, but schooldays it is limited to 15 min a day and weekend days (fri and sat) to 1 hr. After that, she needs to ask for more time. Usually we don't give that, although in vacations we are lenient. The device still works very well, although the battery (still same as in 2017 or so when it was bought new) is a lil' bit hammered. Now here's the thing: is this device not overkill for the tasks I mentioned? I think so, yes. A kid her age (almost 8) would be happy with whatever, it could be 480p and they're cool with it, as long as the software is still secure (and don't give me the BS of 'don't give them a tablet'; it is locked down and my first shared PC was in like 1989 when I was about her age). And sadly, Apple doesn't want to provide software updates for this device anymore. Microsoft not either, btw, as they deprecated Windows 10 and Windows 11 requires TPMv2 (though Windows is more about PCs and laptops, I'm not sure if there's any effect on Surface hardware). I believe companies can do better, but if they don't want to, they should unlock the bootloader and give the user free reign on the device. You quit support, you unlock the hardware, or else you're violating the local law. That'd be my preference.

eviks• 8 months ago

Because your made up stat is false because you lump a real problem (died of old age) with a fake one (completely obsolete)

cjstewart88• 8 months ago

Kinda related... I put together a filterable set of apps that are supported on older iOS devices. https://cjstewart88.github.io/vintage/

nullbyte8089• 8 months ago

god i thought ios 12 was old lol

asdefghyk3• 8 months ago

RE ".... won't allow other Operating Systems to run on it...."

How does apple do this ?

layer83• 8 months ago

By requiring signed firmware and holding the signing keys.

ryandrake6• 8 months ago

It wouldn’t be that big a problem if 3rd party app developers would stop dropping support for older operating systems. This is the thing that truly kills the devices.

Go to the App Store on an iPhone 7 and every app will refuse to install because it requires the latest and greatest OS even though they used to work just fine on the old OS. They deliberately drop support even when they don’t have to. Total shitty behavior.

I gotta throw away my phone because you, Mr. Developer, can’t be bothered to keep the old code around for backward compatibility.

kstrauser• 8 months ago

That’s not how that works. Broadly speaking, you compile your app against a selected SDK version. Want to use newer features? You have to use a newer SDK. The SDKs themselves support selected ranges of OSes and don’t go back all the way to the beginning.

If you’re writing an app that targets the newest hardware features, say because you’re making a camera app that uses the latest updates, it’s not going to run on iOS 5. You can’t hold that against app authors, or even against Apple, really. There’s not a lot of return on investment for sinking thousands of dev hours into supporting ancient phones that almost no one uses, and which by definition are more likely to be used by people who won’t spend a dime on apps or services.

jovantho• 8 months ago

As far as I know, it's not really on the app developers, after a while Apple requires them to switch to a newer "target" build if they want to push out an update. Currently, the minimum target iOS version if you're submitting an app to the app store is iOS 18.

And additionally, even if there once was a compatible version, Apple only lets end users download it if they have previously purchased/downloaded the app.

In my opinion, this is almost fully Apple's fault

0x0• 8 months ago

It's actually a requirement by app store connect to use a modern sdk for uploading binaries, and modern sdk versions will often raise the minimum supported ios version, so this is not always the developer's fault. See for example https://developer.apple.com/news/upcoming-requirements/?id=0...

monegator• 8 months ago

you, Mr. Developer

Yes, it is I, Mr Developer, that decided that every year the minimum XCode version / SDK Version must be raised

yaky• 8 months ago

It's Apple more than developers. Even if an app has an older supported version, you cannot install it outright on older iDevices. You have to "purchase" it first (even if it's free) using old iTunes version or a newer iDevice with the same account, and only then, when you "own" the app, the old iDevice will prompt you to install the older version, if it's supported.

karanveer2• 8 months ago

I second this.

nullbyte8089• 8 months ago

I just bought an iPad Air 1on Mercari for $25 in mint condition. Handles EPUBs and PDFs like a champ. Battery drains when wifi is turned on. Webkit is horribly out of date, but the kernel says its from 2021? I think webkit was frozen in 2018.

extra88• 8 months ago

That makes sense, that iPad had 5 years of major OS updates (2013-2018), which included the browser, but Apple provides security updates and critical bug fixes for at least 2 years after major updates end. That model stopped at iOS 12, first released in 2018, which received security updates for an especially long time, 2023.

In that era, Safari added new features, including adding support for web standards, in the major update and in a .1 update about 6 months later, Safari 12.1 came out in March 2019.

PrairieFire2• 8 months ago

sadly apple silicon and Tahoe may have delivered a knockout punch to the future of oclp. the dortania team has said apple silicon support is more or less out of the question at this point. with Tahoe ushering in the first large batch of deprecated intel machines with the t2 chip, it’s tbd if dortania will be able to ship something to get them to Tahoe. sad days and may soon mean we’re having the same convo about older Mac’s as we are about old iPhones and iPads.

thisislife26• 8 months ago

True. But there's also the plus side - Intel Macs allowed us to run multiple OSes and that was a very desirable feature that was part of its attraction. With ARM Macs, this attraction is truly gone (even if Apple fans taut its ability to run a crippled Linux). So, many will no longer buy any ARM Macs at all. That's Apple's loss. As soon as the battery of my old iPad also conks out, I plan to buy an Android tablet with an unlocked bootloader - I am never buying a locked device that infringes on my rights, ever.

dangus• 8 months ago

I think this kind of comment represents a little bit of denial about e-waste.

You call it “old but capable” but it’s really more close to just “old.”

We really want tech to be less disposable but the problem is that tech is still progressing fast.

Automobiles have barely changed in the past few decades as a fundamental concept and in general capability and road-worthiness and that’s why you see a lot of 20-30 year old examples on the road.

But imagine that buying a 2000 Volkswagen Jetta meant a car that had a 20 horsepower engine that gets 20mpg. That’s what old tech devices are often like. Sure, you can use it as a glorified gas-guzzling golf cart, but not many people need that and they’d rather just get a golf cart if they do.

A 2013 iPad Air is not going to be a very usable experience as the device was originally intended even if you get suitably lean software on it.

This is a dual core device with 1GB of RAM. At this point it can barely browse the web in an acceptably performant way. We can lament our inefficient web apps and fuss and moan but if grandma can’t get her slippers from Amazon without waiting half a century for the page to load it’s not a useful device anymore.

Sure, you can use it as a server or something, or maybe some kind of smart display, it would work fine. But let’s go back to the golf cart analogy: presumably the original XX million units that were sold can’t all be web servers or smart home screens. The quantity of people who originally bought them for the original mainstream purpose have moved on to something newer and aren’t looking for a niche secondary use case. You have to be a very specific person to try to fit that square peg into a round hole.

I have been a user of the OpenCore Legacy patcher. I bought a 2012 Mac mini, excited that I could use it as a Mac server with the latest OS. The experience was sluggish at best even with a brand new SSD installed and RAM maxed out. I also had random kernel panics that I couldn’t resolve. So I ditched the Mac server idea and installed Linux. I went with that for a while but it turned out to have insufficient single core performance for my applications. The architecture also couldn’t accept more RAM even if I found higher capacity sticks, the technology was completely at the limits. I ended up selling it and built a server with much newer (but still mostly used) parts instead.

The calculus for reuse gets even worse if you start thinking about performance per watt and energy efficiency. There are some devices especially in the desktop category where you get to 15 years old and you have a real legitimate “I’ll save more energy and cost on my power bill” argument.

E.g., Let’s say I own an AMD FX 9590 (2013) with its 220W TDP, I can replace that with an Intel N355 15W embedded class chip and it’ll be faster by a double digit percentage with the same number of threads. I know this is an extreme example but it’s still a demonstrator in the amount the technology has changed.

This would be like if my 2013 Toyota got 2mpg.

I think we need to be more pragmatic and accept these devices for what they are: a temporarily owned thing, almost like a lease. They aren’t all that different than buying some fast food that comes in disposable packaging, the difference is the time scale. Once you’ve eaten it, you’ve consumed it, and it’s over. There’s maybe a bit of material you can recover at the end, let’s call it 10%. And we have to grapple with that reality rather than pretending we can fully change it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to argue against right to repair. Yes, they should have things like replaceable components and a requirement to become more open as they age. They should be designed to be as usable as possible when they become older. At the same time, we should be pragmatic and accept that the most likely scenario is that a device like a 2013 iPad Air will still only see 5-10% of buyers reusing the device in this way rather than sending it to the bin even in the most ideal scenarios. Of course, that number is a lot better than some smaller number like 1-5%, with many iPads being thrown out as soon as the battery swells.

zapzupnz• 8 months ago

All of that is cool, but can this help get iOS 18 back on supported devices that have upgraded to 26? That'd be magical.

N_Lens• 8 months ago

26 (Tahoe) has had a lot of teething problems on ALL platforms, and lacks the typical quality and polish of Apple releases. I couldn't believe how many obvious bugs there were on first use across Macbook and iPhone.

accrual• 8 months ago

Seconding this simply for data purposes. iOS 26 was the worst release I've ever dealt with coming from an iPhone 4S user to present. Goddamn there were so many obvious bugs and flaws. The .1 release fixed some of them but my keyboard still randomly shifts to the left by a few pixels every time it opens.

Take me back to the days where things were governed by UX and not revenue.

gamer191• 8 months ago

Sadly not, those devices don’t have an exploit afaik

gessha• 8 months ago

I wonder if liquid glass will push people to jailbreak 18 and 26.

xuki• 8 months ago

Probably need a lawsuit in the EU before they allow downgrading OS. I would love to get my old phones to iOS 16 to jailbreak it.

handsclean• 8 months ago

Well, I wanted to revert and wanted a new phone, so bought an iPhone 16 instead of a 17, which comes with iOS 18 installed. iCloud data synced in fine, and the 17 is a very small upgrade anyway, even a downgrade in some ways.

AstroJetson• 8 months ago

I have an iPad Air that I love, made in 2014, last iOS is 12.5. I’d love a slightly more current browser, but the rest of the software is working fine. I spend 6-7 hours using it each day.

Just a browser is all I want.

thisislife26• 8 months ago

And this is a great example of planned obsolescence because Apple does not allow any other browser with its own rendering engine on ios - all browsers on ios are forced to use ios provided browser engine, and thus when they stop updating it, all browsers, even the non-Apple when become "outdated" to. All apps that also use WebViews also become "outdated". (Note that Safari is "bundled" as part of ios and thus stops receiving updates when ios updates stops).

nullbyte8089• 8 months ago

Strangely enough they updated the kernel to one in 2021.

kridsdale1• 8 months ago

I joined Apple at the start of my career when iOS 6 and Snow Leopard were the active projects. I had to learn all of this. I’ve since forgot but this post was a wonderful bit of proprietary OS jargon and trivia nostalgia for me.

Tepix• 8 months ago

Interesting article. Minor correction:

    $(cat n18.10A403.kextlist | sed 's/^/--bundle-id /') - this weird expression appends --bundle-id to every line from the file at n18.10A403.kextlist.

It prepends "--bundle-id ".

baiac• 8 months ago

Really the command to strip a “fat header” is called “lipo”…

nullbyte8089• 8 months ago

lmao

noaccesstomy• 8 months ago

Writing this from an iPhone 8 (no sec updates anymore) and I am not feeling good about it…

seam_carver• 8 months ago

The last update for iPhone 8 was iOS 16.7.12 on 15 Sep 2025

pickledoyster• 8 months ago

A bit of OT, but I have four iPhone 5/5s/SE (the SE is peak design and form factor, fight me) lying around that I use strictly as offline devices for things like saving data from my heart rate monitor, controlling my action camera, doing voice/field recordings through the 3.5mm connector – stuff I'd prefer never to leave my device (or data that should be open to user control but requires an invasive app to work, I have very few apps on my daily driver).

These devices are are small, snappy and powerful enough in 2025.

catlikesshrimp• 8 months ago

I am going farther offtopic, too. I have removed the radio on Samsung Galaxy IV device† and they still work. I don't know if that is possible for iphones, just throwing it here.

† I don't have the skills to reverse the process, though :)

Neil44• 8 months ago

It's a shame there isn't something like Lineage OS for Apple mobile devices.

jimangel2001• 8 months ago

The blame is on Apple, that I hate as much as any other company that locks their bootloader.

rekoil• 8 months ago

Fascinating. Could this method be used to boot iPhone OS 1.0 (or at least 1.1.1) on an iPhone 2G with 16GB NAND maybe?

The oldest iPhone OS that natively boots on my particular one is 1.1.4, 1.1.1 (which is the highest version number where you can trivially escape the OOBE via the emergency dialer) fails to initialise the FTL (flash translation layer), probably because the chip is sufficiently different from that used in the older phones.

It would bring me great joy to be able to relive emergency dialer hacktivation again, but I have lost that particular iPhone 2G, and only have this 16GB one left.

norman784• 8 months ago

Would be cool if companies are forced to open the devices that they aren't supporting anymore.

karanveer2• 8 months ago

Good work this is.

nullbyte8089• 8 months ago

I have an old iPad Air 1. Can I upgrade to a newer OS from 12?

hnarn• 8 months ago

I feel like there should be ”abandonware” legislation for both software and hardware. Like, if you’ve written code or built hardware (or both) and you’ve sold that to consumers, and you end up dropping support for that thing but the company still exists, you should be legally obligated to provide code and schematics to people that have verifiably purchased it.

The code or schematics doesn’t even have to be freely licensed and distribution could still be restricted, patents still apply and what not, but programmers could develop their own ”patch sets” on top of the proprietary code that can only be used by people who already have the code, extending the lifetime and adding features.

Obviously it’s not perfect but I think it’s a pretty reasonable compromise between companies IP interests and the rights of consumers and fighting e-waste, because the way this is set up today is in my opinion quite absurd. There’s no natural law forcing us to accept planned obsolescence.

Running Unsupported iOS on Deprecated Devices

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