Apple is bringing wireless recovery firmware technology developed since 2020 to the iPhone 16 series devices, which can use another device to transfer firmware when restoring firmware. The initial wireless recovery firmware was launched by Apple in iOS 15.4 and watchOS 8.5, and was later expanded to iOS 17 and tvOS 17. It mainly supports Apple Watch and Apple TV.
Now Apple has finally introduced this feature to the iPhone, allowing users to restore firmware wirelessly with the help of family or friends’ iPhones when needed without connecting to a computer to use iTunes.
Essentially, when an iPhone 16 series model encounters some problem that causes it to enter recovery mode, the user only needs to place it next to another iPhone or iPad to restore the firmware. This normal device will be responsible for downloading the latest version of iOS and transferring it to the device that needs to be restored.
It is very necessary for Apple to bring this technology to the iPhone, because many users no longer use computers frequently or even do not buy computers. In this case, it is more troublesome to install iTunes recovery on the computer.
In theory, any model running iOS 18 should support this feature, but after testing, only the iPhone 16 series models actually support this feature. This series of models comes with a special recovery partition, which can manage the entire iOS recovery process regardless of whether the iOS partition starts normally.
It remains to be seen whether Apple will expand support for this feature to the iPhone 15 series and more models in the future. This feature is relatively practical for most users, and Apple should expand support for more models.