Apple still signs downgrades to 7.1.2. For now

Sep 22, 2014 21:41 GMT  ·  By

iOS 8 brings a good number of improvements over iOS 7. First of all, you get rich notifications from third-party apps, extensions, Continuity, and Handoff. That should be enough for you to stick with iOS 8. 

Besides that, iOS 8 solves some of the bugs in iOS 7. However, using the new firmware on an iPhone 4S makes the device slower than on iOS 7. Apps will take more to start, the boot up time is longer and you don't even get all of the new features.

Back-up everything

For a little while after the update to iOS 8, Apple still lets users go back to iOS 7.1.2. That means you can downgrade your iPhone 4S, but you can do the same on an iPhone 5s too. The steps are easy to follow. Just make sure you do this now. There's no turning back in about a week.

You need to understand that going back to iOS 7.1.2 means you have to restore your phone. You may lose settings on it and some of the stuff may not be restored.

In order to make sure your device can go through the downgrade process, go to this page and see if the signing window has closed or not.

Backing up your device is better to be done via iTunes, iCloud and other third party services. First of all, download all your pictures and hit the back-up button in iCloud. You need to have those Contacts and Calendar entries safe just in case something goes wrong. Then connect your phone via the USB cable to a computer running Windows and hit the back-up button in there as well.

Dropbox is a great alternative. Use that to back-up files on your iOS Device and the pictures in your Camera Roll. If you have your Contacts and Calendar entries in Google Calendar and Address Book make sure to export a copy of all of that. It shouldn't take you more than a few seconds, but it can save a month of grief.

Download and downgrade

You first need to download the proper firmware for your device. Find it in the list below and click the link to download it. Depending on your connection, it should take a few good minutes. Remember that each firmware is over 1GB in size.

iPhone 5s (GSM) iPhone 5s (CDMA) iPhone 5 (GSM) iPhone 5 (CDMA) iPhone 5c (GSM) iPhone 5c (CDMA) iPhone 4S iPhone 4 (GSM 3,2) iPhone 4 (GSM 3,1) iPhone 4 (CDMA 3,3) iPad Air (5th gen Wi-Fi + Cellular) iPad Air (5th gen Wi-Fi) iPad 4 (CDMA) iPad 4 (GSM) iPad (4th gen Wi-Fi) iPad Mini (CDMA) iPad Mini (GSM) iPad Mini (Wi-Fi) iPad Mini 2 (Wi-Fi + Cellular) iPad Mini 2 (Wi-Fi) iPad 3 (Wi-Fi) iPad 3 (Wi-Fi + Cellular GSM) iPad 3 (Wi-Fi + Cellular CDMA) iPad 2 (Wi-Fi 2,4) iPad 2 (Wi-Fi 2,1) iPad 2 (Wi-Fi + Cellular GSM) iPad 2 (Wi-Fi + Cellular CDMA) iPod touch (5th gen)

Once you have it on your computer, go ahead and connect to iTunes via the USB cable, click on the iDevice name and get to the Summary page. Hold down the Option key (on your Mac) or Shift (on a Windows machine) and click Update. Then you will see a window opening. Use that to browse for the previously downloaded firmware.

iTunes will verify the update and at the end you will have your good old 7.1.2 running on your device.