Apple has officially stopped signing iOS 14.7.1

Sep 21, 2021 09:24 GMT  ·  By

Apple has just rolled out iOS 15, but this isn’t the only news on the iOS front coming this week. The company has also stopped signing iOS 14.7.1, therefore making it impossible to downgrade to this version if you’ve already installed a newer release.

iOS 14.7.1 was launched in late July with an important fix for iPhones with Touch ID paired with an Apple Watch, but in the meantime, the Cupertino-based tech giant has also come up with iOS 14.8, an emergency update including a zero-day vulnerability fix.

This time, Apple published the update on September 13, only a week before the company was scheduled to officially release iOS 15 to the supported devices.

Downgrades no longer allowed

By no longer signing iOS 14.7.1, Apple makes it pretty much impossible for an iPhone running a newer version of the operating system to downgrade to this release.

In other words, once you installed iOS 14.8 or iOS 15 on your iPhone, you can no longer go back, so you’re stuck with these releases.

In case you’re wondering why this is so important for iPhone owners out there, it’s because some users just want to go back to an earlier release due to various issues experienced with the latest version of the operating system. A downgrade most often helps them deal with critical bugs until a newer update is rolled out.

At the same time, users who want to stick with older versions of iOS are very often interested in jailbreaking their iPhones, and in most cases, the newer the release, the slimmer the chances for a method to bypass the restrictions and unlock a device. There’s no jailbreak for iOS 15 right now, and there’s a chance it’ll take a while until one is developed and released to users.