If you’ve ever experienced firmware issues like boot looping or bricking with your iPhone, your last resort is to connect it to a PC or Mac with a cable and restore the firmware using iTunes. According to a new report from 9to5Macthe new iPhone 16 models can restore their software wirelessly thanks to RecoveryOS. This feature would make it possible to restore iPhone 16s wirelessly from another iPhone or iPad running iOS 18/iPadOS 18.
image: 9to5Mac
RecoveryOS has been available on Apple Watch and Apple TV devices for a while now, and it’s nice to see Apple finally bringing it to its most popular device: the iPhone. According to the new report, iPhone 16 users can simply place their affected device on another iPhone or iPad (connected to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), which will then download the latest available version of iOS and wirelessly transfer it to the affected iPhone.
The new iPhone 16 models will reportedly come with a dedicated recovery partition that will manage the entire process even if the main iOS partition isn’t booted. It remains to be seen whether RecoveryOS will require additional hardware features and if it will make its way to older iPhones and iPads.