If you’ve ever faced firmware issues like boot looping or bricking with your iPhone, your last resort would be to connect it via cable to a PC or Mac and restore its firmware with iTunes. According to a new report from 9to5Mac, the new iPhone 16 models will be able to restore their software wirelessly thanks to RecoveryOS. This feature would allow iPhone 16s to be wirelessly restored from another iPhone or iPad running iOS 18/iPadOS 18.
RecoveryOS has been available for a while on Apple Watch and Apple TV devices and it’s good to see Apple finally bring it to its most popular device – the iPhone. As per the new report, iPhone 16 users will be able to simply place their affected device on top of 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 reportedly come with a dedicated recovery partition that manages the entire process even if the main iOS partition is not booted. It remains to be seen if RecoveryOS requires additional hardware features and if it will make its way to older iPhones and iPads.