I tweeted a short video few days ago expressing my anger towards apple update which made the touch screen not responsive in the welcome or “hello” screen. So here is the complete story.
I’ve always hated how apple thinks, although for the past 2 years I’ve been using apple devices daily specially Macbook Pro as my daily driver but it never took away a bit of my disagreement with the way they control how customers use their device.
Last Thursday my boss seeked my help to assist him to migrate his everything from his old iPhone 6s to his newly purchased iPhone X. Well this shouldn’t have been an issue at all because I’ve done that many times without issue but ever-since iOS 11 there were many weird instability bugs doing all these. The older iPhone was running iOS 10, typically I used to be able to make a full backup using iTunes and restore it while setting up the new device. This has been always working out for me but this time I was out of luck.
Assuming things would be like past, I made the iTunes backup and right away restored it on the iPhone X. thats where the problem started to happen. Once the device restarted and hello screen appeared I was not able to get passed by “Choose Wi-fi Network” Page. The loading indicator was spinning forever on the right top corner and the touch screen was completely unresponsive. The funny thing was the the phone was actually fully functional, I could use the silent slider to put the phone on silent, increase or decrease the volume and even put the phone to sleep by pressing the power button. but yup the wifi page could not be passed.
This was ridiculous. I know it happened due to the crappy iOS 11 software so I went online searching for people with the same problem and hopefully an answer the could help me. Surprisingly I found few topics on the apple forums about the same problem. based on the number of people looking for the same answer on those threads there were more than hundreds of people with the same issue but the only solution provided by the people or apple guys was to reset the device, which would only mean losing whatever is on the device.
Well I was out of luck on the X. so I go for the reset option, but Oops! I have a non yet setup device and itunes says I have find my iPhone enabled on it, which was stopping me from being able to reset it! Its complete crap as this device was not yet to set up and it was not even appearing in the iCloud web page for me to remove it, and yet I could not reset it due to “YOU CANNOT DO IT CAUSE THE FIND MY IPHONE IS ENABLED ON THIS DEVICE.”
Luckily I could reset it using itunes by going to the recovery mode. but that would mean downloading the entire OS again and losing everything. I had no choice, I reset it with the hope that I can still make use of my back up on the mac! I knew that restoring that backup while setting up the X would not be an option anymore, So I tried to update the iPhone 6S to iOS 11 instead, that way I could use the setup menu of iOS 11 and migrate everything to iPhone X without iTunes. Sounds good right?
So I went ahead to upgrade the iPhone 6S. I used iTunes to do it which basically created another backup off the phone during the process of upgrade. But that is when the real problem rose, the upgrade did not go smooth but it happened. guess what I had to restore the iPhone! the 6s booted into iOS 11 with all the greetings and crap, but I stuck on the “Choose Wi-Fi Network” page again! Oops! this is bad! I went ahead and restored the backup on 6s but no luck. everytime I stuck on the same page.
Searched all over the internet and the only solution that Apple provided was to reset the iPhone which would lead to losing everything on the phone, its funny that the people who were looking for a solution on apple’s community forums never complained about the idea of losing their data, seemed that they all accepted their faith that “The solution is to put your phone into recovery and reset it”. There was not a single person complaining about this.
I was not ready for this, so I looked up all the other solutions, I even tried to downgrade the iOS to version 10 to test my luck and see if I can restore the backup and get it up working or not! But that was not an option, thanks to apple for not signing the older version of iOS full packages just because of the fact that they are assholes!
after spending more than 6 hours on this garbage device I gave up, I reset the devices both so they could be use and setup the phone as a new one. Luckily I was able to download all the photos off the 6s using iTunes while the device was at the “Choose Wifi Network” screen.
What pisses me off is that this issue was reported by lot’s of people and all that apple has done about it is to tell them to reset their phone. That was their elegant solution.
Whats worse is despite apple not being helpful in releasing a fix in their crappy updates or having a working solution, they also restrict their users by acts like not letting users to downgrade the software and troubleshoot the device on their own.
Well after this issue I ended up to help my boss to upgrade his iCloud account to a bigger package to be able to run iCloud backup on all this apple devices. I suggest you to do the same too.
Peace