An internet recovery option for iOS devices could be coming soon

The option to restore a MacOS system from the internet has been around for years, providing a helpful possibility for restoration of the operating system from Apple servers without the need of a macOS boot disk or recovery partition. Unfortunately, if your iPhone or iPad suddenly stopped working due to, for example, a faulty update, in order to restore the system, you need to connect the device to a Mac or a PC with iTunes.

However, this may be changing in the near future - 9to5Mac discovered a feature, included in the code for iOS 13.4 beta, that might allow over-the-internet recovery of an iOS device. The feature is reportedly called “OS Recovery” and it implies the possibility to restore a device without the need to connect it to a computer.

Reportedly, the OS recovery is expected to work just like the macOS Internet Recovery, which gives the possibility of a fresh reinstallation of the operating system with downloading necessary files from the internet.

This feature can be helpful for other Apple devices as well, not only iPhones or iPads. At the moment, if a firmware issue arises, the Apple Watch cannot be restored without bringing it to an Apple Store, given the fact it has no Lightning port to connect to iTunes. The same applies to the HomePod as well, which doesn’t have a port to connect to a PC for OS restoration either.

We are hearing rumors about future iPhones not having a Lightning connector at all, so this feature could be really helpful if those rumors are true.

We still don’t have information when this feature will be included in the official release of iOS and whether it will be included in upcoming versions of iOS 13 or whether Apple is just testing it out for iOS 14.