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I have non jailbroken ipad 4th generation with ios 7.0 installed. I want to run some applications that do not support that old version and therefore I need to upgrade.

The device itself has version 9 downloaded but my understanding is that this will not work as IOS 9 can no longer be installed after 10 is out.

I did not find a reliable information about peformance of IOS 10 on ipad 4th and I'm afraid I can turn it to unusable device. Everything that I can find is about some initial versions of IOS 10 and I think it is a known issue that early versions of major releases have some performance bugs.

So don't want to risk and if possible I want to be able to downgrade to IOS 7 if performance is unacceptable. My understanding is that I need to save SHSH for my device which I don't have and I'm not sure if this can be done now.

The first question is if it is possible in principle to save SHSH for old version of IOS given that that version is no longer supported by Apple?

I think there are several ways to do that but I'm not sure if they work or not.

Option 1: Use iFaith

AFAIK iFaith can save SHSH for non jailbroken device.

Question I was not able to find answer to is:

  1. does the latest iFaith support saving of SHSH for IOS 7? According to wiki the latest version is 1.5.9 and it supports IOS 5.3 but I'm not sure this information is accurate.

Option 2: jailbreak + RedSn0w/TinyUmbrella

I can jailbreak first so that I can use tools other than iFaith to save SHSH.

Questions:

  1. Can jailbreak for unsupported version of IOS be done at all?

May be there is some other option to save SHSH I was not able to found. Or may be there is another way to have a backup plan for downgrade.

Any help is appreciated.

Update:

According to https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/SHSH

Apple only issues signatures for the currently-available iOS version, which disallows installing older iOS versions. But if you have saved signatures for an older iOS version, you may be able to use a replay attack to restore that version. Therefore it is recommended to save the signature for your device as long as Apple issues it.

But there is another note there

Users often misunderstand this system and think that the SHSH firmware version they back up depends on the firmware version they have installed on their device. This is the case for iFaith, but not for TinyUmbrella. iFaith dumps the SHSHs from your device's storage (whatever's installed on your device, e.g. 4.3.3), while TinyUmbrella gets SHSHs from Apple's servers (whatever firmwares Apple is currently signing).

If this is true then option 2 cannot work and the remaining open question is if there exists a method to extract SHSH for IOS 7?

Roman-Stop RU aggression in UA
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  • I believe my question is a bit different as I still have old version and that may give me some advantage but the link you provided gave me useful hints. I'll add an answer to my question here and let moderator decide if this is a duplicate. – Roman-Stop RU aggression in UA Feb 26 '17 at 11:42
  • This question is a duplicate of that one. To answer your question simply, though, you will not be able to downgrade back to iOS 7 on an iPad 4th generation under any circumstances. Sorry. – Andrew Larsson Feb 26 '17 at 19:18
  • FWIW, I recently upgraded a 4th Generation iPad to iOS 10.x. Initially it was a lot more sluggish and some apps became buggy, but then I did a full iTunes backup / Erase / Restore and all the buggy apps started working again, and the sluggishness was nowhere near as bad (previously the iPad was barely usable, now it's mainly fine). Of course, this is only my personal experience with the apps I'm using. Only you can decide whether the applications you need to run are worth the upgrade to iOS 10 (or the purchase of a more recent device). – Monomeeth Feb 26 '17 at 22:16

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