iPhone users can no longer downgrade back to iOS 7

If you hate iOS 8, whether because it runs like crap on your device, you miss your jailbreak, or because it’s significantly more buggy, you’ve previously had the option to downgrade back to iOS 7.1.2 if you wanted to. But bad news. That ship has sailed. Apple has stopped signing iOS 7.1.2, making iOS 8 the only version of iOS that can be installed on any device capable of supporting it.

With every new iOS update, there are bugs and glitches. Oh man, were there ever glitches with iOS 8. For a brief time, if you knew how, you could go back to the sane stability of iOS 7. Not anymore—Apple stopped signing iOS 7.1.2 on Friday afternoon. This, of course, was bound to happen. Apple likes to nudge its users along to the latest OS as quickly as possible, and for the most part that’s a good idea: The newest software has the newest security patches, even if you’re running an older device that can’t take advantage of all the new software’s bells and whistles. But with iOS 8.0.1 breaking users’ phones to the point where they couldn’t make calls, and iOS 8.0 seriously bogging down some older hardware, it was nice to have an escape route back to iOS 7, even if it was a convoluted one.