Swipe up to upgrade

I will receive another iphone via mail from our office today which has 13.4 installed and I will try to test whether I can:

1. restore my icloud backup to this iphone
2. bsckup this iphone with itunes
3. restore the iphone x with 13.4.1 with the itunes backup

I will post results here after I had the chance to test this setup

Same problem here with iPhone X after upgrading from 13.4 to 13.4.1 yesterday.

Here's what I found out and a solution (at least if you have a backup):

• Connect the phone to a Mac and put it into DFU/recovery mode
• For me, this only worked on a Mac! My Windows PC didn't recognize the iPhone X in DFU mode!
• So, I used iTunes on a Mac to freshly install iOS 13.4.1. After that the iPhone did work again but the "swipe up to upgrade"-error re-occured after I recovered my iCloud backup!
• What now? The solution was to downgrade to the previous version of iOS:
  • I got the package for iOS 13.4 from https://ipsw.me and used this manual to install it
  • iPhone restarted fine and recovering the latest backup from iCloud also worked!

So, there seems to be something wrong with 13.4.1 that makes some phones crash. I'm a little worried that I'll be stuck with 13.4 for the rest of my iPhone X's life now... @apple, any idea? I have a first gen iPhone X. Is the reason maybe some setting for accessing the control center when the screen is locked? On the other hand, the phone keeps on restarting so there must be something else wrong.

This same problem has also happened to me of the course of the past several days (on two iPhones now, I'll get to that below). My iPhone 11 Pro Max attempted to upgrade from 13.4 to 13.4.1 and experienced the white screen with "Swipe up to upgrade" as the only text. 

Swiping up seems to lock up the phone for 60 seconds and then it will reset by flashing a screen with a white background and Apple logo, or do a longer reboot with a black background and white Apple logo. Force resetting the phone also does not resolve it, and will go back to the "Swipe up to upgrade" screen.

I have AppleCare+ for my phone and called Apple about the problem. After being unable to make the phone functional again, the support rep seemed to decide it was a hardware problem and sent a replacement iPhone 11 Pro Max.

Upon receiving the replacement iPhone, I went through the setup process and restored from my iCloud backup, which caused the exact same problem to reappear! The replacement device was behaving in the same broken way: stuck on the "Swipe up to upgrade" screen. 

Finally, I followed what ulliGT said above, and used a Mac to restore and downgrade the replacement iPhone to 13.4. Then I was able to successfully complete the restoration of my data from iCloud backup.

This appears to be an issue with 13.4.1 and some configuration of the user data or settings (that is also stored in the backup). It also seems that 13.4 does not have this bug and works fine. However, now I am concerned I will be stuck on 13.4 and unable to upgrade the phone in the future without losing all my data. I have sent my original iPhone back to Apple in the replacement box.

I don't know how to draw more attention to this bug, but hopefully an engineer at Apple will investigate this problem!

Same problem here. iCloud-Backup doesn´t work (swipe up), but iTunes-backup and set up as a new phone works.

Very frustrating as my last iTunes-backup is from mid 2019.

@apple: do something. At least sign ipsw 13.4 again to make the necessary downgrade possible.

Ok, just got off the phone with Apple. It wasn’t really an engineer per say but a technical liaison to that level. The only good news is he confirmed that the issue has been reported by enough people to have it sent to engineering for diagnosis. The bad news is who knows when this will be addressed.

I’m lucky enough to work with a company that has some test devices and I was able to find one (iPhone 8+) that was running 13.4. I was successfully able to restore my iCloud backup down to that phone and now am in the process of making a local iTunes/Mac backup. Per other comments above, I hope this will allow me to restore the local backup to my iPhone 11 Pro.

Hello Molly.Williams,

Thanks for that info and for choosing the Apple Support Communities. If I understand correctly, you are unable to use your iPhone after updating, as it is stuck on a setup screen or goes to the Apple logo. First, a good idea is to check if your photos that are on your iPhone could have already been imported to your computer or even iCloud or have a backup you may not be aware of:

View your photos and videos on iCloud.com

Locate backups of your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

Next, we would like you to reinstall iOS on your device; this will help us isolate the situation further. Reinstalling iOS should not affect any of your data, so please follow the steps from the "If your device turns on but gets stuck during start up" section in this article:

If your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch won't turn on or is frozen

Use the “Update” option and not “Restore” and these steps will reinstall the iOS software on your iPhone.

Cheers!

I’m happy to report that restoring from the local backup to my iPhone 11 Pro with 13.4.1 worked! Of course, this is a terrible workaround solution that many won’t have available. You basically need four things to do this.

1. A device running the same iOS or newer to what yours was using prior to the failed update. (Exception is 13.4.1). For most people this will be 13.4 Note, you you cannot use a phone that has an earlier version then what you were running. Example, if you had 13.4 installed on your iPhone before the problem, you will not be able to restore your iCloud backup to a device running 13.2 as and example.
2. The device in #1 must also be big enough to support your iCloud restore. (there may be options to workaround this per post above)
3. A Mac or PC with enough available storage to make a local backup.
4. A lot of time and patience. For some it may just be easier to setup your phone up as “new” but for me the amount of configuration would have been a huge pain in the butt.

If you borrow a friends or family phone for this process make sure they have a iCloud or local backup of their data and are willing to go without their phone for several hours.

I really hope we’ll see this addressed soon for everyone’s case. If you don’t take the option above make sure you keep your iCloud backup in place for now. That way if Apple does address this problem, hopefully in the coming weeks. You could then try to recover your iCloud backup at that time.

Best of luck, and if you have any questions I’ll try to respond.

@DribbelCastle is correct when it comes to all those of us, who upgraded their phone just recently to 13.4.1 and due to revoked signing of the 13.4 IPSW package cannot downgrade tp 13.4 any longer. Those folks need an alternative device (as @DribbleCastle described) to recover the data from their iCloud backup. I do not know if any of the commercial offers on the internet, that promise extraction of data from your iCloud backup, might be of any use here.

For the lucky few that ran into this problem earlier and were able to downgrade to 13.4 before signing expired, the easier way described by many of you should still be open:

1. Use your working 13.4 phone to make an iTunes backup onto your local computer
2. Factory reset your phone and re-install it with a fresh 13.4.1
3. Restore the backup from your iTunes

Question about this: Should this not fix the problem, will you be able to recover the iPhone including iOS 13.4 (!) from the backup?

I have the same problem after upgrade to 13.4.1 iOS. I did everything described in the answer, but the problem is still the same. So what can I do? I do not want to restore my iphone, I only need to install the new ios or get back to the older one.

I have the same issue on upgrading from 13.4 to 13.4.1. Factory reset makes bootable but restoring data from icloud backup makes my iphone stuck again (Swipe up to upgrade persists).

Trying 13.4.5 (beta) results in the same issue.

I hope the downgrade option to 13.4 will be available again.

My phone is iPhone XS.

****, that doesn't sound good. I anticipated that the signing issue might happen somewhen and unfortunately do not have another idea. Since both of you unsuccessfully tried 13.4.5 it seems like Apple did not fix our problem at least yet. All of us seem to have some configuration, app or data that does not work with iOS > 13.4 and we somehow need to make Apple aware of that. @Daniel06 when you talk to the engineer tomorrow, can you please make him aware that there are multiple people having this issue.

Looking at the latest security problems with the Mail app, I'd sure love to update to 13.4.5 better sooner than later, but if the way back to 13.4 is now blocked, we all now seem to be stuck where we are :-(

Spoke with the engineer. They had me send a diagnostic of the iPhone and made them aware of this thread that several people are having this issue. They will review the data provided and another engineer will call me Tuesday or possibly tomorrow.

Thank you, Molly.Williams! Yes, I have indeed tried that as well. Restore works, I can configure the iPhone as "new" but I cannot restore my backup from iCloud. Whenever I try restoring it from this specific backup I am stuck again (same problem as some others in the thread also had). I am somewhat running out of ideas here. If Apple would allow me to downgrade to 13.4 again that would be one more option

Setting up as a new phone was quite the process. Having over 80+ apps and not having the settings transferred over was very frustrating. Hopefully they come back with a resolution or at least the ability to downgrade for the time being.

This is bonkers...I appreciate you taking the time to investigate and post results. I had a perfectly good phone until this update and am consistent with icloud backups, but none restore and result in the same "swipe up" error. I can get the phone to work as a clean install which tells me there is no hardware issue. Without a restore from icloud though, I'm afraid I'll lose years of texts and other settings (backup photos to google thank goodness). Keep us posted...thank you!