Swipe up to upgrade

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

Same issue. I experienced it twice. Once the day of the 13.14.1 release which I eventually restored back to 13.4 and my iCloud backup worked. Just last night my phone auto-updated again to 13.14.1. Woke up to the white screen wit the "slide to upgrade" message. Same exact problem except this time there is no downgrade option with Apple no longer signing 13.4.

I have a call with an Apple engineer tomorrow afternoon, but guess that will be more about capturing data which will go into a fix down the road in iOS development. I suppose getting a replacement device from Apple an hoping its running 13.4 is an option. Tonight I'm trying one more thing I saw from others who had a similar problem in September. I'm turning off the Find my iPhone feature of iCloud and then trying to restore the iCloud backup to the iPhone. I'm guessing this will be a big waste of time but so is setting up my phone from scratch.

Please share if you have any updates, especially those who had discussions with Apple engineers.

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.

I would bet my salary that it has nothing to do with refurbished devices. My device was an iPhone 11 Pro straight from retail. This is 100% a software problem. Your best bet is the 13.5 GM that just came out to devs. Not sure if its in the public beta channel yet. We might see it as a public release as soon as Tuesday or Wednesday. If not, early next week.

I’ve been struggling with this since the 11th and have an active support call with Apple. In frustration this evening I restored the phone via recovery mode to 13.4.1 and then installed iOS 13.5 beta 3 which seems to be the current one. I then chose Erase and Reset all settings and chose to restore from my iCloud backup and it worked! The phone is currently downloading all the apps. Hopefully when the official 13.5 release comes out I can switch back to the mainstream version. Hope this helps! Be safe and well!

Mark

Well after weeks of trying to find a solution and with all the communication directly with Apple support it turns out this problem cannot be fixed. The reason is that my original backup, that was on 13.4, was overridden by the new back up when I set up my phone as new. I really wish there was a way to create a new back up option instead of overriding a previous one.

I can confirm this. I had a backup from 6 months ago via iTunes and could restore to 13.4.1 without a problem. Only the recent backup via iCloud was a problem

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.

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.