Swipe up to upgrade

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.

I think them confirming your AppleID is just so they can view your iCloud backups. In my chat session today they used the same tool and then the person seemed to have some info on what they saw for restore options.

Okay, so I have actually not found a suitable iPhone (size of 64 GB and 13.4 installed). But I was able to restore back to the 32 GB iPhone while activating „offload apps“ and offloading lots of apps.

However, the restore process did not complete. At 5.9 MB it stopped and I left it for over 14 hours until I stopped it manually. But after that I could actually backup the iPhone via Apple Configurator 2 to my MacBook successfully and was able to restore this backup onto my iPhone X with 13.4.1 without a problem!

So I now have my backup (or 9X % of it at least) on my iPhone X and am on the newest release. I believe this is a possible path, but one would need a suitable iPhone with 13.4 available.

To all of you: Good luck!

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.

To answer the question above. No, once you upgrade to 13.4.1, (even if the update were to fail) you would be forced to use 13.4.1 or newer going forward. That is caused by the simple fact that Apple does not sign anything prior to 13.4.1, therefore you cannot install it.

The local backup does not contain iOS 13.4 itself, just a reference telling point that it was made with iOS 13.4.

I saw the 4th beta of 13.5 came out yesterday but nothing in the notes addressing this issue. If anyone tries it out let us know. I'm worried I'll still have the issue when I upgrade to 13.5 but now I'll know to take a local backup before updating.

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

Having the exact same problem with this stupid update. Lost all my data and had to restore to a blank phone and even then took an hour to make it through the set up without the phone freezing.

[Edited by Moderator]

I read rumors that this error only happens on refurbished iPhones and iPads.

Is there anybody here who's iPhone or iPad has this error while the device is definitely not refurbished and has not been repaired or exchanged?

My original iPhone has been replaced because it was broken. I got a refurbished iPhone XS because of my AppleCare+ plan and it has this error.

I had problems with refurbished Apple devices in several cases.

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.

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 got a lot of useful insights from this thread (thanks!) and want to share my story as well. I upgraded my iphone X to 13.4.1 on 5/7. Right before the upgrade, I backed up the phone which was with iOS 13.4. The upgrade ended up with the frozen "swipe up to upgrade" white screen. I then started my lengthy and exhausting working sessions with T-Mobile and Apple for the next week or so, tried several different attempts (including restoring to factory and then restoring from my 5/7 backup) and they all ended up in vain. By learning a tip from a reply here that one of you successfully restored from an old version of backup with 13.4.1, I happened to have another backup dated back to January. I tried and succeeded recovering my phone with the Jan backup a week ago. Spent few days backing up the important data especially the images to the cloud photo service, I was discussing with the Apple agent (who is the most recent one of a few that I have worked with on my case and he is very helpful) to retry restoring to the 5/7 backup with 13.4.1 (based on the discussions in this thread, I did not have much hope but wanted to try the luck for a 2nd time). A few days ago, 13.5 was out right before my retry attempt. So, I just backed up my phone, updated the phone to 13.5, restored to factory and then restored it with the 5/7 backup created with 13.4 and it worked. Seems 13.5 resolves the "swipe up to upgrade" white screen issue introduced by 13.4.1.

To me, this is a HORRIBLE software bug introduced in 13.4.1 OS that directly turns non-trivial percentage of phones into "brick". Even worse it happened in the current pandemic time that everyone depends much more heavily than ever on phones for their living.

I am having the same problem. After the upgrade the phone is stuck on "Swipe up to upgrade". I have been trying to swipe up but it will not respond.

So finally the iPhone restored itself to factory setting....and I lost also a lot of photos and more.... It is clear that iOS 13.4.1 causes some defect....