I updated my iPhone X about an hour ago and now it is stuck of the white "Swipe up to upgrade" screen. It won't let me swipe up and it keeps going to a black screen and a black screen with the Apple logo and back to the white screen. I'm really nervous because my photos aren't backed up (stupid, I know). I don't want to have to restore my phone and lose everything. Please help :(
iPhone X, iOS 13
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!
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.
The same here. If I set up my iPhone as new it is OK. If I try to restore from iCloud backup it stucks "Swipe up to upgrade" screen. Downgrade to 13.4 not possible anymore, it is frustrating. :(
Small update. The restore with find my iPhone turned off had no effect. Same problem with "swipe to upgrade" . For fun I also did not setup up FaceID during the initial setup. Doesn't matter.
I saw they have seeded iOS 13.5 GM. Any idea if this will have the fix we need?
13.5 fixes this problem. I upgraded to 13.5. Reset the setting and restored from my 13.4 iCloud backup.
Swipe up to upgrade
