iOS 26 Update Bricked My iPhone 15 Pro Max – Recovery Mode Loop

You can't get a phone out of recovery mode using another phone.

Yes, you can exit the recovery mode using another iPhone. With iOS 26, Apple introduced a recovery feature where, if your device encounters a problem, you can connect it to another iPhone running iOS 26. That device will then attempt to fix the issues and restore your phone. However, I tried this method myself, and it didn’t work.

That would indicate that something pre-existing on your phone was corrupt. That corruption has unfortunately, been included in the backup you restored.

You will need to restore iOS using your computer, then set the phone up as a new device. You can sync data from iCloud, contacts, calendars, photo library, etc, but do NOT attempt to restore your backup. That will bring the corruption with it and you'll end up right back where you started again.

Your point is very valid, and I was thinking the same. I tried almost every possible solution I could think of, but all led to the same result. Restoring from iCloud kept failing — it wasn’t an issue with my backup. For the time being, I downgraded my iPhone to iOS 18.7, restored everything from iCloud, and it worked perfectly. That showed me the problem was with compatibility in iOS 26, not with my backup.

I even deleted my old iCloud backups and created fresh ones in case of corruption, but the problem remained. I also tried making a local backup on my PC and restoring it to iOS 26, but again it ended up in recovery mode. Today, I gave up on restoring altogether and instead just signed in with my iCloud account to let everything sync back. But even then, when I changed my phone’s language, it froze and went straight back into recovery mode.

Right now, the phone works flawlessly on iOS 18 with no hardware issues at all — which makes it clear that the problem lies entirely with iOS 26. The software is simply too buggy, and because of that, it’s impossible for me to properly restore everything on this version or even update.

Downgrading is not an option. It has never been supported.

Downgrading is always an option as long as Apple is still signing the RC (Release Candidate) builds of the previous version. Many people use this method, including when moving from a beta to a stable release. Typically, after every major iOS release, Apple continues signing the stable RCs of the earlier version for about one to two weeks, which allows users to roll back if needed. However, once Apple stops signing those versions, it’s no longer possible to downgrade.

It’s not really a problem with the phone itself. If you don’t restore anything from iCloud and just let the iPhone sync everything back from scratch, it might work. But in my case, even when I did that, my phone went into recovery mode while I was simply switching the language.

From what I’ve understood, there seems to be some kind of incompatibility between iCloud and iOS 26 that’s causing this issue. I’ve tried restoring the backup both through my computer and directly from iCloud, but both methods lead to the same error.

And honestly, what’s the point of erasing the entire phone and redownloading every single app from scratch? Especially with banking and authentication apps — that’s just too much of a hassle.

No, by stable RC I didn’t mean the beta version. I was never on any iOS 18 beta. I was actually on the official iOS 18.6 release when the update appeared. That’s when I tried updating to iOS 26. If I had been on the beta, I would’ve completely understood that bugs are possible since beta versions are meant for testing. But this situation was surprising to me because it’s a major official iOS update, and yet I’m unable to install it on my phone.

Right now, I’m still stuck on iOS 18 because I’m unsure whether trying again will result in the same error. I’ve already tried everything possible, but even Apple doesn’t seem to have an answer. What’s odd is that in my home, both the older iPhone 12 Pro Max and 14 Pro Max updated successfully — only my 15 Pro Max got stuck.