iCloud Backups No Longer Available for iPhones and iPads Running iOS 8 or Earlier
Making a device backup over iCloud now requires iOS 9 or later, which means iPhones and iPads that are running iOS 8 or earlier are no longer able to be backed up using iCloud.
Apple announced the change in November, and as of this week, it has gone into effect. Support for iCloud backups on devices that run iOS 8 or older has ended, and Apple has deleted all existing iCloud backups of those devices.
Apps and data stored on an iPhone or iPad running iOS 8 or earlier are not affected, and these devices can still be manually backed up to a Mac or a Windows PC. If you have a device on iOS 8 or older, if you can update, you can restore iCloud backup capabilities. Otherwise, all backups will need to be done manually.
Apple says that it discontinued iCloud backups for older devices to "more closely align" with its minimum software requirements. With the iOS 9 update that came out years ago, Apple adopted CloudKit for iCloud backups and stopped using an older system, and it looks like this older system is what's being sunset.
Popular Stories
Apple was not able to narrow the scope of a UK lawsuit accusing it of locking 40 million UK consumers into iCloud, to the detriment of third-party cloud storage providers. British consumer group Which? first filed the lawsuit in late 2024, and is asking for £3 billion for UK Apple customers.
Apple wanted to exclude non-paying iCloud users from the lawsuit, but the tribunal denied Apple's...
Apple recently announced that Tim Cook will be stepping down as CEO later this year, after 15 years of leading the company.
Effective September 1, Apple's hardware engineering chief John Ternus will become the company's next CEO, while Cook will become executive chairman of Apple's board of directors. In his new role, Apple said Cook will assist with "certain aspects" of the company,...
Instagram will remove end-to-end encryption for direct messages between users from May 8, 2026. When the date comes around, Meta will potentially be able to see the contents of all messages between users on the social media platform.
Encrypting messages has been an optional feature in Instagram since 2023, but in March of this year the social media platform quietly updated a help page to say ...
