Your old iPad might be still going strong, but if all your apps need newer versions of iOS to run, it feels like you can’t do anything with it. Don’t worry, we’re here with a clever trick that will help you load up your old device with older versions of of your favorite apps.
What’s the Deal With Old Versions of iOS and New Apps?
As of the publication of this article, we’re currently on iOS 9 and, in a short few months, iOS 10 will roll out to the public. Although Apple does a pretty admirable job dragging old hardware along for each iOS update, every train has a final stop. The iPhone 4 is stuck at iOS 7.1.2, for example, and the first-gen iPad is stuck all the way back at iOS 5.1.1. With every new wave of iOS hardware, a little bit of the legacy hardware is left behind.
While getting stuck on older software is par for the course, it can be frustrating. Many people abandon these old-but-still-functioning devices not because they’re upset about missing out on the new iOS features, but because it’s such a pain to download apps to them.
The way Apple has the App Store configured, you are always directed towards the newest version of an application. On the surface, this is a perfectly sensible thing for Apple to do: why would they ever want you to download older, buggier, and potentially less secure software when there’s an updated version available? When you’re on an older device, however, this means an app may not be compatible with your old version of iOS. Search for an application in the App Store on your iPad 1, for example, and the App Store app will tell you that the app can’t be downloaded because it requires a device running iOS 7 (or 8, or 9), and therefore can’t be installed on your iPad…even if there was an iOS 5 version of the app at some point in the past.
What they don’t tell you, though, is that you can easily (no jailbreak required) and legally (no piracy required) download old versions of applications to your older iOS devices with a pretty simple trick.
Before we walk you through that trick there is one minor and obvious caveat: the trick only works on apps that once had versions compatible with your OS. You can’t download an iOS 5 version of a six month old app that never had a version compatible with iOS 5.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at how to stock up your aging iPad 1 with apps, frustration free.
How to Download Old App Versions to Your Older Device
As we noted above, if you fire up an old iPad using iOS 5 and try to download darn near anything from the App Store, iOS 5 is so ancient that installation will almost certainly fail for 99% of apps (even if that app is old enough to have an ancient iOS 5-era version).
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However, if you purchase/download the current version of the application–on either a newer iOS device (like your iPhone 6) or using the iTunes desktop software on your Windows or Mac–then the older version of the application will be accessible to your older device. Why? Because Apple’s policy is that if you purchased an app (this applies even to free “purchases”), that the app should be available to any device in your personal collection that requests to download it. When an old iOS 5 device requests a new app from your library (rather than from the iTunes Store), it’ll search for an old, compatible version and–if one exists–grab it.
We’ll demonstrate the trick with the popular comic book reading app Comic Zeal. If you attempt to download Comic Zeal an an old device (which is presently listed in the App Store as requiring iOS 8.2 or above), you’ll get an installation error like the one we highlighted above.
To get Comic Zeal on our iPad, we need to make a quick stop at either our computer or another, newer, iOS device. Does it matter which you use? Only if you’re downloading an application that is iPad only–if you search for an iPad only app on your iPhone you won’t see it in the search results.
For our example, we’ll use iTunes. Fire up the app and search in the search box for the name of your application. Select the app in the search results. Click the “Buy” or “Get” button, depending on whether the app is paid or free.
How Do I Download Games To My Old Iphone 3gs 6.1.6 Redsnow
Once you click the Get or Buy button, you don’t have to wait for the app to actually download to your computer (and we recommend you don’t, actually, as it will be a new version you can’t use anyway).
Having purchased the app, head over to your older iOS device and search for the exact app in the App Store or click on the “Purchased” icon in the lower navigation bar. When you locate the app, click the “Install” button.
After you click “Install”, you’ll see a popup like the one below indicating that there is an older version of the app available for download. Click “Download” the last compatible version.
At this point, the app will install as expected and you can use it, albeit without the features present in the newer updates.
It might not be the most convenient way to go about doing things, but this little workaround is a great way to breath life into old hardware.
Why does my wifi turn on automatically. I'd like to think I'm capable enough to remember to turn WiFi on when needed.
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reader commentswith 84 posters participating, including story authorHow Do I Download Games To My Old Iphone 3gs 6.1.6 3gs 6 1 6 Untethered
One of the iOS platform's advantages over its competitors is that official software updates are not just provided to older devices, but provided in a timely manner on a single date. It gives older phones and tablets a nice longevity boost, and allows Apple to continue selling older hardware that works and acts much like its newer counterparts.
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The downside of that approach is that only Apple gets to decide if your hardware is worthy of an update. This can cause two problems: the first is that owners of not-so-old devices can be left with old software, as is happening to owners of the original iPad (which was, believe it or not, still the newest iPad available just 18 months ago). The second is that an update can be pushed out to devices that aren't ready to handle it, as happened when the iPhone 3G received the iOS 4.0 update in 2010.
That update wasn't just missing features compared to the version of iOS 4.0 that shipped for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS—it also made previously existing functionality much slower. Now iOS 6 is here, and the iPhone 3GS is in a similar position: it has just come off the market, and it's using less RAM and a slower processor than the other supported devices. Does iOS 6 make the iPhone 3GS an unusable mess, or can people with older phones perform the update without reservations?
![]() What don't you get?
Apple has been restricting certain iOS features to certain devices since iOS 4, and iOS 6 is probably the most confusing example of this yet, mostly because there are now many different iOS products with varying performance levels.
As the oldest supported device, the 3GS misses out on the largest number of features: it can't use the 3D Flyover or turn-by-turn navigation features of the new Maps app (restricted to the iPhone 4S and newer), Panorama mode (iPhone 4S or newer), or the offline reading list feature (iPhone 4 or newer). Features from older iOS versions that didn't make it to the 3GS are still not present in iOS 6: these include location-based Reminders (iPhone 4 and newer), WiFi Personal Hotspot (iPhone 4 and newer), FaceTime (iPhone 4 and newer), AirPlay Mirroring (4S and newer) and Siri (iPhone 4S and newer).
These missing features generally don't change the operation of the phone—they're simply not present. One app that does change is Maps: on newer devices, getting directions from 'current location' invokes the turn-by-turn navigation feature. There's also a button in the lower-left corner of the screen that you can tap to bring up all the steps in your route.
On the 3GS, getting directions from your current location brings up a list of driving directions that you can swipe through to see where you're going—swiping from the left brings up the next step, and swiping from the right brings up the previous one. There's also no button to tap to bring up all of the steps at once, which seems like an odd omission to me. (If you have a newer phone and would like to see how this works, you get the same interface if you use anything other than 'current location' as your starting point when getting directions.)
Otherwise, Maps on the 3GS brings all of the changes it features on newer phones, including Yelp reviews, the revamped interface, and the lack of integrated public transit directions.
What do you get, and how fast is it?
Aside from the growing list of features restricted only to newer phones, the iPhone 3GS actually gets most of the new OS's tweaks and refinements—iOS 4 set expectations low on the iPhone 3G by excluding some of that version's best improvements, so it's nice to see the older handset so well-supported in this case. With the exception of the Siri and Maps sections, just about everything mentioned in our main iOS 6 review applies to the 3GS, including Passbook support, Facebook integration, shared Photo Streams, revamped sharing menus, Do Not Disturb, iCloud Tabs in Safari, the new Find My iPhone tweaks, the Camera app's exposure lock, the new Mail features, and the new call features, among others.
The new features also don't slow the phone down appreciably. To give you some idea of performance relative to iOS 5.1.1, we launched some standard apps in both versions to measure application launch times. These numbers measure the number of seconds starting from when the app icon is tapped and ending when it becomes usable:
Most of the results are well within the margin of error, with the exception of Mail, which consistently took around an extra second to launch. In practice, the phone feels about the same as it did running iOS 5—occasional stuttering and nowhere near as snappy as my current 4S, but still responsive to input in a way that the iPhone 3G with iOS 4 was not.
We also ran our standard suite of smartphone benchmarks on the 3GS under both iOS 5.1.1 and iOS 6 to see if there were any improvements or regressions. While GLBenchmark and Geekbench scores remain unchanged from iOS 5, improvements made to Safari's JavaScript engine continue to benefit the 3GS just as they benefit newer models.
While iOS 6 doesn't slow the 3GS down compared to iOS 5, the phone is still getting pretty long in the tooth—three years is a long time in technology. That goes doubly for the smartphone and tablet industries, where a doubling of performance between product generations is still possible.
Conclusions
Even if you subscribe to the belief that each year's iPhone improvements are merely incremental (and I tend to upgrade my phone hardware once every two years, myself), the jump in performance and features that you get by moving two or three generations at once really add up to a substantially better experience.
iOS 6 doesn't make the iPhone 3GS any slower or more difficult to use than it was before, which should be good news to anyone who keeps theirs around as a secondary or backup phone—indeed, it's pleasantly surprising how many of the refinements and improvements make their way down to Apple's oldest-supported piece of iOS hardware. However, that hardware has been surpassed so thoroughly by other iOS and Android handsets at this point that it's difficult to recommend it as a primary handset. You don't have much to lose if you upgrade a 3GS to iOS 6, but there's a lot more to gain by investing in a newer device.
Your old iPad might be still going strong, but if all your apps need newer versions of iOS to run, it feels like you can’t do anything with it. Final fantasy tactics for pc. Don’t worry, we’re here with a clever trick that will help you load up your old device with older versions of of your favorite apps.
What’s the Deal With Old Versions of iOS and New Apps?
As of the publication of this article, we’re currently on iOS 9 and, in a short few months, iOS 10 will roll out to the public. Although Apple does a pretty admirable job dragging old hardware along for each iOS update, every train has a final stop. The iPhone 4 is stuck at iOS 7.1.2, for example, and the first-gen iPad is stuck all the way back at iOS 5.1.1. With every new wave of iOS hardware, a little bit of the legacy hardware is left behind.
While getting stuck on older software is par for the course, it can be frustrating. Many people abandon these old-but-still-functioning devices not because they’re upset about missing out on the new iOS features, but because it’s such a pain to download apps to them.
The way Apple has the App Store configured, you are always directed towards the newest version of an application. On the surface, this is a perfectly sensible thing for Apple to do: why would they ever want you to download older, buggier, and potentially less secure software when there’s an updated version available? When you’re on an older device, however, this means an app may not be compatible with your old version of iOS. Search for an application in the App Store on your iPad 1, for example, and the App Store app will tell you that the app can’t be downloaded because it requires a device running iOS 7 (or 8, or 9), and therefore can’t be installed on your iPad…even if there was an iOS 5 version of the app at some point in the past.
What they don’t tell you, though, is that you can easily (no jailbreak required) and legally (no piracy required) download old versions of applications to your older iOS devices with a pretty simple trick.
Before we walk you through that trick there is one minor and obvious caveat: the trick only works on apps that once had versions compatible with your OS. You can’t download an iOS 5 version of a six month old app that never had a version compatible with iOS 5.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at how to stock up your aging iPad 1 with apps, frustration free.
How to Download Old App Versions to Your Older Device
As we noted above, if you fire up an old iPad using iOS 5 and try to download darn near anything from the App Store, iOS 5 is so ancient that installation will almost certainly fail for 99% of apps (even if that app is old enough to have an ancient iOS 5-era version).
However, if you purchase/download the current version of the application–on either a newer iOS device (like your iPhone 6) or using the iTunes desktop software on your Windows or Mac–then the older version of the application will be accessible to your older device. Why? Because Apple’s policy is that if you purchased an app (this applies even to free “purchases”), that the app should be available to any device in your personal collection that requests to download it. When an old iOS 5 device requests a new app from your library (rather than from the iTunes Store), it’ll search for an old, compatible version and–if one exists–grab it.
We’ll demonstrate the trick with the popular comic book reading app Comic Zeal. If you attempt to download Comic Zeal an an old device (which is presently listed in the App Store as requiring iOS 8.2 or above), you’ll get an installation error like the one we highlighted above.
To get Comic Zeal on our iPad, we need to make a quick stop at either our computer or another, newer, iOS device. Does it matter which you use? Only if you’re downloading an application that is iPad only–if you search for an iPad only app on your iPhone you won’t see it in the search results.
For our example, we’ll use iTunes. Fire up the app and search in the search box for the name of your application. Select the app in the search results. Click the “Buy” or “Get” button, depending on whether the app is paid or free.
Once you click the Get or Buy button, you don’t have to wait for the app to actually download to your computer (and we recommend you don’t, actually, as it will be a new version you can’t use anyway).
Having purchased the app, head over to your older iOS device and search for the exact app in the App Store or click on the “Purchased” icon in the lower navigation bar. When you locate the app, click the “Install” button.
After you click “Install”, you’ll see a popup like the one below indicating that there is an older version of the app available for download. Click “Download” the last compatible version.
At this point, the app will install as expected and you can use it, albeit without the features present in the newer updates.
It might not be the most convenient way to go about doing things, but this little workaround is a great way to breath life into old hardware.
READ NEXT
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