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trparky
Premium Member
join:2000-05-24
Cleveland, OH
·AT&T U-Verse

trparky

Premium Member

[iPhone] iTunes iOS upgrade vs. OTA upgrade

Is there any real difference between an iTunes iOS upgrade and an OTA upgrade?

Why I'm asking is that there were some glitches that I was having on the iPhone after the OTA upgrade from iOS 8.1.3 to iOS 8.2 and I decided to do a full restore of the iPhone.

I figured, what the hell? What will it cost me? Half an hour? Big deal.

So I plugged in my iPhone to my desktop, performed a backup, and then told iTunes to do an iPhone Restore. It then proceeded to download a full copy of the iOS 8.2 installation file (2.2 GBs of data) from Apple and then put the device into... I don't even know. It reloaded the OS or at least it appeared to do so. It then walked me through the whole process of restoring my iPhone backup.

Half an hour later and I'm back up and running on my iPhone, minus the weird glitches.

Why? What happened? What got fixed? How did it get fixed? What fixes were done by doing this long procedure?
Daemon
Premium Member
join:2003-06-29
Washington, DC

1 recommendation

Daemon

Premium Member

iTunes always downloads the full OS and installs it. OTA only downloads the changes since the last update.

The difference is which files are replaced--with the iTunes update, it replaces all of the OS files even if some of them are the same copies that were present prior to the update.

The full update is likely to be more stable, as you could have a modified version of a file that the OTA updaters didn't expect to be modified, causing an incompatibility. The full installer will replace all files, and likely replace the unexpectedly modified file, restoring compatibility.

SuperNet
Go Ninja,Go Ninja Go..
Premium Member
join:2002-10-08
Hoffman Estates, IL

SuperNet

Premium Member

said by Daemon:

iTunes always downloads the full OS and installs it. OTA only downloads the changes since the last update.

The difference is which files are replaced--with the iTunes update, it replaces all of the OS files even if some of them are the same copies that were present prior to the update.

The full update is likely to be more stable, as you could have a modified version of a file that the OTA updaters didn't expect to be modified, causing an incompatibility. The full installer will replace all files, and likely replace the unexpectedly modified file, restoring compatibility.

What he said...
Kearnstd
Space Elf
Premium Member
join:2002-01-22
Mullica Hill, NJ

Kearnstd to Daemon

Premium Member

to Daemon
said by Daemon:

iTunes always downloads the full OS and installs it. OTA only downloads the changes since the last update.

The difference is which files are replaced--with the iTunes update, it replaces all of the OS files even if some of them are the same copies that were present prior to the update.

The full update is likely to be more stable, as you could have a modified version of a file that the OTA updaters didn't expect to be modified, causing an incompatibility. The full installer will replace all files, and likely replace the unexpectedly modified file, restoring compatibility.

You also have the fact that if the iDevice is low on free space the iTunes method can still update it while OTAs have been known to fail if the device is low on free space.