iOS 26 quietly adds a feature you'll thank Apple for when things go wrong

iOS 26’s second developer beta has now arrived, and it is bringing a couple of changes and even a hint about the iPhone 17 Air. Meanwhile, there’s a new Recovery Assistant that is being shown for the first time in this beta. 

The Recovery Assistant is a useful feature aimed at helping you if your iPhone won’t boot properly. The cool thing is that it doesn’t require a Mac or PC for fixes. 

Rarely does an iPhone fail to boot properly, but these things do happen and there could be some software issues that prevent an iPhone from starting. Usually, fixing this requires a Mac or PC, but with this new Recovery Assistant, Apple is making it less of a necessity. 

Recovery Assistant is described in the release notes for the second dev beta of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 as a new way to recover your device if it won’t start normally. There aren’t many other details in the notes, but it’s mentioned the feature can look for problems and attempt to resolve them.

Meanwhile, this feature is super useful for a growing amount of users who only use iPhones as their main computing device. Some people may not even have a computer to run the current recovery procedures on. 

This feature seems to be an expansion of an existing feature that allows an iPhone to be restored with the help of another iPhone or an iPad. But, what’s cool with Recovery Assistant is that it doesn’t require any type of other device. 

It’s been a few years since Apple has been working on such a thing, actually. Back in February 2020, an iOS beta showed some software hooks for an “OS Recovery” feature that doesn’t rely on a Mac or PC to recover an iPhone. Rumors also indicated in 2021 that there would be an “Internet Recovery” feature that would reinstall an unresponsive iPhone with ways to wirelessly restore the OS. 

Meanwhile, Android users have long had a Recovery mode on their phones, which can help in cases where the phone won’t boot. There’s also Safe mode on Android, while Galaxy phones and OnePlus phones even have more sophisticated diagnostics tools. So it’s good that Apple is finally working on such a thing, but it was, well, about time. 

iOS 26 is now in its developer beta, with a public beta expected next month and the official stable release in the fall. 

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