Quick Summary
To restore an iPhone using Recovery Mode you need to connect it to a computer. But with iOS 18, you can do it wirelessly via an iPhone or iPad – provided your phone is the iPhone 16.
One of the iPhone features you hope you'll never need to use is Recovery Mode, which is the nuclear option for errant iPhones: it enables you to erase your phone and install a fresh copy of iOS, which is sometimes necessary if your iPhone is freezing or doesn't seem to be recognised by your computer any more. But there's one key problem with Recovery Mode: you need a computer to use it – and if you don't have access to one, that meant a trip to an Apple Store or third party repairer. Or at least, it did before the iPhone 16.
9to5Mac have discovered that Apple has brought the same over-the-air Recovery Mode that exists for the Apple Watch and Apple TV to iOS. If you have iOS 18 on the iPhone 16, you can use Recovery Mode without having to find a computer to connect to. The feature is a welcome surprise: Apple's how-to recovery mode page doesn't describe it yet.
How Recovery Mode works in iOS 18
According to 9to5Mac, iOS 18 for iPhone 16s has the same RecoveryOS that Apple first released on Apple Watch and Apple TV; the site was able to simulate a real recovery to check that the feature worked.
What that means is that instead of having to connect a computer, you'll be able to put your iPhone next to another iPhone or iPad and go into Recovery Mode that way. The other device will then download a new copy of the iOS firmware and transfer it to your iPhone.
As far as we can tell you can use any iOS 18 or iPadOS 18 device to do this transfer. But the actual wireless recovery is only currently on the iPhone 16, which ships with a recovery partition pre-installed on its system storage. We don't yet know whether Apple will add that feature to older iPhones running the same iOS or if it's going to keep it as an iPhone 16 exclusive. Hopefully it's the former.
