Downgrading OS 4 to 3.1.3 for iphone 3Gs (Windows & Mac)

Life Technology
1

I got very annoyed with 4.0 The multitasking is cumbersome and not well designed at all. So I found a way to downgrade back to 3.1.3. After that Spirit worked fine for the jailbreak. It took me a whole lot of time figuring this out mostly because the tutorials available online are all complicated and difficult to follow. There is also another method that uses a program iRecovery but it involves imputing command prompts manually and that never worked for me.

I’m putting this here because I think people with low computer skills like me will find this more comprehensive than the usual tech gibberish. Here’s what you have to do.

1-Make sure you have .Net Framework 4 installed on your pc. You can download it here.

2-Download the 3.1.3 firmware and keep the file on your desktop.

3- Download iRecboot, unzip the file onto your desktop. One of the files is called “libusb.” Click on it and install the program on your pc.

4- Open your C drive on your pc and click on WINDOWS, system 32, drivers, etc. In the folder named “etc” you will see a file called “hosts.” Open this file with Notepad and at the bottom of the page on a separate line, add the following:
74.208.10.249 gs.apple.com

Then click on “file” in Notepad and “save as” on your desktop.

Now you are ready to get to work.

1- Open up itunes 9.2

2- Put your phone in DFU mode (not recovery mode) and connect it to your pc.

3- Soon itunes will be bouncing around telling you that it detected a phone in recovery mode (although it’s actually in DFU mode) and it will tell you to restore the phone.

4- Hold the shift key and left click on restore in itunes. This will give you the option to browse for a specific file on your computer. Navigate to your desktop and select the 3.1.3 firmware you downloaded earlier. Click OK and wait for itunes to restore 3.1.3

5- When itunes is finished installing the firmware, it will give you an error message 1015 and your phone will be stuck in recovery mode. This is good. Ignore it and close itunes.

6- Now all you need to do is use iRecboot to pull the phone out of recovery mode. You need libsub and .Net 4 Framework installed for this to work and that’s why I instructed you, above, to install these programs BEFORE you restore the phone. Now locate the file called iRecboot.exe on your desktop and open it. A small program will appear giving you two options “enter recovery” or “exit recovery.” Click “exit recovery.”

Done! Your phone will then automatically restart and all you have left to do is connect the phone to itunes to activate it.

IMPORTANT: After you activate your phone you will be given a choice between earlier backups for your settings. Choose a backup from before you updated to OS 4. After that is done, you can proceed with syncing your phone as usual.

Note: The Spirit jailbreak will now work on your device.

Note: I think this method works on other iphone models and ipod touch, and maybe even the ipad. I’m not sure because I did not test it but other people have been successful.

For Mac: It’s the same procedure with two exceptions. First, you need a Mac version of iRecboot. but you do not need .Net 4 Framework (it’s a windows program) And the only other difference is when you click on restore, instead of shift+click restore you have to hold the option key and click restore. option+click restore.

Enjoy! :smiley:

2

Nice tutorial.
Makes me glad I haven’t updated to 4.0 yet!
I’m not in a rush. I’ll wait for 4.1 when they iron out all the kinks.

3

Hmmn, can you elaborate on what aspects you don’t like about 4.0? I’ve had no problems with it myself. Battery life seems better. Internet seems faster. More new apps are coming out that support multitasking. Haven’t had any issues there.

It’s not perfect and there are still some places that could be better, but I’ve yet to find any part that was worse than before.

4

You are definitely best off waiting. I wanted to give it a try and I figured OS 4 would be jailbroken soon enough. Jailbroken or not, I don’t like OS 4. I’m happy to be back to my earlier settings in 3.1.3 The phone is much more responsive. Everything opens up faster and even safari is faster.

5

[quote=“Adam_CLO”]Hmmn, can you elaborate on what aspects you don’t like about 4.0? I’ve had no problems with it myself. Battery life seems better. Internet seems faster. More new apps are coming out that support multitasking. Haven’t had any issues there.

It’s not perfect and there are still some places that could be better, but I’ve yet to find any part that was worse than before.[/quote]

Here’s the worse about OS 4. EVERYTHING you touch is automatically added to the multitasking dock. You constantly have to open the dock, press and hold an icon until the screen jiggles and then you have to end each task one by one. It’s really cumbersome and time consuming. If you forget to do that, you end up with a ton of applications in the multitasking dock and it slows things down. I think the phone runs low on memory and it becomes sluggish.

Also, once you have too many tasks running, you have to scroll through the dock to find your app. It’s faster to navigate to your app with the home screen. This makes the multitasking dock rather useless for certain things. It’s poorly designed from top to bottom. Proswitcher is WAY better.

PS: I have not noticed any difference in battery usage.

6

I’m running an ordinary iPhone (not jailbroken), but I haven’t experienced any issues at all from having upgraded to 4.0 (knock wood?). Nice to have the instructions in case they’re needed, though. Would the sequence be the same for someone running a Mac, or is there a much easier way to do it on Mac?

7

I’m a big fan of iOs4, except that my battery life seems to be suffering a bit.

8

[quote=“ironlady”]I’m running an ordinary iPhone (not jailbroken), but I haven’t experienced any issues at all from having upgraded to 4.0 (knock wood?). Nice to have the instructions in case they’re needed, though. Would the sequence be the same for someone running a Mac, or is there a much easier way to do it on Mac?[/quote]It’s the same on a Mac except you need a different version of iRecboot and you do not have to download/install .Net 4 Framework.

Downloading the files is what takes time. Once you have the files and programs you need on your desktop, it only takes a few minutes to complete the procedure.

[quote]I’m a big fan of iOs4, except that my battery life seems to be suffering a bit.[/quote]To each his own. Adam says his battery life actually improved! Each machine seems to be handling OS 4 differently. There is a chance that something happened in the upgrade to OS 4 on my phone. I had to restore after I upgraded because OS 4 did not install properly. For example, I had the MakeitMine app before I upgraded. This app simply changes the carrier name to your own name in the status bar. Well, after the upgrade, my name stayed even if that was installed with a jailbroken app. The web browser wasn’t working, either, so that’s why I restored the phone a second time. After that. everything worked but it was often very slow.

9

Mainly because of the folders (I haven’t yet made much use of multitasking), I still like OS4, but the phone is definitely a bit less responsive - colud this be because I need to close apps in the task bar or something?

Plus Notes have become annoying. They’re suddenly syncing oddly, and notes that I add to become unrevised, because they’re syncing “the wrong way.”

(This is using a Mac computer, and iPhone 3GS.)

10

A colleague upgraded his 3GS and I like the jailbreak-style multitasking-on-demand better, especially with the Proswitcher, a Palm-pre style app-switcher. Not everything needs to background and most apps were fine keeping state as it was.

Maybe there will be a jailbreak app to tone down the multitasking behavior for the 3GS peeps.

There’s a reason the iPhone4 has half a gig of RAM.

11

[quote=“lostinasia”]
I still like OS4, but the phone is definitely a bit less responsive - colud thi multitasking), s be because I need to close apps in the task bar or something?
[/quote]Double press the home button and the multitasking dock will open. Tap and hold any icon inside the multitasking dock for 3 seconds and they will all start to jiggle. Tap the X on the top, left corner of each icon to end the tasks one by one.

If you didn’t know this, it means you have every app you have ever used since you upgraded to OS 4 running simultaneously. Even when you power off the phone, upon startup it will remember which apps were running. It really sucks. If you don’t know how to use and “MAINTAIN” OS 4, you’d better get used to sluggish performance. It’s a totally flawed design.

12

There seems to be some misinformation here about iOS4 and multitasking. Here is my understanding after using it for these past few weeks:

  1. Not all apps support multitasking. In fact, the vast majority don’t. And even those that do aren’t really multitasking - they just save their state and return to it, so they use very little of your memory. The exception are apps that have background audio, GPS, downloading etc. but these apps will be few and far between. The apps that want to “multitask” have to be updated to support multitasking, which most won’t bother to do. So even though you see apps in the multitasking dock, they just refer to the last apps you were using. Clicking on them relaunches them in the same way as if you had clicked on their main app icon. They are not using any memory by displaying in your multitasking dock, and closing them there doesn’t give any benefit.

  2. If you do have an app that is sitting in the background, you don’t need to use the multitasking dock to relaunch it. You can also click on it from the home screen / folder or wherever you have put it. It will relaunch in the same way as if you had clicked it from the multitasking dock, so there’s no need to keep swiping through screen after screen on the multitasking dock to look for it. I only use the multitasking dock to access the last few apps I have been using - anything else I just launch like normal.

  3. Even if you have several apps “multitasking” in the background, they won’t be using a significant amount of memory since the vast majority won’t be doing anything in the background. If your iPhone does start to run out of memory because of this, it should automatically start purging older apps you had “running” in the background. So you can continue using the phone like normal and not have to worry about what is or isn’t running in the background. The only times I’ve had to “kill” an app from the background is if I was changing some setting in it that required me to relaunch it. This has been a rare scenario.

  4. I’ve heard that OS4 runs sluggish on iPhone 3G units. On my 3GS it killed my battery much quicker than before UNTIL I did a hard reset by turning off the power completely and then rebooting the iPhone again. After that, battery life has been equal if not better than before.

Hope that helps. I would be interested to hear if anyone has experienced anything different from the above.

13

Thanks both RobinTaiwan and Adam_CLO.

This MacWorld article…
macworld.com/article/152322/ … vices.html
…backs up much of what Adam writes above; the multitasking supposedly isn’t a resource hog.

Since I updated to iOS4, I haven’t noticed any battery issues - the battery wasn’t good enough before, and it’s not good enough now. (Basically the phone won’t last a day of heavy use, which doesn’t matter that much for me since I’ve got a speaker dock in my office.)

I have noticed sluggishness - a second here, a few seconds there. The phone’s been “really” turned on and off a few times (with the top button held down for a few seconds, and then the phone rebooting); I haven’t noticed a difference before or after. I haven’t done a full factory reset and re-install, because that seems like far too much work, and I’m very unclear about what data I’d lose from different apps - and I’d rather not find out.

I haven’t yet tried any mulitasking, because the only apps I use where it’d be relevant are CBC Radio and FStream. I don’t think they have multitasking updates yet. I think some of the GPS apps may now have it enabled, but with the way GPS drains the battery there’s no way I’m leaving it on anyway.

After the update, the compass went wonky. Any GPS app that used the compass needed that silly figure-eight motion, EVERY TIME. The most ridiculous suggestion in the world, picked up from Apple’s own forums, seems to have solved this: tilt the phone when using the compass. Now it seems to work, bizarrely enough. We’ll see if it still works tomorrow.

iTunes U material will no longer sync into smart playlists, although it still copies over to the iPhone. It’s strange: the material is there, in the iTunes U section; the playlist is in the playlist section; but the playlist itself is empty.

The syncing of notes, as I mentioned above, is sporadically driving me insane. It’ll sync and wipe out whatever I’ve just typed. Sometimes this happens, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Smart playlists on the iPhone still won’t live-update. Grr. Basically smart playlists on the iPhone are still quite a bit less functional than they were on the iPod 3-4 years back. If you listen to mainly music, this probably doesn’t matter much, but for heavy listeners of podcasts/ audiobooks/ iTunes U, it’s a pain.

14

My phone is only 3G, so the psuedo-multitasking is not available.

I’ve noticed no difference in battery life or Internet download speeds since updating to 4.0, however everything runs slower. Apps open slower, often freezing for a few moments before they finish opening. Very clunky.

The only think I like so far is the ability to combine related apps into folders. Saves real estate and makes for quicker access.

15

Craig, you can easily enable OS 4 multitasking on the 3G if it’s jailbroken.

16

I assume it would run rather sluggish on a 3G?

17

I assume it would run rather sluggish on a 3G?[/quote]
That’s what most 3G users are reporting, yes. It’s easy to turn it on or off just to try it out, though.

18

Given the sluggishness without multitasking, I don’t think I’d want to add it.

19

I’ve got a 3G, and have found that almost everything is a little worse since updating to iOS4. Worse battery life (although, as with some others here, I’ve never been able to go through a day without charging the 3G even with older versions of the OS), apps are slower, and web pages take longer to load.

The thing is, none of it feels drastically worse, it’s all just a little worse. And I do like the folders with iOS4.

At this point I’m giving it a little more time to see whether the cumulative drawbacks eventually annoy me enough to go ahead and try to reinstall 3.1.3. But it’s good to know that the option is out there, and to have a tutorial for how to do it – so thank you very much for the information, RobinTaiwan. :notworthy:

20

Another iPhone OS 4 issue: my iPhone (3GS) no longer remembers the Wifi password at my university. I’ve always needed to log in every day (unlike on my home Wifi network - why, I have no idea), but at least before the phone remembered my data and I just needed to click the “Enter” button. But now I need to re-enter the data every time, which is rapidly getting annoying.

Each and every time the phone asks me if I want the data to be remembered, and I always say yes - and then it’ll ask me again when I log in again in a couple of hours, if I’ve moved to a different building and briefly lost the connection or something.

Is anyone else having this issue? (I found one post in the Apple forums on the issue, but no solution.)

(I’m also getting more annoyed with the touch delays - I keep getting to the wrong place, because the phone doesn’t respond, so I tap it again, then suddenly I’ve moved on a couple more screens. I hope I’ll get used to this.)

I actually think my battery life has improved a bit, but it’s hard to be sure.