If you updated your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to iOS 7, and didn’t like it or finding it laggy on your device and want to downgrade back to iOS 6, then we have some bad news, the window to downgrade from iOS 7 to iOS 6 is now closed.

That is because Apple has stopped signing iOS 6.1.4 (for iPhone 5) and iOS 6.1.3 (for all the compatible devices).

iH8sn0w, developer of jailbreak tools such as Sn0wbreeze, confirmed this on Twitter.

Looks like Apple is finally starting to stop signing 6.1.3/6.1.4.

— @[email protected] (@iH8sn0w) September 21, 2013

You can also visit this website to find out the signing status, and as you can see the signing status of all the iOS 6.1.3 and iOS 6.1.4 firmware files is now in red, indicating that they’re no longer being signed, except for the iOS 6.1.3 firmware file for iPad mini (GSM model).

This doesn’t come as a surprise as over the last few years, Apple has used this strategy to keep jailbreakers at bay. It not only releases new software updates, that fixes the vulnerabilities used by the jailbreaks, it also stops signing the older iOS firmware file, which prevents users from downgrading back to the older iOS version that can be jailbroken.

This has couple of implications. The first one is that you won’t be able to downgrade to iOS 6.1.3 or iOS 6.1.4 from iOS 7. You won’t be able to downgrade even if you’ve SHSH blobs. You can read this post for more details.

If you’re on iOS 6.1.3 or lower and have jailbroken your device then you should be very careful while installing new tweaks as a bad tweak can force you to restore your device, which would mean losing the jailbreak and all the tweaks installed on your device.

Also note that if for whatever reason your jailbroken device goes into a reboot loop then there is a way to fix it.

If you’re on iOS 7, then you’ll have to wait for evad3rs team to release a jailbreak for iOS 7 or for someone figure out a way to downgrade from iOS 7 to iOS 6.x.x, which seems unlikely.

Update:

Please note it may still be possible to downgrade from iOS 7 to iOS 6. However, it is not possible if you have an iOS device, which has an A5 or newer chip so iOS devices such as iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, the iPads and iPod touch 5G. The only iOS 7 compatible device that can be downgraded from iOS 7 to iOS 6 is the iPhone 4. iH8sn0w has confirmed this on his blog:

There is a lot of confusion about having to be running iOS 6.1.3 to obtain such blobs. No, that requirement only applies if you’re dumping blobs right off the device. Which also makes me mention, if you have a firmware below 6.1.3 and do not have SHSH blobs for it, make sure to grab those blobs with iFaith. If you obtain these SHSH blobs, you are free to upgrade to iOS 7 and downgrade back down in case of anything getting released (DOES NOT APPLY TO A5 USERS).

If you’re still on iOS 6.1.3 or lower, and haven’t taken a backup of the SHSH blobs then you can still take it using iFaith, which allows you to save SHSH blobs right off the device rather than from Apple’s servers like TinyUmbrella. The blobs could be useful if a low level boot loader or APTicket exploit is discovered.

We’ll let you how to downgrade your iPhone 4 from iOS 7 to iOS 6.1.3 as soon as possible.

Thanks everyone for the tip!