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Apple requires periodic device reactivation?
I own an old iPad 2 from 2011. It still works, though the battery doesn’t last very long anymore and of course the last available OS for this device is iOS 9.3.5 from 2016. Yes, iOS because iPadOS came later.
I use it occasionally to play some (old) games. And to conserve battery and avoid annoying ads and potential security issues I keep it in airplane mode all the time.
Every few weeks a dialog appears, asking me to verify my Apple ID. (This often causes a crash of the running application. Annoying but otherwise harmless.) I click Cancel and go on using the iPad.
Today something different happened: Without any warning I got a black screen with the Apple logo. This looked like a reboot of the OS to me, though I’m not 100% sure1). When it came back up, it required that I activate the iPad in a fullscreen modal dialog! There didn’t seem to be any way around that.
So I turned off airplane mode, entered my Apple ID credentials and pressed continue a few times until the normal home screen was shown. Then I turned airplane mode on again and everything was normal.
Conclusions
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I am not sure whether this still applies to more modern devices or OS versions but Apple seems to want to have occasional contact with its devices. Or more correctly, the devices want to phone home occasionally. Even against the users’ wishes.
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The code implementing the verification and activation dialogs causes apps and even the OS to crash. So I’d call that code buggy.
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How long will the activation process continue to work? Apple may decide to change something on the server side. Or the TLS root certificates the iPad knows about may expire, preventing a secure connection. And without OS updates it is unlikely that they will be updated. So at some future point in time this may no longer work, rendering the device unusable. So while the hardware is still more or less fine, Apple may cause the device to become inoperable.
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For the preppers out there it also means that when some big catastrophe happens that takes you offline your Apple devices may cease to be usable after a while.
Now I’m not advocating for OS updates for 14 year old hardware. That would be unreasonable. But please Apple, make sure that your devices will continue to function indefinitely without any requirements to call home, i.e. in airplane mode or otherwise without any Internet connection.
Thanks!