The honest answer is that nobody outside Apple knows, because Apple has never said. There is no page on apple.com that gives an end date for the iPhone you own, or for one on sale today. Every date you have ever been quoted for an iPhone — including the ones in this article — is somebody’s inference from Apple’s past behaviour.
That is not a reason to shrug. Apple’s behaviour has been consistent across a decade of models, consistent enough to plan around, as long as you are clear about which of three different endings you are asking about.
Apple publishes no forward date
Apple maintains two pages that look like they answer this and do not. Its security-releases page lists what has already shipped and which devices got it. Its device guides list which iPhones can run the current iOS. Both are records of the past and present. Neither is a commitment about the future, and Apple has never made one for an iPhone.
We follow that on this site: every device page here leaves the “software updates until” and “security updates until” fields empty rather than filling them with a guess. A blank is the true answer. A date would not be.
The pattern: six or seven years to the last new iOS
What Apple has actually done is drop a model from the annual iOS release six or seven years after it went on sale:
| Model | On sale | Last major iOS | Dropped at |
|---|---|---|---|
| iPhone 6s | Sept 2015 | iOS 15 | iOS 16, Sept 2022 — 7 years |
| iPhone 7 | Sept 2016 | iOS 15 | iOS 16, Sept 2022 — 6 years |
| iPhone 8, iPhone X | Sept 2017 | iOS 16 | iOS 17, Sept 2023 — 6 years |
| iPhone XR, iPhone XS | Sept–Oct 2018 | iOS 18 | iOS 26, Sept 2025 — 7 years |
| iPhone 11 | Sept 2019 | iOS 26, still current | not yet |
Six to seven years, every time. If you want a working assumption for a phone bought new today, six years is the conservative one and seven is the optimistic one. It is an assumption, not a promise, and Apple can change it in either direction without telling anyone in advance.
Then there is a security-only tail, and it is long
Being dropped from the new iOS is not the end of updates. Apple keeps patching the last branch your phone can run.
On 17 August 2026 Apple shipped iOS 26.6.1 to “iPhone 11 and later”. The same day, it shipped iOS 18.7.10 to the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR — phones that stopped getting new iOS versions a year earlier. The iPhone XR went on sale in October 2018. Nearly eight years on, it was still receiving security fixes; it simply was not receiving new features.
This tail has no published end date either, and it is not uniform. Apple has reached back to devices years past their last major release when a serious enough flaw turned up, and has also let branches go quiet for months.
“No longer getting updates” means three different things
Three endings arrive years apart, and only one of them is a security problem:
- No new major iOS. Features stop arriving. The phone works exactly as well on the day after as the day before.
- No more security patches on your branch. This is the one that matters, and it is the one nobody publishes a date for.
- Apps start requiring an iOS you cannot install. For most people this is the practical end — banking apps in particular tend to raise their minimum every couple of years — and it usually bites before number 2 does.
When someone tells you a phone is “unsupported”, ask which of the three they mean. Most of the time they mean the first, which is the least important.
What endoflife.date does and does not tell you
endoflife.date is the database most articles are quietly reading from, including ours. It is a third-party project, not an Apple product, and it is upfront about what its iPhone table tracks: “iPhone support (supported devices get the latest iOS updates) is quite long”, and separately, “Apple occasionally releases security updates for many older devices”.
So its Supported column answers ending number 1. It does not answer number 2. As of today it records the iPhone XR’s support as having ended on 22 April 2026 — and Apple shipped that same phone a security update on 17 August 2026. The database is not wrong. It is answering a question about iOS versions. If you read its end date as “the day my phone became unsafe”, you have read it as an answer to a question it was not asked.
The UK angle: the EU sets a floor, Britain does not
Since 20 June 2025, phones placed on the EU market fall under Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/1670, the ecodesign rules for smartphones. On updates, Annex II requires that “from the date of end of placement on the market to at least 5 years after that date”, a manufacturer that provides security, corrective or functionality updates must make them available at no cost for every unit of that model.
Read the clock carefully. It runs from the date the model stops being sold, not from the day you bought it. A model on sale for three years therefore carries an obligation running to roughly eight years from launch — which is close to what Apple already does voluntarily.
The UK has no equivalent minimum. Its regime is the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure (Security Requirements for Relevant Connectable Products) Regulations 2023, in force since 29 April 2024. It requires a manufacturer to publish a “defined support period”, which it defines as “the minimum length of time, expressed as a period of time with an end date, for which security updates will be provided”, and it forbids shortening that period once published. It does not say how long the period has to be. A manufacturer that publishes two years complies with the letter of it.
So: the EU legislates duration, the UK legislates disclosure. In practice a global manufacturer ships one build to every market, so the EU floor tends to become everybody’s floor — but that is a commercial inference about how phone makers behave, not a right a UK buyer can enforce.
What to do with all this
- Buying new and planning to keep it: assume six years of new iOS versions, with a security tail beyond that. Do not plan around the tail.
- Buying second-hand or refurbished: count from the model’s launch, not from your purchase. A three-year-old phone at a good price is a three-year-old phone.
- Already have an older phone: if it still installs security updates when you look in Settings, it is still being patched, whatever a support table says about iOS versions.