Delete Corrupt iPadOS Updates

In this video, we’re going to look at how you can delete an update you’re trying to install on your iPad. Why would you want to do this? Well, maybe it became corrupt when you downloaded it. So then, when you try to run that update, it doesn’t do anything, or it just stalls out. What you’ll need to do is delete that update and then re-download it. Let’s see what I mean. Let’s go to my iPad.

So I am installing an update on this iPad. I’m going to open up my Settings app. When we go over to General, and then we go up to Software Update, you’re going to see that my iPad is preparing an update, but it’s been preparing this update for a long time. It’s stalled out. If you’ve experienced this, the next thing that I would recommend is force quitting the Settings app and then seeing if that takes care of it. You can also restart the iPad. Now I’ve done both. I forced quit the Settings app, and I’ve restarted my iPad. It still just sits here and says preparing update. So now what do you do?

Well, the next thing is to delete the update. And then, once you delete the update, you can re-download the update. So how do we do that? Well, what we need to do is we need to go back to our General settings. So I tap on General here, it brings us back, and then what we do is go over to iPad Storage.

Under iPad Storage, we have all of our different apps listed, along with how much each app has taking. As an example, iMovie here is taking up 1.46 gigabytes. You’re going to see under one of these listings here the update. I’ve been trying to update it to iPadOS 14.4. So what I need to do is I need to delete this.

To delete it, I tap on it, and then you’re going to see Delete Update. Once I delete this update, what I’m going to do is download that update again. And then, with the new download, I’ll hopefully be able to update my iPad. So now, let’s delete this. It asks me, are you sure you want to delete it? I tap on Delete Update, and now it deletes it.

Now, what I’m able to do is go back over to my General settings, and then we go up to Software Update. It is checking for an update. It sees that there is an update, I tap on Download and Install, and now it’s going to re-download that update. And hopefully, this time, it will not be corrupt when it downloads it, and it’ll install that update.

So that’s how you can delete a possibly corrupt update. Maybe it has stalled out. You restart the iPad; it doesn’t do anything. You force quit the settings app; it doesn’t do anything. What you’ll need to do is delete the update. To do that., You just go to your General settings and then go to storage and find the update. Tap on the update and tap on delete. From there, you’re going to be able to update your iPad again. It’s going to re-download the update, but after that, you should be able to update your iPad.

So that’s how you can delete an update that seems to be corrupt on the iPad.