If you are like me and upgraded your iPhone 3G to the supported iOS4 when offered, you’re probably suffering the June of your discontent.

iOS4 while fine on the iPod Touch 3rd gen and the iPhone 3Gs is a disaster on the 3G for many users.  Lots of things are blamed, too many apps, use of the Exchange connector yada yada yada.

All I know is that my device which was slow but functional became basically useless after I “upgraded”.  So I looked for ways to downgrade.  The process I followed was using a Macintosh and the iPhone but I believe it can be done if your primary OS is Windows, but I have not tried that so if you do, best of luck with that.

After lots of searching, and ZERO help from Apple, I found this article on Lifehacker.  I don’t propose that there are not others, but I used this one because it was easy to follow and got me where I wanted to be.  Mostly, but more on that later.

So first step is to go to the Lifehacker article and read it.  Seriously read it all the way through.  Then print it off.  Then go to the link provided in the article and download Recboot (Mac link) because YOU’RE GOING TO NEED IT.

Here’s the one other piece that you will have recognized if you did as suggested and read the Lifehacker article before starting, specifically the last paragraph where it tells you that you will need a 3.X backup to get your world back without starting fresh.  Here’s the joyful surprise.

Apple in their wisdom to “help” you (into a migraine) has deleted all your old backups once you have upgraded to iOS4.  If iOS4 actually worked on the 3G this would be ok, but since it doesn’t you can now say ratzenfratzen%#(()@^*@(**(!!!!!

Fortunately you have a Time Machine backup, or other backup where you can easily recover a directory structure from the Library.  If you don’t have a backup, you can still revert your iPhone to 3.1.3 but you will be setting it up as a new device.  But since you’re very smart and have a Time Machine backup, pop into Time Machine and navigate to your_main_drive_HD:Users:username:Library:Application Support:MobileSync:Backup or use ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup in the Go To Folder finder command.  As you will recall the ~ means your username.

Now look carefully at the longnamed folders and select the ones that are closest to the date of when you did the iOS4 update but PRIOR.  Select the folders you want, using Command-Click for multiples and then select Restore.  This will restore the old backups to the right place.  You may get a message saying a newer folder exists do you want to overwrite?  If any backups have been done since you updated to iOS4 you will see this message and you do want to overwrite.  Remember if you have multiple devices syncing to iTunes, the folder naming conventions don’t make it easy to figure out which device which folder applies to so when you do the restore, you may be overwriting a backup for an iPod, an iPod Touch or an iPad.  This is where useful naming would have helped but Apple doesn’t provide it so you’ll have to tough it out.  I suggest that as soon as you get your iPhone restored you sync and backup all your other devices just to be safe.

Anyway, back to the show.  If you’ve done the restore properly and BEFORE running through the process to downgrade, when you get to Step 4 in the Lifehacker article, you’ll be able to select to restore from backup.  You will see all the backups available to iTunes in the drop down, so select the iPhone 3G backup with the date you just restored and click continue.  Your iPhone settings will be restored.

Slow down a second there friends, because you are not done.  You’ve downgraded and you’ve restored your settings.  Now go watch TV or read a couple of chapters because iTunes now needs to put the content specified by the settings back on the iPhone.  This will take as long as it takes depending upon how much stuff you had specified to be synced in the settings.

I would suggest you let the restore process work it’s way through before you make changes such as adding or deleting music, podcasts, TV shows or Movies.  Keep it simple.  Also remember that if you had set up iBook syncing when iOS4 was installed that setting is now hosed because iBooks needs iOS4.  Of course I live in Canada and the only thing on the iBooks store up here is the same content I’ve been able to download for years from Project Gutenburg, so iBooks at least to me is a complete waste of time.

When all is done, you should have your iPhone back to normal with the 3.1.3 OS.  Sync it up to current, make sure your mail and calendar work and you’re back in the game.

There’s lots of speculation about whether Apple will fix iOS4 to work properly on the iPhone 3G.  I have always enjoyed my Apple products, but I also believe that Apple is a business that has turned planned obsolescence into an art form.  Compared to the 3Gs, the 3G is very slow, and with iOS 4 being designed for the A4 chipset in the iPhone 4, my guess is that iOS4 is always going to suck hard on the iPhone 3G.  I should have waited to see the impact of the upgrade so I did not have to go through this time wasting effort, hopefully if you jumped too, this will help save you a lot of time.  If you have to have the functions in iOS4, then better to buy an iPhone 4 or a 3Gs and understand that in two versions whatever you have will be useless again.  And yes, I believe that that sucks hard event was well known at Apple and is a design point to get iPhone users to upgrade.  You can certainly choose to believe that Apple would never do this to a customer, and that’s fair.  If you do believe that, I have some wonderful vacation property for sale completely surrounded by water.

US carriers tend to run 24 month terms that align with the Apple obsolescence plan.  Canadian carriers are bloodsuckers and the 36 month terms are customer hostile, so expect to take a bath every couple of years.  Apple Canada has announced that the Apple Store will sell unlocked iPhone 4 units that won’t be bound to a carrier and whenever the devices show up in Canada I will go that route instead of looking at the subsidized price as a saving at the price of being shackled to the carrier.  You should do what suits you best.