IPad IOS 9.3.6 - Initializing screen OLD IPad2 won't work! BUT...VNC Does!

[squirtbrnr]

Yep I had the same problem here:

End of the road for iPad 3 (iOS 9.3.6)?

With the recent deprecation and now removal of the old States UI, it looks like my old iPad is useless when it comes to HA. It was a matter of time as there’s a dozen other apps I can’t update because the iOS version is so old. iOS 9.3.6 is the highest version iOS it can support. This means I have to use the old HA iOS app. I thought the iPad supported Lovelace because I could still view about 95% of my front end except for the few Lovelace cards I had (Alarm Card, Dark Sky Card, and a couple ot…

and my solution which was posted by someone else and is very similar with respect to your solution was posted here:

Options for Lovelace on older iPad (ios 9.3.5)

I have homeassistant up and running on a raspberry pi 3b+ I install docker on my pi & ran the image from “docker pull jlesage/firefox” Refer https://hub.docker.com/r/jlesage/firefox You can now go to http://your_pi_address:5800 from your ipad2. You will get the latest firefox instance where you can open the homeassistant url on the browser. Its clunky, but working. FYI, i have ipad 2 running ios 9.3.5

The issue boils down to iOS 9.3.6 not supporting certain modern browser features such as the level of JavaScript required to run Lovelace. Installing a different browser on the iPad doesn’t change anything because those browsers all use the base webkit installed in iOS to function. so Firefox on an iPad is essentially Safari webkit with a firefox wrapper. The HA iOS Companion app is more or less a glorified web page with extra background features and functions.