If any of you or relatives still use an iPhone, I think that doing these changes may protect it from the verification updates - for now, anyway. You need to prevent updating to iOS 26 and prevent any future updates, even of earlier versions.
Turn off automatic updates and WiFi. And change the data mode to either Standard or ideally Low Data. Don’t connect to WiFi or this may well trigger the update.
Obviously, the phone won’t get security updates either and over time, apps may stop working too. But, this should at least delay the inevitable.
Even the tech giants and, for all his bluster, Elon Musks companies keep to laws they don’t necessarily agree with in countries they want to do business at. (And if not good enough they are made to feel it)
If you want to stop certain laws from happening I would encourage you to get organised against it in the country where you live.
I am indeed involved in campaigning against laws I don’t approve, cutting ties with companies whose policies I don’t agree with, writing regularly my dissent to local MPs and some more. And I’m in the process of scrutinizing my daily drivers, being devices, OS and software.
Being my phone one of my daily drivers I was only asking Murena where they stood on age verification, but after my first post was buried and merged into this, and not having recieved a firm reply to my simple question, I may have to make my own mind about what their position will be.
A form of age verification is likely to happen, also within the EU, and I don’t disagree with this in principle, because I see how young people are vulnerable. What I do disagree with is if this is left to the market and this becomes just another source of information for companies to better micro target advertisements. Reading the weathervane, it’s the most achievable to try to convince lawmakers of the dangers of that and to develop a tool that will just reveal the bare minimum (adult or no) and at the same time prohibit any form of micro targeting non-adults.
Doing this at OS level is for those reasons indeed undesirable.
Once those “soft" verifications are introduced, sooner or later they will leave space for more intrusive way for verification aka facial scan, ID, etc
But in the open source world there will always be freedom warriors who will say no.
Quite a few developers are already taking a side on this, issuing statements that they will not implement age verification in their systems. ZorinOS is one of them, and that’s the OS I happily married for this reason on all my PCs.
Whoever is not taking a side, is either waiting last minute to implement it, or checking what others /competitors are doing.
Either way, you cannot make privacy the flagship of your business model and then betray your user /customers base.
I would just like to let Murena know this. The day that my phone demands ID / Age verification is the day that I will switch it off, remove the sim card and put it in a drawer, never to be used again. It is as simple as that.