Apple’s latest iPhone update may be causing issues for early adopters. Reports claim bugs, crashes, low battery life, and even black screens, so you better hold off for a bit.
There are a range of minor bugbears across the entire patch. One stops you from using the flashlight when pulling down the control centre while settings are open. Another forces the Photos app into a blank white screen, preventing you from switching to another program by constantly pulling you back. Anything short of restarting your device is redundant. You’ll also need a whole lot of luck finding some of your main apps, such as Settings and Fitness, which have entirely disappeared from the home screen for some users.
One of the more prominent issues is reports of dwindling battery life, though the cause is hard to determine. Some suggest it could be new background features demanding a little more juice, but nothing introduced in iOS 18 accounts for such a sharp drop. My editor, Damien, says his iPhone lasts around 36 hours iOS 17.7, but nearly half that on the new patch, and he’s not alone. Umlaut’s Ryan Taylor and Christina Warren have experienced the very same thing. Since it’s only been two days since Apple dropped the update, it’s too soon to diagnose exactly why this is happening.
Moving onto the most irritating bugs, there’s no excuse for the crashing Message app and spotty Wi-Fi that doesn’t automatically reconnect to known SSIDs. Launching some apps from shortcuts shows a blank screen like the previously mentioned Photo app. Lastly, though not a bug per se, some banking apps refuse to work with iOS 18, probably requiring their own update to support the new OS.
Thankfully, iOS 18 has some redeeming elements in its useful features. Now you can change the controls on your lock screen from the default flashlight and camera, schedule a text to send later, lock an app to require Face ID before launching, and customise the style/placement of your icons. As an Android user, it shocked me to learn iPhones lacked these capabilities until now.
If you have updated your iPhone and stumbled upon some of these bugs, you can always revert back to an older version while waiting for fixes. It’s also important to note that, while iOS 18 is officially supported starting from 2018’s iPhone XR, not all models can use its full set of functionalities. Thankfully, Apple isn’t forcing iOS 18 on everyone as you can stay on iOS 17.7 if you wish.
That said, even old models handle this update quite well. All devices seem as smooth as can be when they do work, with little degradation to performance, at least on Geekbench multi-core score. To be exact, iOS 18 causes around a 100-point reduction on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, now setting at 7,000 points give or take.
Be it smartphones, PCs, or peripherals, it is always good to wait a couple of weeks to see if any annoying bugs are present. Be like me, and don’t become a beta tester, unless it’s for GTA 6.
