Apple iOS 12.1.2 Has a Serious Problem | Hacker News Reader

Apple iOS 12.1.2 Has a Serious Problem

forbes.com

Is it just me or is "After a promising start, iOS 12.1.2 is going from bad to worse for iPhone owners" kind of a hilariously bad lede?

Forbes publishes an article with a clickbait title like this for almost every version of iOS.

Gordon Kelly usually does three, "iOS <x> — Should You Upgrade?", "iOS <x> Has a Great Secret Feature", "iOS <x> Has A Serious Problem". They're all trash.

    Apple iOS 12.1.2 Has A Serious Problem - Forbes
    Apple iOS 12.1 Has A Serious Problem - Forbes
    Apple iOS 11.4.1 Has A Serious Problem - Forbes
    Apple iOS 11.2.5 Starts Causing New Problems - Forbes
    Apple iOS 10 Has Three Nasty Surprises - Forbes
    Apple Confirms iOS 9.3.2 Has A Serious Problem - Forbes

"...Disconnects Mobile Data" or the like would've made for a less obfuscatory headline.

That version of the headline wasn't upvoted, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18743963

people click clickbait, whodathunk!

To everyone hoping to avoid the problem, make sure you disable automatic updates if you are still on 12.1.1 or earlier.

Settings > General > Software Updates > Automatic Updates

Turns out 12.1.2 is the non-optional “your phone is updating tonight” I received Wednesday. (Appeared to be mandatory anyway).

I'm sticking with iOS 10.3.

If you can upgrade, you should. iOS 12 is the best version in a long time.

Yeah. Battery life, speed, everything is better on 12. Especially on older devices, like mine (6s). Don't need a new one for at least 1 / 1.5 years.

You must be one of the few 6S people to claim 12 is better. Pretty much all I've talked to regret every going to 11 or 12 on the 6S.

11 sucked for older iPhones. 12 brought the magic back and new useful features.

My 6S is doing fine. Got the new battery and i’m good for another year on it.

iOS 10 is way better than 11 or 12, especially on battery life. Battery life is terrible on 12 so no I won't and never will 'upgrade'.

Not my experience. SE here, and 12 is great, but suit yourself.

12.1.1 that is.

Isn't there an extensive QA with all sorts of automatic and manual flows before they push out a release? Not sure this is the first time they've pushed out something with problems.

Not saying it's easy, either, I'm sure there's a lot of things to think about. But it's the world's most valuable public company.

The software I work on has about 50,000 daily users. Every time a change is made, there are extensive automated tests that test all of the software features. Then the nightly build is automatically connected to every compatible piece of hardware made in the past 20 years and tests that change against all of that hardware (this step takes about 10 hours to complete). Then, and only if it passes all of those automated tests, there is a team of people who continually test any new changes, and try to recreate any problems that have been reported by beta users and field users. Before a release, they spend a month testing it from end to end.

If a critical bug ever makes it to the field, which almost never happens anymore, not only do we revert to an old version immediately (which I suppose Apple could make available if they wanted), we spend as much time as it takes to understand how it got past our tests in the first place. Then, not only do we write a specific test to catch it next time but we also look at how we can change our process to fill the hole that allowed it to get past in the first place -- so other problems can't get through that same gap later.

If that's our process, and we're a small outfit compared to Apple, I can't imagine how rigorous Apple's process is.

> If that's our process, and we're a small outfit compared to Apple, I can't imagine how rigorous Apple's process is.

Why would you blindly assume they have a more rigorous process just because they are bigger?

1. larger customer base means more angry customers to deal with

2. they have more money to throw at the problem

3. any problem that makes it into the wild gets blown out of proportion, so pre-release testing is part of their PR budget

My guess would be because they have more at stake with each release?

This could easily be a pure numbers issue. There are 700 million iPhones in service according to Apple. Something that happens to only 1/100000th of iPhone users would happen 7000 people.

This could be an incredibly rare bug and would still show up enough to make the news.

There should be, and it seems there was for a long time (and still is sometimes), but they’ve made similar basic missteps before, like that time the keyboard replaced a lower case “i” with “A [?]”. It is strange, and it feels almost like they have automated tests that pass on everything that they wrote tests for but some basic functions don’t have tests and so were missed. It feels like they need someone to manually try the updates before pushing them.

got this problem this morning, a message says my phone is not activated and then shows "No Service";after auto-upgrade to 12.1.2 last night after power off/on the phone, it seems ok for now;

I am in US, iphone 6s plus

I'm seeing WiFi disconnections a few times a day since about 2 weeks (disconnecting during FaceTime for example), but only on my iPhone X, not on my iPad Pro 10'5...

Is the problem just on X or newer iPhones?

I have a SE, I've had 12.1.2 for a few days with no problems.

Has Apple really not learned from the recent past? iCloud hacks, passwordless root login, Batterygate, the list of lacking QA and technical excellence goes on. Now this, and again with a total lack of good communication. I really wish the last hardware company with a track record in preserving privacy took some lessons from Google's SRE culture. A transparent, timely postmortem and a public apology would go a long way, but that just wouldn't be Apple. "We know what's best for our users", yeah...

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