iPhone Owners Irate After iOS Update Bricks Cellular Data
tomsguide.com
tomsguide.com
What exactly did apple do here? Kind of suspicious that they made adjustments to the eSIM specifically for Turkey when Erdogan announced he would be banning iPhones because of coup fears [2]. Did they enable Turkey to listen in?
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209084
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/business/turkey-erdogan-a...
why would they need an Apple backdoor to do so? AFAIK carrier equipment already have "lawful intercept" mechanisms built in (which is no surprise because it's not e2e encrypted).
This reinforces my constant reluctance to update anything around holidays or other chaotic travel periods.
I wonder if Apple shouldn’t have waited until after the holiday season to push major updates. I mean, we all know stuff happens, this is just reality, but waiting a few measly days would not only have saved the inconvenience for the iOS team members who were surely pulled in to work during family holiday time, but probably more important to Apple, it would have saved the customers ability to communicate during the busiest family travel time of the year.
Mobile standards and modems are a massive kludge of compatibility layers and hacks. Just look at the 'Hacks' section of the mediatek modem engineering app and you'll see all kinds of tweaks to allow the phone to connect to a certain network in a certain country which does something slightly wonky.
My guess is that hurried rewriting of bits of a mobile stack probably led to them not perfectly replicating all those hacks, so certain phones with certain combinations of base stations, mobile networks, sim card models and authentication servers no longer connect properly.
On the plus side, most of those mobile networks will probably now be snowed under with complaints from angry iphone owners, so rapidly updating their systems to become compatible again, even if apple refuses to re-implement the hacks.