Troubling iOS 17.5 Bug Reportedly Resurfacing Old Deleted Photos | Hacker News Reader

Troubling iOS 17.5 Bug Reportedly Resurfacing Old Deleted Photos

macrumors.com

Apple software quality has been really, really, really bad lately.

The initial OTA update for iOS 17.4.1 has an unacknowledged yet widely known severe battery drain problem. A your-battery-is-less-than-50%-by-lunch problem. Apple silently released an update, not acknowledging the problem, with the same version number but a different build number, so it was not available OTA and it was advised (by other users with anecdotal evidence) to update again via Finder, which does detect the update.

It promptly bricked my phone.

The update failed and it simply showed the "connect to iTunes" Ikea-like pictogram, and became unresponsive.

A few reboots later I was finally able to restore using DFU mode but nevertheless this isn't the "it just works" Apple of the bygone days.

This wasn't an isolated incident; hundreds of people reported the same in online forums. Except the Apple support forums, where the self-styled experts would sooner blame the weather than an Apple product be at fault.

My personal favourite was a thread about some Apple TV issues, which does some funky things with wired Ethernet and floods the network with DHCP requests. The "expert" was arguing with a guy who authored one of the RFCs for DHCP, implying that non-compliant behaviour by Apple couldn't possibly be in the wrong.

If you have the DHCP argument link handy I’d love to have a sensible chuckle reading it.

This is one of those occasions where Apple is really on the hook to offer some sort of technical explanation of what’s going on here. It’s entered the realm of a trust issue.

Agreed, this is a major breach of trust if iCloud backup is not honoring my delete actions.

I am sure this is also a GDPR violation and EU is probably already looking into it.

As one commenter on the page said:

> This is a MAJOR breach. “Deleted” must be “DELETED”! If the photos are resurfacing that means that Apple is somehow storing these photos illegally.

Can this be debunked, or is this a reasonable take?

Probably no way for users to disprove this without access to iCloud servers, but users could prove it if they are getting photos reappearing from a previous phone, since obviously those could not be from local storage.

I think a reasonable counterargument to this is a theoretical internal outage at iCloud and one or more machines storing data needed to be restored from backups. The backups contained "deleted" photos from before users deleted them.

Could be some kind of syncing consistency bug between servers too.

It's possible, but there is a lot of surface area for sync bugs before you get to "cloud provider must be harvesting our nudes" territory.

I have iCloud Photos disabled and regularly delete photos (and clear them from recently deleted) so I was anxious to update and see if any old photos resurfaced.

After updating I did indeed have 1 previously deleted photo (an accidental lock screen screenshot, something I do regularly and always delete) from 2022 appear at the bottom of my "Recent Photos". I don't believe that I had iCloud Photos enabled at any point in 2022. I have had the same device for many years.

My best guess is that this remained on the device somewhere in an inaccessible state (deletion failed) and this software update has made it accessible again.

EDIT: I permanently deleted it again and restarted my phone and it didn't reappear

I had a photo show up from Sept 2019 and I haven’t even upgraded my phone yet. Maybe my wife did, as we share an iCloud Photo Library

Edit: nope we are both on 17.4.1. Must be our iPad updated

Next time when your spouse asks you to "come here for a second", you are going to go through some things.

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