iOS 18 witnesses first serious bug

After a relatively quiet launch of iOS 18, a serious bug has now emerged: When replying to shared Apple Watch watch faces in iMessage, the app crashes. Apple is already working on a bug fix update.

First major bug discovered in iOS 18

So far, the launch of iOS 18 has gone relatively smoothly – and it remains pretty quiet. But now a serious bug has been discovered in Apple’s messaging service iMessage, as 9to5Mac reports. But we can give the all-clear straight away, because this problem is very specific and therefore certainly does not affect many users. The bug occurs when users reply to a shared Apple Watch watch face within a thread.

As soon as the error is triggered, the messaging app crashes repeatedly. What is particularly problematic is that the problem then affects both conversation partners and can even cause the app to crash during conversations with other contacts. The error only occurs if the reply is sent from a device with iOS 18. Users of the beta version iOS 18.1 can reply without any problems, but are also affected by crashes if the bug has already been triggered, for example if the sender was using iOS 18.

Data loss threatens

The only currently known solution to this problem is extremely drastic: those affected must delete the entire chat history on all devices. This inevitably leads to the loss of all messages, photos and videos that were not saved elsewhere.

What’s particularly annoying is that even if you restore the deleted history from the “Recently Deleted” folder, the error occurs again – which makes the bug very annoying. Restoring the iPhone from a backup before the bug occurred could help – but only if the messages were not also synchronized via iCloud.

Precautions for users

To prevent the problem, iOS 18 users should refrain from replying directly to shared Apple Watch faces for the time being. Instead, it is recommended to send a separate message without using the regular thread mechanism.

It can be assumed that Apple is already working on a solution and will provide an update shortly. A bug fix update that will solve other small problems is probably already in the pipeline. In the past, these improvements always followed shortly after the actual upgrade launch. Until then, users should be careful when dealing with shared watch faces in iMessage.

Background to the iOS 18 release

iOS 18 was officially released just a few days ago, on September 16. The update brings numerous new features, including:

• Text effects for iMessages
• The ability to send messages at a later time
• RCS support for communication with Android users

Despite months of beta testing, some bugs seem to have slipped through the cracks. In addition to the iMessage problem, there have also been reports of difficulties with iPadOS 18, which, according to user reports, has turned iPad Pro models with M1 chips into unusable devices.