Why Is My IPhone Bothering Me for Not Having an Update?
As many Lifehacker readers already know, I love the good beta version of the operating system. Risking a crazy life in exchange for early access to new features is a trade-off that I am always willing to make, and as a rule, it was not an issue for my Windows PC or various smartphones. However, my friends were not always so lucky.
If you will let me use my weekly column to answer one of their questions, I promise it will be quirky and fun. One of my neighbors came up to me yesterday and asked why her iPhone, which was previously included in the iOS 14.2 beta, is now giving her a strange “new beta” message.
When she went to check for updates for her iPhone, there was nothing there. The message still persists, popping up on her phone multiple times a day as she unlocks her device, and makes her wish she never beta tested. (Her words.)
How to avoid problems with the iOS beta
The technical answer to the question of why this is happening is not very interesting, since this bug has already appeared in previous beta versions of iOS. The Boy Genius Report found a 2018 tweet from app developer Guilherme Rambo explaining the source of the issue:
If you’re smart, you can probably guess the immediate solution to this annoying problem: you will need to set your iPhone’s date to a few days (or a week), uncheck the box for your device to automatically update the date. / time, and just live in the past until Apple releases a fix. This will of course make using apps like Calendar or Mail a bit of a headache, but at least you’ll be free of annoying notifications.
Otherwise, your only option is to try and back up and restore your iPhone with an earlier version of iOS. This entails backing up to iCloud or your computer, rebooting into recovery mode with one of the following button combinations , connecting to your Windows or Mac PC, and iTunes (or Finder) will update your phone instead of restoring it. In theory, this should bring you back to the stable version of iOS 14.1. Then you will get rid of annoying messages forever.
I probably have to admit that I was not entirely honest above: while I usually use the latest and greatest beta versions of operating systems, I have been lazy since iOS 14.2. I’ve been on iOS 14 for several months – first beta, then stable OS, and then stable iOS 14.1. There was not enough in the iOS 14.2 beta that caught my attention when it was announced.
As a result, when the stable version of iOS 14 came out, I did what I always do: I deleted the beta profile from my device (via Settings> Profile ), installed the public version of the regular update, and got on with my work day. My device updated to iOS 14.1 when it dropped out for everyone, but it has remained on that version of iOS ever since.
I think this is a good practice for most people. I have nothing against small iterative iOS updates, but unless there are one or two features that you absolutely cannot live without, I think regular people are better off playing around with beta versions of iOS for major releases rather than small ones. These are large numbers – 13, 14, 15, and so on, not decimal fractions. And if you don’t remove that profile for the major release after it’s released, you might end up in beta for subsequent minor releases.
This is what brings us to today’s question. My roommate never deleted her beta profile after iOS 14, so she was running iOS 14.2 without even knowing it or thinking about it. And as a result, she ran into an annoying bug that does not affect those in the stable version of iOS 14 (technically now iOS 14.1). Is this the end of the world? Not really. But this could definitely have been avoided.