Update Your IPhone to Protect Saved Messages From Being Deleted
iOS 18 brought with it many new features and changes , as well as bugs and glitches. One bug in particular puts your saved messages at risk simply if you reply to the wrong message in a thread. Just over two weeks after the launch of iOS 18, Apple released iOS 18.0.1, an update that fixes four of those glitches, as well as two relatively serious security vulnerabilities.
iOS 18.0.1 fixes four bugs
According to Apple’s iOS 18.0.1 release notes, this update adds four key patches to your iPhone. First, Apple has fixed an issue in the new iPhone 16 series that was causing touchscreens to become unresponsive. This bug has affected all four new iPhone 16s, including the base and Pro models, so if you have one, you should update to avoid touchscreen issues in the future.
You may also have noticed that your iPhone 16’s camera was freezing when recording video in macro mode with the ultra-wide camera: this only happened when recording 4K with HDR disabled, which is a special configuration that needs to be set: by default, videos are at 1080p resolution . HDR is also enabled automatically, so you will need to adjust both settings to trigger this error. However, this bug has been fixed in the latest update.
Moving on to issues affecting other iPhones running iOS 18, Apple has fixed a bug that was affecting performance due to a memory allocation issue. Apple says the bug affects “select iPhone models,” but did not specify which ones. Hopefully, if you’ve noticed performance issues on iOS 18, version 18.0.1 will make things easier.
It’s important to note that Apple has also fixed a serious bug in Messages that could cause message history to be lost. As I said earlier, if you reply to a generic Apple Watch face in a message thread, it will cause the app to crash repeatedly. The only solution is to delete the entire thread, which could result in years of lost messages. Although the situation required for the error to occur was very specific, it is good to know that the error has now been fixed.
Security patches in iOS 18.0.1
That’s it for Apple Notes, but there’s more to this update. Apple doesn’t include security notes in its update release notes,and by going to this page , we can see two security patches included with iOS 18.0.1. These are also pretty serious security flaws: the first concerns audio messages on iPhone 16 devices, where an audio message can capture several seconds of audio before the actual microphone light turns on. That orange light is supposed to come on every time the microphone is activated, so it’s concerning that a feature—essentially Apple’s own—could access the microphone for any length of time without the light turning on. I hope this is a very isolated incident and not a larger vulnerability that could be exploited by third parties. After all, we don’t want spyware to silently access your iPhone’s microphone in the background.
The second security flaw concerns Apple’s new Passwords app , in which saved passwords can be read aloud via VoiceOver. Obviously not ideal, but Apple didn’t say how easy or difficult it was to enable this flaw. This includes a variety of devices running iOS 18, including iPhone XS and later, iPad Pro 13-inch, iPad Pro 12.9-inch 3rd generation and later, iPad Pro 11-inch 1st generation and later, iPad Air 3rd generation and later, iPad 7th generation and later, and iPad mini 5th generation and later.