Serious bug threatened years of news histories

First major bug discovered in iOS 18

So far, the launch of iOS 18 has gone relatively smoothly – and it basically 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's 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 when 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 basic: 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.
Overview of new features
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 helps – but only if the messages were not also synchronized via iCloud.

Precautions for users

To prevent the problem, iOS 18 users should initially refrain from replying directly to shared Apple Watch faces. 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 that an update will be made available 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:

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.

What do you think about this iOS 18 bug? Have you experienced similar problems or have you been spared so far? Share your experiences in the comments – we are curious to hear your impressions!

See also: