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iOS 12's most annoying bug yet

Yes, iOS 12 is still in beta, but this latest bug is the most annoying one to date, and comes days before millions of people will be running iOS 12.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

Wondering how the iOS 12 beta is coming along? Well... pull up a seat.

After what has been a good run of stability and sound performance, with the finish line now in sight it seems to have spectacularly tripped over its shoelaces and pulled up probably the most annoying bug that I've seen during this beta cycle.

UPDATE: Apple has now released a patch to fix this popup hell.

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The new bug results in a popup being generated each time the handset is unlocked or the notification panel is used. The popup tells me that there's a new iOS version available.

iOS 12 popup bug

iOS 12 popup bug

There isn't one. But this bug is making me wish there was one.

According to developer Guilherme Rambo, the problem seems to come down to a data bug:

It looks like this method in Springboard does some date/time calculations to determine if the current build is about to expire, every time the cover sheet gets dismissed. For some reason, the latest builds of iOS 12 think they're about to expire.

Now you're probably going to point out that this is a beta, and this is exactly the sort of things that betas do. In fact, they're exactly the sort of thing betas are supposed to do.

I disagree. We're entering into a phase where everything is continually a beta. Look at the past few years' worth of iOS releases.

Bugs everywhere.

Same with macOS. Or Windows. Or Android. Or pretty much any other bit of code you care to mention.

And remember, a few days from now millions of people will be running iOS 12.

This feels less a beta issue, and more an overall lack of QA, an entire industry willing to push out code to satisfy release dates and patch later, and end users who increasingly see this as the norm.

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