Since the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus hit stores on September 19, the highs of Apple’s record-breaking sales have been quickly overtaken by a number of lows. Just three days after Apple announced that it had sold a record 10 million new iPhones over the opening weekend, buyers soon discovered the new phones’ operating system — iOS 8 — featured multiple bugs.
A few even found a flaw in the physical phone, reporting that their devices showed signs of bending after being kept in their pockets. Quickly dubbed “Bendgate,” the reports of bent phones have proven to be “extremely rare,” according to a story published Thursday in the Wall Street Journal. The article quoted Apple as saying that only nine customers had been in touch to report issues with warped phones.
Apple will replace bent phones under the terms of its warranty if the devices pass a “visual mechanical inspection” by a support Genius, NextWeb reported. Meanwhile, Apple has also released (and quickly pulled, in one case) two updates to its troubled iOS 8.
More Crashes than iOS 7.1
First released on September 17, iOS 8 was the company’s “biggest release since the launch of the App Store,” Apple said earlier this month. The new operating system came with hundreds of new features and apps, including a health-and-fitness app, expanded integration with other Apple devices, new speak screen capabilities and predictive, personalized typing support.
However, the new operating system also brought a number of new problems. Many users who downloaded iOS 8 to their iPhones and other devices reported that batteries were draining faster, apps were crashing and Wi-Fi connections were failing.
On Wednesday, Apple released an update — iOS 8.0.1 — aimed at addressing such issues. Within an hour or so, though, it removed the update after numerous reports came in of iPhones no longer connecting to mobile carrier networks and Touch ID functions failing.
Today, Apple released iOS 8.0.2, along with an apology to “users who were impacted by the bug in iOS 8.0.1.”
Data analysis by the mobile analytics firm Crittercism, published on Tuesday before either iOS 8.0.1 or iOS 8.0.2 was released, showed that devices running iOS 8 were experiencing a crash rate of 3.56 percent, compared to a crash rate of 2 percent for iOS 7.1.
“Older devices are obviously worse offenders than newer ones,” said senior marketing manager Jeannie Liou in a blog post on the firm’s Web site. As of September 22nd, apps crashed 3.57 percent of the time on the iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c and iPhone 4s (of note, Crittercism lumped the iPhone 4 into this group in the supplied data even though it doesn’t run iOS 8). Meanwhile, the company found that as of the same day, iPhone 6 apps crashed 2.63 percent of the time and iPhone 6 Plus apps crashed 2.11 percent of the time.” (continued…)
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