Latest iOS 13 bug is killing apps and driving users crazy

November 4, 2019

By Kim Komando

An unfortunate pattern seems to have overtaken Apple’s software development cycle. The company releases a new version of iOS 13, gets acclaim for its features, then loses any goodwill it had from the public thanks to bugs and glitches. To see how badly Apple screwed up the last version of iOS 13, click or tap here.As excited as we were to recommend iOS 13.2, some serious glitches have been found in the software. While the update fixed some annoying bugs and security flaws, iOS 13.2 features a major glitch.Whether you’re an iPhone power user or just like running a few apps at a time, here’s what you need to know about Apple’s latest iOS glitch. Plus, we’ll show you how you can stop Apple from auto-updating your phone so you can download new updates at your leisure — or whenever you feel it’s finally stable.

New update, new problems

iPhone users across the web have been complaining about Apple’s latest iOS release: iOS 13.2. The new operating system was released to grant access to Deep Fusion, a new photo processing system for iPhone 11 and above, as well as new emoji and the ability to opt out of Siri data collection.While all of these updates were important for users, any fanfare evaporated once users discovered the update kills multitasking — one of the most important features of modern-day smartphones.

In addition to the overzealous background app killing issue in iOS 13.2, I’ve experienced & seen on other phones a complete UI freeze for 1+ seconds. IDK what it is, wife is seeing this in Photos, I’m most acutely aware in Safari, all iOS 13 releases have done it, 13.2 worst

— Dave Murdock ?? (@davemurdock) November 4, 2019

To understand multitasking on iOS, it’s important to remember your phone has a limited memory. Today, iPhones cap out at 4GB of RAM — which is more than enough to handle two or more apps running at once.With multitasking, any apps pushed to the background save their information so you can return to them without having to reload everything. This is most commonly seen while playing music in the background, or switching between web browsers and other apps. Related: Stop Facebook from eating your memory and draining your battery In theory, your app usage should only be limited by the amount of RAM your phone possesses; however, iOS 13.2 prevents the phone from running apps in the background in the first place. Users report switching back from an app to a video in another app and losing their place — the video just restarts from the top.There have also been claims of lost data, forced reboots and freezing on apps that should have no problem running in the background, like Mail.

Why does this keep happening?

Nobody is 100% why Apple’s quality control seems so lax these days, but several Twitter users in the software development industry imply Apple has not been giving its developers adequate time to iron out bugs before release.

For iOS 12 everyone said “Apple needs to take a release just to fix bugs.” And that worked, in the short term.

For iOS 14 everyone needs to push “Apple needs to take a release where they just write unit and integration tests for everything.”An OS is too big to avoid testing.— Dayton Lowell (@daytonlowell) October 31, 2019

In a sense, the general public has become the de-facto beta testers for Apple. While crowdsourcing debugs is not a new practice, we’d appreciate Apple at least be upfront about it.

I need to stay current to keep my phone safe, but are the updates even worth it?

Although the glitches in iOS 13 are distressing, we still stand by the fact that keeping your phone up to date is the best way to stay on top of cybersecurity threats. Even if these updates break important features in the operating system, many of the security fixes are worth it. After all, a glitchy phone is preferable to a hacked one.But we understand unstable software is no fun to use. To make matters worse, many users have features like automatic updates turned on — which means they don’t even have a chance to wait and see how stable an update is before downloading it.If you want to stay as current as possible on iOS without being forced to use every glitchy update that comes out, turning off automatic updates may be the best solution. All you need to do is open up the Settings app and tap General.  Tap Software update and select Automatic Updates. Toggle this switch off to prevent the newest updates from being auto-installed on your phone.With Automatic Updates disabled, you can take a wait-and-see approach to any new Apple software. Judging by the company’s track record, you might end up waiting a while for a stable release. Click or tap here to see what happened when Apple’s software updates broke FaceID and Passcode Lock.