I’ve been actually having fun with the iOS 15 public beta for weeks now, and the brand new options like Stay Textual content and UX refinements like clustered notifications already make it a higher expertise than iOS 14. However week after week, new beta replace after new replace, I’ve made a nauseating discovery: iOS 15 isn’t fixing a bug that’s been in iOS for a decade.
Let me preface by saying this isn’t some experience-ruining glitch or phone-bricking calamity; that is an annoyance, a malformation so benign that it’s been kicked to the underside of each precedence listing because it appeared, if the iPhone’s devs seen it in any respect.
What am I speaking about? Okay, image this: you’re chatting away within the Messages app and also you need to ship a photograph. You faucet the motion bar to open your photographs and faucet the one you need to ship, which then seems in your message draft window. You hit the ship button, and the draft goes away. However the picture shouldn’t be despatched. You repeat the method – open picture gallery, faucet picture, hit ship – and nonetheless it isn’t despatched.
Has this occurred to you? Maybe, as soon as? You may’t bear in mind?
That’s the insidious genius of this bug, which I’m satisfied is sentient, to solely wreak occasional havoc earlier than going dormant. It’s troublesome to trigger deliberately, and thus not reproducible. It stays off the radar.
However this glitch occurs on the most inopportune occasions, leaving me embarrassingly on the hook: I’ll smugly textual content associates “You received’t BELIEVE this!” after which gear as much as ship them a jaw-dropping picture or perfectly-timed meme, after which, I can’t. The bug strikes! My associates giggle at my seeming ineptitude! I’m undone!
Sure, okay, there is a repair. BUT.
Now, there’s a repair of types – simply manually shut the Messages app and open it up once more. Poof, the photographs load and ship as regular. However even that course of can take valuable seconds that eclipse the opportune window for sending a humorous picture. I curse the bug, who has been clearly mendacity in wait, and lament all of the laughs I didn’t carry into this world.
Typically I’ll go months with out experiencing the bug, and I’ll surprise – did I think about this entire factor? Have I ever really not been in a position to ship photographs? Possibly I’m misremembering to cowl up for remembering too late that I had an ideal picture rebuttal in an argument, a visible l’esprit d’escalier. Possibly my mind misfires and has invented a digital gremlin that has it out for me each as soon as in an important whereas.
However then it occurs once more, and I appear like a doofus who can’t work out how you can ship a easy picture. Once more, that is removed from a crippling flaw of iOS, and I duly take pleasure in utilizing it 99.99% of the time. I actually dig iOS 15, and its new options are thrilling.
But, I can’t assist however ask, humbly, for Apple to repair this one factor. It might be small, however I’ve been seeing it seemingly since I obtained my iPhone 4 in 2010. Because the saying goes, “it isn’t the mountain forward that wears you out — it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.” Or the misfortune to have the right picture to ship and no solution to ship it (for a number of seconds).