Back in September, Apple released an iOS 8.0.1 update that essentially broke iPhones for a while, and an explanation is now finally available. Sort of.
For those of you unaware of the issue, iPhone users who installed the iOS 8.0.1 update back in September lost cellular service and Touch ID functionality. While one could live without a fingerprint reader on their smartphone, losing network signal pretty much renders your phone useless, or, as many complained, turns an iPhone into an expensive music player. Long story short, iOS 8.0.1 pretty much disconnected thousands of iPhones from mobile networks for a while.
The company offered no explanation for this issue at the time, and rushed to roll out an iOS 8.0.2 update to patch things up. The subsequent update, however, caused even more chaos and brought even more damage, with lots of users complaining about all sorts of issues - read more about it here.
One month later, and iPhone users finally get some sort of explanation for this whole situation with iOS updates. More specifically, Apple's product marketing executive Greg "Joz" Joswiak acknowledged the problems with the initial iOS 8.0.1 update, but said that the update itself was fine, it was the way the software was "distributed" that caused the issues.
"It had to do with the way the software was being sent over servers," Joswiak told Re/Code on Tuesday, Oct. 28, at the Code/Mobile conference in Half Moon Bay, California. "It was the way software was being distributed."
The executive further pointed out that Apple reacted within an hour of finding out about the issue, and it promptly offered a software fix. On the other hand, it still remains unclear just what exactly went wrong with iOS 8.0.2, which was supposed to fix what iOS 8.0.1 had broken, but instead did more damage on its own. According to Joswiak, a software rollout is very complex and it usually entails some mishaps, but the company should receive credit for its prompt reaction to patch things up.
"Whenever you're pushing software and doing some very difficult things, you're going to have some mistakes," said Joswiak. "What we try to do is very quickly fix them."
