iOS 18 brought with it plenty of new features and changes, but also bugs and glitches. With one bug in particular, your saved messages are put at risk, simply by replying to the wrong message in a thread. Just over two weeks after launching iOS 18, Apple released iOS 18.0.1, an update that patches four of these glitches, as well as two relatively serious security vulnerabilities.
iOS 18.0.1 fixes four bugs
According to Apple’s release notes for iOS 18.0.1, this update adds four key patches to your iPhone. First, Apple has patched an issue on the new iPhone 16 series, where touch screens would become unresponsive. This bug affected all four new iPhone 16s, including the base models and the Pros, so if you have one, you should update to avoid any touch screen issues going forward.
You may have also noticed that your iPhone 16’s camera would freeze when recording video in macro mode using the Ultra Wide camera: This occurred only in 4K recording with HDR turned off, which is a specific configuration to have set: Video is 1080p by default, and HDR is automatically enabled as well, so you would need to adjust both options in order to trigger this bug. Still, this bug has been fixed with this latest update.
Moving to issues that affect other iPhones running iOS 18, Apple fixed a bug that impacted performance due to a memory allocation issue. Apple says this bug affected “some iPhone models,” but did not specify which. Hopefully, if you noticed performance hiccups on iOS 18, 18.0.1 makes things smoother.
Importantly, Apple also patched a serious bug in Messages, that could result in message history loss. As I previously covered, if you replied to a shared Apple Watch face in a Messages thread, it would cause the app to repeatedly crash. The only fix would be to delete the entire thread, which could result in losing years of messages. While the situation required to trigger the bug was quite specific, it’s good to know the bug is now fixed.
Security patches in iOS 18.0.1
That’s it as far as Apple’s notes are concerned, but there’s still more to this update. Apple doesn’t include the security notes with its release notes for updates, and heading to this page, we can see two security patches included as part of iOS 18.0.1. These are pretty serious security flaws, too: The first concerns audio messages on iPhone 16 devices, where an audio message may capture a few seconds of audio before the actual microphone indicator lights up. That orange light is supposed to come on anytime the microphone is activated, so the fact that a function—Apple’s own, in fact—can access the microphone for any length on time without trigger the indicator, is concerning. I’d hope this is a very isolated incident, and not a larger vulnerability that third parties could exploit. We don’t need spyware silently accessing your iPhone’s microphone in the background, after all.
The second security flaw concerns Apple’s new Passwords app, where saved passwords may be read out loud via VoiceOver. Obviously, not ideal, but Apple didn’t share how easy or difficult this flaw was to activate. This one affects a host of devices running iOS 18, including iPhone XS and later, iPad Pro 13-inch, iPad Pro 12.9-inch 3rd generation and later, iPad Pro 11-inch 1st generation and later, iPad Air 3rd generation and later, iPad 7th generation and later, and iPad mini 5th generation and later.
