iOS 15 Messages Bug Causes Saved Photos to Be Deleted

[aesc80]

All these bugs are a result of working from home. Harder to collaborate on these types of issues. I'm all for working from home, but these bugs are the compromises.

Maybe, maybe not. If they have a truly dedicated QA team (which I kinda doubt), they'd be all over those things. A good QA team will comb through that nicely and spot even the most edge case of bugs.

More than likely, Apple outsources their QA to other countries that may or may not have WFH / Covid mandates (East Europe, India, China). All they do is get a list of things, "go through the app" and sign off. The development teams are probably writing up code at will and just taking QA's assessment as gospel. In that case, that has 0 to do with "WFH"

 

[mchart]

I reported this bug numerous times throughout the beta. Never got anything back. As i've said elsewhere, this is a serious bug to have on a production OS. The amount of people loosing photos to this must be significant.

 

[Rico-Suave]

Just upgraded from 11 Pro Max to 13 Pro Max — both running iOS 15. System Data on 11 is 20.73GB — on the 13 it's 70GB. The Photos storage category doesn't even show up on the 13 Pro Max. Total system data on the 11 Pro Max is 58GB — on the 13 it's 105GB. Such BS.

 

[Jim Higgins]

Oh for f***'s sake. This has to be Apple's most botched iOS release ever.

Good 'ole Apple technical advances :-(

 

[ian87w]

We all love Craig Federighi but apart from his charisma, does he actually foster a culture where details matter? Apparently not. Apple’s software quality has never been great but it’s getting to the point of being ridiculous.

Probably because he was assigned for the mass scanning team. I mean he became the primary spokesperson when criticisms arose. Also notice he didn't appear at all during the keynote.

 

[mchart]

This iOS release is becoming very reminiscent of the iOS 11 release. I didn’t think it could get worse than that but here we are thanks to china virus lol

Worst part is that this iOS really didn't add that much that is visible to the user. So it's a double whammy. Only real feature add is the OCR in camera. Everything else is fairly trivial to most users.

 

[Wags]

Getting very 90s Apple vibes with everything going wrong this year.
They need a quality assurance team again instead of relying on public testers.

Like when their stock was .35 share and on verge of bankruptcy? Power PC days. Do you have the right decade?

 

[iFan]

I have been dealing with a weird upgrade from my 12 Pro 256 to my 13 Pro 256 (iUP).
I did the device-to-device transfer, my 13 has ~229/256 GB remaining. On the 12, I had about ~185/256. So that 50 GB delta ha due curious. In digging, it appeared the Messages data on my 12 was ~15GB. On the 13, it was ~44 GB. WTF?
Several calls with Apple support yielded my next step: Reset and restore from my last 12 backup (something I look to get to tomorrow. ANYWAY...
Yesterday, I was saving some images from Messages on my 13, and they were no showing up in my Photos. So I ended up sending them to myself via email. Which is to say, I am seeing some issue with Messages and images, for sure.


Edit: meant to add... One Apple support rep told me "that's just how the 13 allocates memory now." Ummm, what???
Also, had I known, I would have preordered a 512. On my 12 Pro, 256 was just fine.

Edit #2: this camera but is HUGE! The lenses protrude shockingly far. My Apple silicon case helps, a lot. But naked... Insane.

I went through this last year when upgrading to my 12. I tried to recreate the issue and it depended partially on how I moved the data over from previous phone (device to device vs iCloud restore from backup.)

After freaking out and deleting a few message threads, the issue resolved itself over days/weeks by just plain old indexing. Even if it says it is done indexing, it probably isn't. I think it took several weeks and eventually my 12 showed it was using the same amount of storage as the previous phone. It went from showing that my 256 was almost entirely full to now showing I have 180GB free.

It's a weird and frustrating bug and likely only impacts those of us with huge amounts of videos/photos in our messaging threads.

My advice to you would be to keep your phone plugged in and on wifi while you sleep and over 1-2 weeks it will resolve. Don't keep restoring as it will just reset the entire process back to square one.

I hope someone from Apple reads this - there are mucho issues for those of us with large large message databases + iCloud backup enabled. I worry one day something will become corrupted and I'll lose it all.

 

[lazyrighteye]

Whoa. I just noticed that now that you pointed it out. I literally was using less than half of my 256gb on my 12 pro max, to the point where I almost downgraded but then decided to keep it at 256gb. According to my iPhone right now, I only have 25gb of free space. What??? How is that even remotely possible. Something is screwy somewhere.

Surely we’re not the only ones…

I’ll update here once I’ve Rest to factory and reatored from my last 12 backup. 🤞

 

[aesc80]

This iOS release is becoming very reminiscent of the iOS 11 release. I didn’t think it could get worse than that but here we are thanks to china virus lol

Right? It's not quite iOS 13 "HOLY CRAP WHAT THE F*CK DID YOU JUST DO" edition, and more iOS 11 "you actually broke the mundane" edition. The funny thing is - the betas actually weren't this bad. I had them for months and it was cool. Feels like someone pushed more code into the RC without it being tested and it all went to crud.

 

[thadoggfather]

hold my beer... said iOS 13.

At least it had dark mode

iOS 15 is one of the more anemic-in-features releases too

 

[eyehop]

A serious bug in the iOS 15 Messages app can cause some saved photos to be deleted, according to multiple complaints we've heard from MacRumors readers and Twitter users.

If you save a photo from a Messages thread and then go on to delete that thread, the next time an iCloud Backup is performed, the photo will disappear.

Even though the image is saved to your personal iCloud Photo Library, it appears to still be linked to the Messages app in iOS 15, and saving it does not persist through the deletion of the thread and an iCloud backup.

To replicate this bug, the following steps must be taken:

1. Save a photo from a Messages conversation to your Camera Roll.
   
2. Check to see that the photo has been saved.
   
3. Delete the Messages conversation the photo came from. The photo will still be in your iCloud Photo Library at this point.
   
4. Perform an iCloud Backup, and the photo disappears.

This is a concern because most users keep the iCloud Backup feature enabled and it's something that happens automatically. If you're someone who regularly deletes message threads, if there's a photo that you want to keep, you won't be able to keep it with iCloud Backup turned on. We tested this bug on an iPhone running iOS 15.1 beta 2 and had our photo deleted after deleting the Messages thread and performing an iCloud Backup, so the issue has not been addressed in the current beta as of yet.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1443196471160066050

Until this bug is fixed, if you've downloaded photos from the Messages app, you'll want to make sure to keep those Messages conversations and not delete them to prevent them from being automatically removed from your devices.

(Thanks, Chad!)

Article Link: iOS 15 Messages Bug Causes Saved Photos to Be Deleted

This is also happening with video I Airdrop to myself from my Mac.

 

[ian87w]

All these bugs are a result of working from home. Harder to collaborate on these types of issues. I'm all for working from home, but these bugs are the compromises.

Oh come on. 2020 was worse, and iOS14 came out fine. Apple is a tech company, and if they cannot even have proper sop for their software development team, they are in worse trouble. Software development have been outsourced and remotely worked on many moons before the pandemic.

Imo, it's simple. The team was tasked to do something else (ie. the mass scanning system). And now we have the result.

 

[BreakingKayfabe]

Oh come on. 2020 was worse, and iOS14 came out fine. Apple is a tech company, and if they cannot even have proper sop for their software development team, they are in worse trouble. Software development have been outsourced and remotely worked on many moons before the pandemic.

Imo, it's simple. The team was tasked to do something else (ie. the mass scanning system). And now we have the result.

iOS 14 was in development much earlier than 2020

 

[ian87w]

This iOS release is becoming very reminiscent of the iOS 11 release. I didn’t think it could get worse than that but here we are thanks to china virus lol

That "China" virus didn't seem to affect iOS14.

 

[cmaier]

Wonder if the anti-apple army that will post about how this is “Timmy’s” or “Tim Apple’s” fault agrees or disagrees with Tim Cook when he says that employees are more productive when they show up in the office. Because I, for one, am certainly beginning to suspect a correlation between remote work and this mess.

 

[ian87w]

iOS 14 was in development much earlier than 2020

Yeah, but the beta period was during the worse lockdowns around the world. The argument was that the lockdowns and WFH are causing the reduction in quality of iOS15. Yet iOS14 fared out well while the world was in worse condition than 2021.

 

[supergt]

Oh for f***'s sake. This has to be Apple's most botched iOS release ever.

iOS 11 has entered the chat.

 

[RedWing512]

Getting very 90s Apple vibes with everything going wrong this year.
They need a quality assurance team again instead of relying on public testers.

Naww, they just need to get everyone's asses back in the office and focused on work. I am thoroughly convinced that all of the issues we are seeing is due to the inability for teams to collaborate like they used to since work-from-home started...not to mention it's allowed for a lot of activism within the company--some of which is unwarranted.

 

[Tagbert]

Oh for f***'s sake. This has to be Apple's most botched iOS release ever.

were you not around for iOS 13?

 

[CoMoMacUser]

And this is why I’m looking hard for better photo storage solutions. I appreciate the serious integration apple has with their ecosystem but I do not trust it to save my photos, and then it’s painful for sharing with family members. I have only 6000 photos, and I know I’m not even close to a power user! Just a new dad with lots of family pics that are very important to me.

I have a Microsoft 365 subscription, which includes 1 TB of storage. It works great. I have thousands of photos, screenshots and other stuff. I don't share very often, but when I have, it was pretty straightforward.

I have the $99/year plan, but there are less expensive versions.

 

[oldmacs]

Hang on are people suggesting that photos are disappearing even if you don't delete the message thread they came in?

 

[josebus]

Oh for f***'s sake. This has to be Apple's most botched iOS release ever.

2022 iOS 16 "hold my beer".

 

[rhyzome]

This is the stuff that should only appear in early betas.

What is wrong with Apple lately? It seems like theyre stumbling and overextended..

Not happy and as a shareholder a little worried 😦

 

[macfacts]

It just works…

Why give a polished out of the box product whren it can be fixed later and let's users feel good about free updates, that the competition doesn't give.