iOS 12 Beta Spams Users Into Submission With Incessant Update Popups
Apple is in the homestretch of testing iOS 12 in beta form before it receives a final coat of polish and rolls out to the public. Unfortunately for developers who are doing the actual testing, iOS 12 seems to be stumbling at the finish line. Specifically, beta testers report that iOS 12 keeps nagging them to update iOS, even though no update actually exists.
It's easy to understand why that would be annoying. Even worse, though, is the frequency of the popup alerts. This is not a one time thing that beta users can simply dismiss and be done with. Instead, it appears over and over again. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet laments he sees the popup each time the handset is unlocked or the notification panel is used.
It looks like this method in Springboard does some date/time calculations to determine if the current build is about to expire, every time the cover sheet gets dismissed. For some reason, the latest builds of iOS 12 think they're about to expire. (@davedelong :P) pic.twitter.com/HWe7C0NnIT
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) August 31, 2018
Over on Twitter, iOS developer Guilherme Rambo posted what he believes is the issue, after doing some digging. According to his findings, the bug traces to some date and time calculations that determine if the current build is about to expire, which occur every time the cover sheet is dismissed.
"For some reason, the latest builds of iOS 12 think they're about to expire," Rambo notes.
The latest beta was only released a few days, on August 27. Apparently iOS 12 beta users have been seeing the popup ever since. It seems that the popups are now showing up more often, forcing users to manually dismiss the notifications each and every time.
This sort of thing comes with the territory of testing out pre-release software. That is not to excuse Apple, especially this late in the game. But as annoying as it is, at least this is something that Apple should be able to easily fix before iOS 12 launches to the public.
