iOS 18 may have hit early snags – here’s why you shouldn’t worry

Apple is reportedly pausing development on new features for iOS 18 as part of an over-arching effort to stamp out the bugs early doors.

While iOS 18 won’t be out until next autumn or even previewed on iPhone until next summer, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman reckons Apple is encountering lots more bugs than usual, at this stage of the proceedings.

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The in-the-know Apple reporter said while the very first version of iOS 18 has been completed, the process “hasn’t gone as smoothly” as usual. As such the thousands of developers have “all new feature development for one week to work on fixing the bugs.”

What does this mean for Apple fans? Well, it’s probably really good news and will result in iOS 18 being a much more stable and bug free release from the get go.

Whether it results in any of the headline features being delayed remains to be seen. Quite often in recent years the ‘point zero’ version of iOS and iPadOS has held off on some hotly awaited features to complete work on the features.

With development reportedly being paused to deal with some buds, it’s certainly more possible headline features could be held back until the end of the year, rather than launching with the main build in September.

Gurman’s sources says the company has thousands of employees all working on the operating systems at the same time, which means it’s easy for those glitches to pop up along the way.

“It’s a problem of 10,000 people typing code and completely breaking the operating system,” Gurman quotes a source familiar with the situation as saying.

Interestingly, the delay has had a knock on effect on the VisionOS operating system that’s set to ship with on the Vision Pro headset in early 2024. The report doesn’t specify what those knock-on effects might be. Could it push the release date back?