Serious bug in iOS 18 costs users their message histories

Since September 16th iOS 18 has been officially available and offers many new features for iPhone users - including customizable home screens and freely placeable widgets. Shortly after the release, however, the first serious error occurred, which in the worst case could destroy entire message histories. The bug was first reported by a reader to the technology website 9to5Mac, which managed to reproduce the problem. Users of iOS 18.0 are affected, while the beta version of iOS 18.1 was spared the bug.

The bug occurs when users share Apple watch faces through iMessage. When replying to the shared watch face, the app not only crashes on the affected device, but also on the other party. So far, only the complete deletion of the message history seems to be able to solve the problem. Restoring from the "Recently deleted" folder does not help, as the error reappears immediately.

So far, Apple has not issued an official statement on the error. However, it can be assumed that the company is already working on a bug fix update. Until then, iPhone and AppleWatch users should exercise caution when sharing watch faces.