iOS 16.1.2 Optimizes Crash Detection, Improves Wireless Carrier Compatibility

After successive softwares updates made Homekit unreliable for me I am cautious about installing iOS updates straight away.
Tidbits’ take on updates is helpful for deciding on whether to proceed.

I’m really the opposite. The second decimal point updates almost always are important security patches or fix something that may have broken badly with the last first decimal point upgrade.

Yes – this is exactly the kind of thing I rely on TidBITS for.

FWIW, I still use an RSS reader (Feedly) for most of my tracking news. Apple has a page of RSS feeds you can subscribe to. I subscribe to their “Newsroom” and “Developer News” feeds. This covers most of Apple’s press releases.

But it generally only announces major OS updates (e.g. Ventura’s release and iOS 16), not minor/bug-fix updates.

They need to have (I think they used to have) a feed for the downloads page, especially the OS-updates sub-pages (e.g. About iOS 16 Updates) which get updated with each update they release.

There are apps and services that can watch pages for changes—I’ll bring one of them to bear on the update pages. Those aren’t necessarily updated before the updates actually go out, but it’s usually close.

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Was this useful? Yes it was - thanks.

I have RSS feeds from three Mac-oriented sites and review them daily. TidBITS, of course. MacStories, but I rarely do more than glance at their articles. And AppleInsider. Well, while they’re fast, they’re too click-baity for my taste, increasingly trying to be all things to all readers of late. I glance over them and read some of their short articles - but the important issues often get no more than a glance if I can anticipate that I’ll get the proper TidBITS coverage, even if I have to wait a day or two.

But it’s not just your coverage. It’s the community responses that make up the whole TidBITS experience.

In this instance, I have a vague feeling I may have seen something about this iOS update but, if I did, I parked it, pending reading a little more about it here - and any associated reactions from the community. My iPhone has still to trigger the red badge of its own volition. I’ve just plugged a USB cable into my iPhone and gone to the iPhone window in Finder, where it tells me that “your Mac will automatically check for an update again on 08/12/2022” - ie not until tomorrow. Having just done a backup and a sync, I’m pushing it through right now.

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Was this particular instance useful? No, but I had already made up my mind to install the latest update as the 16.1.1 update resulted in both our iPhone 8’s chewing through the batteries at an alarming rate. Did check Tidbits talk but no one else had mentioned the quick discharge of batteries. Btw way 16.1.2 seems to have fixed the problem.

I would be very sorry to see the community’s comments on updates go away - they give a good indication whether to hold off or not. I voted yes - the articles are normally very useful!

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I often find out about updates first in TidBITS, not my devices, so the articles are helpful in that way. There are a number of people who rely on me to tell them if an update is ready for prime time, and I rely on TidBITS to give me that assurance, so yes again.

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I apparently need TidBITS to tell me these things because I didn’t realize there was an update!

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“Should you upgrade? I can’t see any reason to delay, especially if you’re planning to be in a car anytime soon.”

That’s the text I like to see–here you are adding value. Your added value is valuable.

Something in this update nobody mentioned: there’s a new setting for notifications at the top of the App Store section where your updates get displayed. I was alerted to it because of a splash screen when checking for updates to an app.

This is an example for the kind of information I’d like to read about, ideally right after the update comes out and before I choose to install. Apple’s “release notes” are mostly useless as they’d never point out a detail like this. And I don’t need the 934th announcement that there’s an update for some Apple doohickey I have. What I do need is a summary of all the little changes.

Yes, this short article was useful. I didn’t know about the update. And I usually wait until someone here on Tidbits tells me it’s Ok to update.

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FWIW, I upgraded my iPhone 13. It didn’t seem to break anything.

The notice about improving Crash Detection was vague, but I think the issue being worked on was the prevention of false positives from roller coasters and other non-crash activities that also have sudden decelerations. I seem to remember that it has also been reported that various skiing activities might also send false positives.

That must have been an iOS 16.1 change since I have it on my iPad, which hasn’t updated to iPadOS 16.1.1 yet. I don’t remember getting that alert on my iPhone, but when I went into the App Store app on the iPad, it popped right up.

Things like this are maddening since I had no idea what you were talking about until I went to try it. Perhaps I’m just blanking on not getting the alert on the iPhone because the concept of getting notifications from the App Store fills me with horror. I’m really, really uninterested in having my devices constantly trying to push more apps on me.

I’m totally with you. I guess this is just more of the “services push” that Apple (and Wall Street) is so obsessed with lately.

The reason I noticed it right with 16.1.2 on my iPhone (and my wife’s) is actually because of the big flashy splash screen they shoved in my face. None of those shenanigans before (16.1).

I make a small automatic donation every month and one of the things I always look for are the version update articles and your recommendations. It’s your choice whether to delete or not but if the replacement isn’t of equal or more value to me, next year’s monthly donations will reflect that decision.

I think I would be fine seeing things like this appear in the watchlist with app updates, but I do find it useful.

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Thanks for all the votes and opinions on whether I should keep covering updates even when I don’t have much to add beyond what Apple says. It seems that such articles are highly popular on the whole, so I’ll keep doing them, though I may try to have some fun writing them to keep things fresh.

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We probably don’t need TidBITs to tell us that there’s a new iOS version available as my iPhone told me already. What my iPhone didn’t tell me, and I would appreciate some insight (if you have one) is why wasn’t there a matching upgrade to the iPadOS version. Forget crash detection, that’s not an iPad thing, but what about wireless carrier compatibility?