Late last week, a report from 404 Media was released, based on a memo from law enforcement in the United States.
According to the report, police are experiencing problems with iPhones running iOS 18: they turn off uncontrollably and require the corresponding passcode after restarting, making it significantly more difficult for authorities to access data. of the device.
Based on these reports, the developer scene spent the last weekend looking for confirmation or an explanation for this phenomenon and ended up finding something.
Jiska Classen, an engineer at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, explained the differences between iOS 18 and iOS 18.1 in an article post on X/Twitter. It appears that iOS 18.1 contains new lines of code with the “Inactivity Reboot” feature.
Essentially, this means that a system timer activates every time the iPhone is locked. If the iPhone is not unlocked for a certain amount of time – researchers assume four days, or 96 hours – the iPhone restarts and asks for the current passcode. Rebooting from inactivity is apparently only related to the last unlock time, and not other circumstances such as connecting to nearby devices.
It has not yet been clarified whether the previous report from 404 Media and the code found in iOS 18.1 are related; it may simply be a temporal coincidence.
Apple has not yet provided an explanation
Other than that, we wish Apple wouldn’t hide such features from its users and hope no one finds out about the change. After all, it is a basic iPhone function and users can assume a fault if they notice that their iPhone seems to turn off sporadically.
As for whether someone leaves their iPhone unused for more than four days, there are enough corporate iPhones in circulation that are only used for work communication on weekdays, a four-day break is not unusual , even during the many long weekends, still vacation alone.
This article was originally published in our sister publication Macwelt and has been translated and adapted from German.
