Apple customers report devices crashing on iOS 9 update
Apple customers report devices crashing on iOS 9 update
By Heather Somerville and Jane Wardell | Reuters – 4
hours ago
SAN FRANCISCO/SYDNEY (Reuters) - A significant number of
Apple Inc customers are reporting their mobile devices have crashed after
attempting to upload the new iOS 9 operating system, the latest in a line of
launch glitches for the tech giant.
Twitter and other social media were awash with
disgruntled customers reporting two distinct faults, with one appearing to be
linked specifically to older models of Apple iPhones and iPads.
"It is beyond inconvenient to not be able to use
your phone for a day," said student Pip Cordi as staff in the Apple store
in central Sydney looked at her phone on Friday. "I have a lot of apps
that I use for school - things like language apps and dictionaries and that's
all really important for my studies."
Another iPhone user, Zorry Coates, said she had spent
three hours in the Apple store and had been left with the option of either
returning her phone to factory settings - losing any non-backed-up data - or
waiting until Apple technicians announced an update.
"They said they were aware of the problem and their
engineers were working on it 24/7, but they couldn't tell me when - or how - I
would get a solution," Zorry said.
"I'm very annoyed because it's wasted half my day.
They pride themselves on being a company that's flawless."
Apple's headquarters in San Francisco did not respond to
a request for comment late Thursday. An Apple spokesman in Sydney said the
company had no comment.
Despite any troubles, significant numbers of iOS users
had upgraded; more than 16 percent, according to Mixpanel, a San Francisco,
California-based analytics company, as of 4 p.m. PDT (2300 GMT) Thursday.
ERROR MESSAGE
Charlie Brown, a technology expert at Sydney-based
Cybershack, said any number of dissatisfied customers was significant in the
social media era, particularly following the troubled rollout of iOS 8. Apple
released several further updates to iOS8, but some of the bugs were never fully
fixed.
"The risk to Apple in terms of having dissatisfied
customers is that as their customer base grows, so will the number of those
dissatisfied customers," said Brown.
One group of users reported that iOS 9 upgrade would fail
after several minutes, requiring them to start the process over. Many posted
screen shots of the error message they received: "Software Update
Failed".
That problem was likely caused by servers that were
overloaded when too many people tried to download the upgrade simultaneously,
tech analysts said.
"It's like the Black Friday thing," said Bob
O'Donnell of Technalysis Research, referring to the major U.S. shopping sale
day after Thanksgiving. "Some websites get creamed on the traffic on Black
Friday."
Other users, many of them with older devices, reported
their devices seizing up on a "swipe to upgrade" page. The latest
upgrade had been deemed by Apple as "friendly" to the older devices
after the iOS 8 problems.
"Apple were saying the downloading mechanism doesn't
take as much space to download," said Sydney-based Graham McKay, an IT
support specialist.
McKay and Brown said they always advised clients to wait
several days before downloading any new upgrades from Apple, Google Inc or
Microsoft Corp to make sure any glitches had been found and ironed out.
Metering the upgrade, or allowing users to upgrade in
waves rather than all at once, would have been a smarter approach, O'Donnell
said.
"It's a lot about setting expectations," he
said.
Apple did this week delay the release of watch OS 2, its
updated operating system for the Apple Watch after it discovered a bug in
development.
(Additional reporting by Melissa Redman in SYDNEY;
Editing by Alex Richardson)
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