iPadOS 17.7.7 full of bugs

[Dingbat]

Word of warning to anyone with an older iPad who gets a prompt to update to iPadOS 17.7.7.

Don’t do it!

Although it claims to deliver security updates, there are so many bugs that apps like online banking and games become unusable, features like Safari Favourites bar disappear, and battery life gets hammered.

Apple have been told about this, and hopefully will put a fix in place.

If you’re running iPadOS 18, you’re fine.

I’m on 18.1.1 with a 4-ish year old iPad Air. I can’t update it any further, even for important security updates, because the storage is too full. I can’t get it to release the 10GB it needs, which is really annoying because there is more than 10GB of photos and videos stored locally that are all also in iCloud, but if I delete them from the pad they delete from iPad too. It does have its own ideas about when to offload stuff but it is far too conservative about doing so.

[Dingbat]

I have the same storage issues and end up deleting or offloading apps until there’s enough room. Never used to be a problem until the OS started to get more and more bloated.

Have you considered putting some of the photos onto Dropbox or similar? I did that with a few hundred scanned photos a few years ago and only pull them back when needed.

Dont you still get about 15GB free with a google account, I do, and store photos on it.

[nodrogd]

Looks as if the iOS 18.5 update has also broken Safari. Several reports on VMs community forum of users getting 403 Forbidden errors when trying to access the VM community forum with Safari browsers. 17.7.7 not affected, nor is any other browser on the affected devices.

I'm curious how getting 403 errors would be the fault of the browser.

[nodrogd]

Originally Posted by Paul

I'm curious how getting 403 errors would be the fault of the browser.

Tried it & I'm getting it as well. Put EXACTLY the same address into Safari & Firefox. Firefox gets me straight into the VM site. Safari says "Forbidden. You do not have permission to access this URL". Users on Mac's & iPads running 18.5 all getting the same issue. Tried mobile data with the same result, so not the Virgin connection. Tried a different DNS, same result.

As I say, it is only machines running the latest iOS 18.5, everything else is fine.

That sounds a bit like the VM site, filtering on user agent.

[Dingbat]

Well, the good news is that Apple quietly released iPadOS 17.7.8 yesterday, which appears to have fixed most, if not all, what the previous release broke.

[nodrogd]

Originally Posted by Paul

That sounds a bit like the VM site, filtering on user agent.

Somebody has traced it to an issue with the Cloudflare CDN related to the new iOS release. Should be fixed soon.