Some iPhone 16 Pro users have discovered some truly annoying bugs, the kind you don’t want to see on any premium device, let alone an iPhone. Sometimes your handset suddenly crashes and restarts and you can’t find a solution.
Considering it affects multiple users, this is the kind of bug that only Apple can fix. Thankfully, the upcoming iOS 18.1 will fix this issue as well as the first Apple Intelligence feature.
But the strange thing is that I have experienced this problem myself. This happened to my iPhone 16 Plus, which I purchased in late September. I’ve only run into this problem once, but something strange happened when I rebooted. I forgot some of the recent data I saved on my iPhone. Specifically, the photos I took just before the reboot were gone.
For long-distance runners, Saturday is usually one of the days of the week when you receive your racing kit. I’m training for a marathon, so I’m scheduling a half marathon race before the main event to get in the zone.
So there I was, on a rainy afternoon in mid-October, juggling several bags, an umbrella, and a rather large iPhone 16 Plus. After receiving the kit, I took a few photos of the venue map. This is the same information you would find online, but it looked better on a larger panel.
I also had the opportunity to launch the camera from the camera control button and take a photo by tapping on the display. Yes, I still take photos the old-fashioned way, but that’s a story for another day.
I took three photos, put my iPhone 16 Plus back in my pocket, and headed to my next destination. I have to take a train from a nearby station to avoid that pesky rain.
Since I’m in a different city, I pull out my phone and do a quick scan of Google Maps to make sure I’m on the right path to that train. Then I got a strange pop-up message telling me that something went wrong and my iPhone had restarted.
“Do you want to send a crash report to Apple?” No, I don’t want to do that right now. I want to quickly check Google Maps while clumsily holding this umbrella so I don’t take a wrong turn somewhere and miss the train.
I didn’t think to take a screenshot of the error message. That’s how frustrated I was. I was running a beta version of iOS 18.1, so I didn’t think much of it at the time. Who knows what the problem was, but I didn’t necessarily want to figure it all out.
Remember those three photos I took after receiving the kit? Hours after my iPhone 16 Plus crash and restart experience, I was looking for those photos to plan my Sunday morning. Ta. I needed to know exactly where the start and finish was and how to get back there from there.
Imagine my surprise when I realized that none of the three photos were saved. I haven’t deleted any of them and they aren’t in the trash. I confirmed.
My iPhone 16 Plus somehow permanently deleted those images when it crashed and restarted. I don’t know how long after the photo was taken that my phone restarted on its own, but it was probably right after that. Within five minutes, I was out on the street looking for my way.
Was it a camera bug? It’s hard to say and we may never know. Despite the data loss, it wasn’t that big of an issue. I simply went online to the event website and found the information. Also, I blamed it on the iOS 18.1 beta.
This happened a few days before reports of iPhone 16 Pro crash and restart events appeared online. That’s when I connected the dots. I haven’t encountered any bugs before or after that one time the iPhone 16 Plus was restarted.
The only evidence I have is that my Photos app is missing exactly 3 photos. Just look at the file names in chronological order and notice that three photos are missing. Had I removed three photos, I would have had the same gap in the numbering scheme. But again, that wasn’t the case.
The photos I lost were just as valuable as the screenshots, so it wasn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things. It wasn’t the kind of photo I wanted to save. Still, it’s very frustrating to see your iPhone unable to save photos due to some error. I can’t remember anything like this ever happening to me.
We hope the issue will be fixed in the final iOS 18.1 release. But again, I was lucky to only experience one forced restart on my iPhone 16 Plus.
