A few days before the update debuts for users Apple Of iOS 17.5 the first problems have already been encountered: thousands of users around the world are complaining about the reappearance, on their devices, of photo which had also been canceled many years before but the same seems to be happening with some too voice messages on WhatsApp.
The bug hypothesis
“There are worrying reports on Reddit that Apple's latest iOS 17.5 update has introduced a bugs what does he do reappear old photos that had been deleted, in some cases years ago, in users' photo libraries“, explain the experts at Macrumors who encountered the problem. The fault of a bug, therefore, one of many that forces developers to often propose new updates to correct the anomalies found on iPhone, iPad and Mac. If in the past bugs could be dangerous especially in terms of privacy, this time it seems that it is an issue that does not put sensitive data at risk.
What happens with “Recently Deleted”
Simply, old memories (good and bad) resurface even if the user was certain he had deleted them: Apple devices, for some time now, have made available a section called “Recently Deleted”, a huge container in which videos and photos end up which we delete but which remain there forever 30 days before final elimination. The improvement was designed because, in this way, one could have time to recover something that had perhaps been deleted by mistake. This bug, however, seems to bring back cancellations that occurred years earlier, not just in the last month.
The complaints were also forwarded by iOS beta testers, basically the users who have previews of what will then be extended to the general public. Therefore, photos that were thought to have belonged to oblivion magically reappear in the albums. There are those who have even found photos dated 2016, i.e. eight years ago, while a user said that on the iPad that he sold to a friend he had found 300 photos.
When the definitive deletion occurs
The bug highlights an ever-current theme: but when are our data (photos, videos, documents, etc.) really deleted? “Computer data is never actually 'deleted' until it is overwritten with new 1s and 0s: operating systems simply drop references to them”, the experts explain The Verge regarding this matter. “One user also said they saw a photo returned even though they didn't sync their phone or use iCloud, implying the photos may have come from the device's storage.”.
At this point, the fear of many users is concrete that, somewhere in the world of the cloud, everything we have taken or recorded exists without it being truly deleted forever. To comment on the matter, Apple preferred not to respond as reported by the mobile newspaper. As mentioned, the problem may not only concern photos: on X a user wrote that after updating to iOS 17.5 “the voice messages that I had already listened to or deleted reappeared.
Before the update I only had one unheard voicemail, but now I have 26″.