iOS 17.5 provided one of the strangest bugs in years on the iPhone. Apple is now explaining why old photos suddenly appeared on your iPhone.
It started as a bizarre post on Reddit last week. Someone reported that his NSFW photos from years ago suddenly reappeared on his iPhone even though he had deleted them.
Although Apple rushed to release an update that fixed the problem, it otherwise kept its jaws tightly shut. Now the company is finally explaining what was going on with iOS 17.5.
What was going on with iPhones running iOS 17.5?
So on iOS 17.5, photos appeared that had sometimes been deleted years ago. It seems like something innocent, but you probably deleted those photos for a reason. Perhaps it’s one with your ex on it or they’re slightly more explicit snapshots.
Especially the idea that Apple would have access to your deleted photos and therefore deleted would not mean deleted caused a lot of anxiety among iPhone users. Did iOS 17.5 bring something darker to light?
(Image: Unsplash/Catalin Dumitra)
So Apple had to come up with an explanation and is now doing so. According to the company, this was a rare problem. To 9to5Mac, it revealed that there was a bug between iCloud and local storage on the smartphone.
Apple tells what went wrong
When you delete a photo on your iPhone, it is normally deleted both on your smartphone and in iCloud. However, a bug caused it to be deleted from iCloud, but not from your iPhone.
Due to a database corruption, some photos just stayed on your smartphone while you no longer saw them in your view. The bug in iOS 17.5 ensured that those photos did become visible again.
Still, that doesn’t tell the whole story, as some users got to see old photos while seeing old photos appear on a new iPhone. According to Apple, this was because those photos were backed up in iCloud, but they were not in iCloud Photos. Thus, the photo could still unintentionally appear on a new device.
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An unusual iPhone bug in iOS 17.5
It’s a rare problem, so it probably hasn’t happened to you. Did it happen anyway? Then install iOS 17.5.1, the company’s latest update. Then delete the photos and they really won’t come back.
