It happened on the Plus, and I lost photos
Some iPhone 16 Pro users have discovered a truly annoying bug, the kind that you wouldn’t want to see on any premium device, let alone an iPhone. The handset can crash and restart out of the blue, with no fix in sight.
It’s the kind of bug that only Apple can fix, considering it’s impacting multiple users. Thankfully, the imminent iOS 18.1 release will not bring just the first Apple Intelligence features, it’ll also fix this issue.
What’s strange, though, is that I have experienced the issue myself. It happened on the iPhone 16 Plus that I bought in late September. I’ve only encountered the issue once, but something weird happened with the restart. The iPhone forgot some recent data I had saved on it. Specifically, photos I had snapped right before the restart had vanished.
Saturdays are usually one of the days of the week when you pick up your racing kit if you’re a long-distance runner. Since I’m training for marathons, I’ve scheduled half-marathons races before the main event to get in the zone.
There I was on a rainy mid-October afternoon, juggling a couple of bags, an umbrella, and the rather large iPhone 16 Plus. After I picked up the kit, I snapped a few photos of the map for the venue. It’s the same information you’d find online, but it looked better on the larger panels.
Plus, I had another chance to start the camera from the Camera Control button and then tap the display to take a picture. That’s right, I still take pics the old-fashioned way, but that’s a story for a different time.
Three photos taken, iPhone 16 Plus is back in my pocket, and I’m on to my next destination. Gotta catch a train from a nearby station and stay away from that pesky rain.
I’m in a different city, so I take out the phone to quickly scan Google Maps to see if I’m on the right path toward that train. That’s when I see an unfamiliar pop-up message telling me that the iPhone restarted because of a problem.
“Do I want to send a crash report to Apple?” No, I do not want to do that right now; I want to quickly check Google Maps while I’m also clumsily holding this umbrella to ensure I do not miss my train because I took a wrong turn somewhere.
I didn’t think to take a screenshot of the error message, that’s how irritated I was at the whole thing. I didn’t even think too much of it at the time, seeing as I’m running a beta version of iOS 18.1. Who knows what went wrong, and I didn’t necessarily want to figure it all out.
Remember those three pictures I snapped after picking up my kit? A few hours after the iPhone 16 Plus crash and restart experience, I was looking for those pictures to plan my Sunday morning. I needed to know exactly where the start and finish were and how to get there and back.
Imagine my surprise to realize none of the three photos were saved. I did not delete any of them, and they were not in the trash. I checked.
The iPhone 16 Plus somehow deleted those images permanently when it crashed and rebooted. I have no idea how soon after I took the pictures, the phone restarted on its own, but it must have been immediately after that. Less than five minutes later, I was out in the street, looking for directions.
Was it a camera bug? I can’t say, and we might never know. Despite the data loss, it wasn’t too big of a deal. I simply went online to the event’s website to find 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 the bug before or after that single time when the iPhone 16 Plus restarted.
The only proof I have is a gap of exactly three missing pics in the Photos app. All I have to do is look at the filenames, which are chronological, to see that three photos are missing. The same gap in the numbering scheme would have appeared if I’d have deleted the three pics. But again, that was not the case.
It wasn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things, as the pics I lost are about as valuable as screenshots. They weren’t photos I would have wanted to save. Still, seeing the iPhone unable to save pictures because of some error is deeply frustrating. I can’t recall anything like this having ever happened to me.
Hopefully, the final iOS 18.1 release will fix any issues. Though, again, I was lucky to only experience a single forced restart once on my iPhone 16 Plus.
