14 DAY TRIAL // A 12-page-long thread on Apple Support Communities that has been viewed more than 16,000 times (at the time of this writing) indicates that iOS 8 has some serious bugs that seem to be affecting a particular iPad model.
Customers are reporting a blue screen of death, or BSOD for short, during normal usage of the tablet computers under iOS 8. The issue seems to be present in all iOS 8 firmware builds released to date, including iOS 8.0.2.
What the users are saying
BSOD is not an uncommon problem, but it’s one that we’ve normally correlated with the Windows ecosystem. Apparently, iPads can get it too.
“I Updated my iPad Air 16gb wifi model with iOS 8 yesterday and since then I am facing random reboots with blue screens. Is this a known issue or am I in trouble?” writes the thread starter.
“I'm having the same problem, iPad Air 128Gb crash in a game, in YouTube or while im [sic] at Safari, it must be something wrong with iOS 8 on iPads, hope they fix it soon,” writes another one.
“Got BSOD after upgrading to iOS 8 on my iPad, is this a bug! If so can we get a fix? This is irritating ‘ios 8 is released with lots of confidence and this kind of issues are bad to see!’ Even during this post I had faced issue of app closing. Expect an immediate fix for this,” yet another customer complains.
Between 60 and 70 percent of the replies to the thread are new complaints, which suggests that the problem is indeed widespread. Interestingly, it seems only to happen with iPad Air models. Older versions of the tablet appear to be unaffected by the flaw.
Which certainly seems ironical, considering that Apple should first and foremost test the newest software against the newest hardware.
iOS updates in the works
We know for a fact that Apple is actively developing a point-one update to iOS 8, but these releases generally take a lot of time to happen. However, the company usually also develops smaller incremental updates in parallel with the bigger ones. The small updates take the form of zero-point releases and generally address small bugs or urgent issues, such as the BSOD problem faced by iPad Air customers.
In other words, don’t be surprised to see iOS 8.0.3 pop up in our software updaters one of these days. What’s surprising is that Apple doesn’t seem to be monitoring the threads with the most burning issues, while media inquiries generally go unanswered.