the ios 18 developer beta 1 wiped my iphone ! kind of.

the first few days of having the beta installed was fine—great, even;

however, two days ago, my phone started slowing down on the simplest tasks,

which coincided with system crashes.

these crashes weren't just simple ones that required a quick reboot to

fix. they were ones where the phone would halt to a small loading icon for

a few seconds, then to a black screen for a few minutes, then to the apple

icon for a few minutes, then back to the home screen.

the crashes were accompanied by what i assume to be the entire icon cache

to be wiped as well, since on boot, i would be met by a load of placeholder

icons and no app titles on my home screen. some sort of other caches must have

been affected as well, because many apps' settings were wiped, alongside the

affected icons and titles. at the same time, many apps' settings stayed, too,

oddly ! my educated guess is that these apps store their local configuration

in a different manner.

today, i had no crashes at all, so i was under the assumption that my problems

have vanished, but i spoke too soon ! my first crash of the day was a big

one. it was followed by the same hard-crash symptoms i mentioned before,

but it also happened to wipe a lot more than just icon and local settings

caches. this crash cleared my open tabs on safari, logged me out of multiple

apps, brought on the same cache wipes as above, and i'm guessing much more

that i haven't fully disconvered yet.

the good news is that i don't keep local data on my phone—or rather,

i don't keep important local data on my phone. all my files are commited

to icloud, all of my device backups are present icloud, and i don't use my

mobile device for important things. it's a tool, not a workstation.

now starts part two of this adventure !

before i bricked my iphone for good, i wanted to go ahead and either revert

to ios 17, or update to a more stable release of the ios 18 developer

beta. thankfully, beta 2 had been released two days ago. this is likely just

a coincidence, but these nasty bugs actually begin on the day of beta 2's

release. (queue tinfoil hat)

anyway, from what i was able to find, beta 2 was somewhat more stable that

beta 1. that's good news. the bad news is that i don't have enough storage

on my device.

i needed to sacrifice something for some space, and that something was

wuthering waves. sitting at 17 gigabytes, i wiped wuthering waves, which

should have given me plenty enough extra space to install the beta 2 update,

given that it only needed an additional 15 gigabytes of total storage to

install, but i was informed that i had been lacking the required available

storage to install the update, regardless of my actions ....

i thought that this was some sort of storage calibration bug, so i restarted

my iphone, but i was still unable to update.

it turns out that the "system data" portion of my device's storage was the

culprit, and was reading something in the order of 30 gigabytes. this value

should be closer to 1–2 gigabytes, and can maybe reach up to 5 gigabytes

in rare cases. i'm not sure exactly where it was sitting before i uninstalled

wuthering waves, but after i did uninstall wuthering waves, the "system data"

promptly expanded itself to fill up the reset of that newly freed 17 gigabytes

of storage.

i'm not sure what "system data" actually means, but it must be a fluctuative

set of data, as i was observing it dancing around the 25–30 gigabyte range,

back and forth, sometimes by megabytes, sometimes gigabytes. one second it'd

be 25.3, then 25.36, then 29.3.

the best idea i could come up with was to see if i could beat it in time

by restarting my device and requesting an update as soon as i could after

reaching boot.

attempt one: i could not beat it in time.

attempt two: i did beat it in time ! after this success, i requested an

update, which went through, but was stuck on "requesting update", or some

thing along those lines, for many minutes. after backing in and out of the

menu, i was once again prompted to free up more storage, and the "system data"

had once again expanded to occupy the free space.

attempt three: i actually, fully beat "system data" this time, but with a

small bump. the update medium actually pre-downloaded, or whatever apple

does with updates before actually intalling the update, but i was informed

with a similar "more storage required" screen. this screen was requesting an

additional 5 gigabytes of storage. i backed in and out of the menu to see if

i could trick the update to go through, or get "system data" to budge, and

i actually got the value down to 3.11 gigabytes ! since initially getting it

to come down, i haven't had any success to get it to force itself any furthur.

i imagine that the "system data" and the beta 2 update process are having a

land war of sorts, where the "system data" is trying its best to eat every

last byte, while the update process is trying to do the same. my guess is

that the update process just needs a little help. surely, the "system data"

doesn't actually have a consistent byte munching agenda, while the update

process actually is forcefully pushing back.

as of this time, i am still stuck at an additional 3.11 gigabytes required

to install the beta 2 update, even after offloading ~400 megabytes of

applications. i'll test out some more fixes and report back if i have any

updates !

update one: after a restart, i was able to get the update to go through

first try ! as soon as i clicked the update now button, i was locked into

a prompt which read "verifying update". given this reading, i'm not so sure

if that 3.11 gigabyte additional resource request was fibbing, or that the

update was so close to completely downloaded, that this "verifying update"

prompt deployed some additional troops to fight off the "system data" regime.

the update is slowly going through, and has reached approximately 1/4

progress complete after 3–4 minutes of waiting. i'll report back on any

furthur developments !

update two: it's up ! i'm not going to sit on my phone here for hours and

hours to test it all out and see if it's still having the same issues, but

from my about 30 second test, it seems fine. i'll report back after about

a good day's use, or if i hit any of the same bugs.

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