iOS 17.6 Update: A Minor but Necessary Fix

The latest update to iOS, version 17.6, has been released and is now available for download. This update brings several important bug fixes and security patches, which are essential for maintaining the stability and security of our devices.

One of the notable features of this update is the resolution of a messages bug that had been causing issues with slow or failed message sending. According to Apple, this bug has been fixed in iOS 17.6, which means that users can now send and receive messages without any issues. Additionally, there have been updates to resolve cell connectivity issues, including a modem firmware update for certain devices. These changes should improve the overall performance of our cellular connections.

Security Updates

iOS 17.6 also contains several important security patches, which are designed to protect our devices from potential threats. One of the most significant security patches is related to the lock screen, where an attacker with physical access could potentially use Siri to access sensitive user data. This bug has been fixed in iOS 17.6, ensuring that our devices remain secure.

Another notable security patch is related to the hidden photos album, where photos may be viewed without authentication. This bug has also been resolved in iOS 17.6, which ensures that only authorized users can view sensitive information.

Shortcuts and Siri

There are also several patches related to shortcuts and Siri, where a shortcut may be able to use sensitive data with certain actions without prompting the user. These bugs have been fixed in iOS 17.6, ensuring that our devices remain secure and do not compromise sensitive information.

Webkit Bugs

As always, there are multiple webkit bugs that have been patched in this update. While these bugs may seem minor, they are essential for maintaining the stability and security of our devices.

Performance and Battery Life

In terms of performance, iOS 17.6 is expected to feel similar to previous updates, with no significant changes or improvements. The benchmark tests conducted by Geekbench 6 have shown that the single-core score is 2421, while the multicore score is 6063. These scores are slightly lower than those seen in previous updates but do not indicate any major performance issues.

Battery Life

Similarly, battery life is expected to be similar to previous updates, with no significant changes or improvements. The RC (release candidate) version of iOS 17.6 has been used for over a week now, and users have reported that the battery life remains fine without any notable differences compared to iOS 17.5 point1.

When to Update

Given that we are approaching the end of the iOS 17 release cycle, there is no significant downside to updating to iOS 17.6. In fact, waiting for a later update may expose us to potential issues or bugs that may arise during the development phase.

What's Next?

iOS 18 is expected to be released in mid-September, and it promises to bring some exciting features and changes. While the exact details are not yet known, we can expect iOS 18 to include major updates and improvements compared to iOS 17.6. As always, it is recommended to update to the latest version of iOS as soon as possible to ensure that our devices remain secure and stable.

Conclusion

In conclusion, iOS 17.6 is a minor but necessary update that addresses several important bugs and security patches. While there may be some minor performance or battery life changes, these are not expected to be significant. With the release of iOS 18 approaching, it is essential to stay informed about the latest updates and features that will shape our devices in the future.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys my name is Brandon and today Apple released iOS and iPad OS 17.6 to the general public after over a month of beta testing so in this video we're going to talk about what's new in this update the performance the battery life and if this will be the final iOS 17 update or not all right so now what's new here in iOS 17.6 and the first thing has to do with the TV application and sports so we now have a new catchup feature for live sports in the TV application and this was introduced for MLS season pass so if you do have the MLS season pass you can now use the catchup feature which means that when you join a live stream a live game that's in progress you can now catch up on the action by watching a series of AI generated clips of highlights that have already happened during the game so this is really cool and this is something that's existed on other services before but it's nice to see this come to the TV application and this is also a aailable on TV OS and iPad OS as well also if you go into one of the games here in the TV application you'll notice that we now have the share button up in the top leftand corner right here whereas before you had to tap on the three dots and the share button was down there so just a minor change to the now playing view in the Apple News application we now have the ability to schedule live activities so you can now schedule a live activity so you don't have to wait for a game to start or for instance the election to start to get those live activities in the dynamic Island there's a small privacy update in the shortcuts application so the first time you run a shortcut with one of these two actions get contents of web page or get contents of URL you'll see that we have this new wording right here so before in 17.5 point1 it just said allow but now in 17.6 we have a sentence underneath of that that says this might allow this shortcut to share content with the website so that's just a new little addition there in shortcuts and the settings application if we go into our privacy and security section and then into location services and then go down to where we see Siri before in 17.5 point1 that said Siri and dictation but now in 17.6 it just says Siri if you have an apple pencil Pro iOS and iPad OS 17.6 introduces lost mode for the apple pencil Pro so before on the 17.5 updates the apple pencil Pro was not fully supported and you could not enter into lost mode but now with iOS and iPad OS 17.6 as you can see you can find it nearby and you can also now Mark it as lost in the messages application if somebody messages you that is unknown if they're not in your contacts list before in 17.5 point1 even if they were International it would just say the sender is not in your contacts list but now is 17.6 if that user is international it will now say that it's from an unknown International sender so a little bit more specific with the wording there in messages if you have have the Beats Pill That is Now supported with iOS 17.6 and there's also now a matching beats icon in the control center when you're connected to that beats pill in the photos application if you go into the recently deleted folder and you go to permanently delete one of your photos there's now a new sentence at the end that says this action can't be undone before it did not say that if you have an apple card and you're in the wallet application and you notice that your Apple card account has been suspended before you would never know why until you called customer support but now starting with iOS 17.6 you get an alert that tells you why your account was suspended for instance if you declared bankruptcy it will now show that as an alert and there's also a few other small wording changes throughout iOS 17.6 for instance the text has changed when you're adding a legacy contact and a few other small changes but nothing really noteworthy now as far as bug fixes go if we take a look at the release notes here there's really not a lot going on in the release notes whatsoever really the only thing noteworthy here is this one related to audio so it says some Bluetooth headphones might not be usable as an audio output route with certain AV Audio session configurations and you can see a few other notes there as well but nothing too interesting now I will say that the messages bug appears to be fixed here with 17.6 so a lot of people had issues with messages either being slow to send or just not sending the first time the message would fail so it seems like 17.6 might have fixed that bug from 17.5 also if you're having cell connectivity issues those could also be resolved with this update so we did get a modem firmware update for certain devices so you might see an improvement in cell connectivity if you did have issues beforehand now as far as security updates go iOS 17.6 contains several important bug fixes and security patches now fortunately none of these were being actively exploited however there are a lot of bugs that have been patched here and some of these seem pretty serious so there are several kernel bugs image IO bugs there's a bug here that's really interesting related to the phone where it says a lock screen issue was addressed because an attacker with physical access may be able to use Siri to access sensitive user data there was also one where photos in the hidden photos album may be viewed without authentication there are multiple issues with shortcuts where a shortcut may be able to use sensitive data with certain actions without prompting the user and there were some with Siri here and then of course as always we have multiple webkit bugs that were patched as well so as I always say even if the update seems minor it's usually always worth it to go ahead and update just to ensure that your device is as secure as possible and then when it comes to the performance performance overall is going to feel about the same as 17.5 and 17.5 point1 I would not really expect any type of change in performance aside from just some bug fixes but as far as overall raw performance don't expect any type of major jump going from 17.5 or 17.5 point1 to 17.6 now I did go ahead and run a geekbench 6 test and we scored a 2421 on the single core and a 6063 on the multicore here on my 13 Pro Max so pretty similar results to what we saw in the previous updates and then when it comes to battery life battery life is going to be in the same boats I would not really expect any type of change to the battery life here with iOS 17.6 I have been using the RC which is technically the final release for over a week now and battery life has been fine for me I've really not been able to tell a difference from 17.5 point1 at least on this device so don't expect any major changes there we likely will not see any changes to Performance or battery life until iOS 18 which they'll probably be worse at the beginning with iOS 18 but it will get a little bit better as time goes on but at this point we're pretty much reaching the end of the iOS 17 release cycle so now should you update to iOS 17.6 or should you just wait for iOS 18 and I would say at this point in the release cycle there's really no downside I wouldn't really worry too much about having issues when updating usually once we get this late into the cycle they not really going to run into any major issues so I don't really see any reason not to update to iOS 17.6 unless you're just really worried about things going wrong and you're having a perfect experience on the version that you're currently on but let's go a and talk about what to expect next because we are getting pretty pretty close to iOS 18 which is coming in September so you know in the month of August we could see a release of a 17.6 point1 and I do think that iOS 17.7 is also possible but iOS 17.7 could be the final you know single point update for iOS 17 I think we're going to see a lot of double Point updates for instance 17.6 point1 17.62 versions like that that are mainly just going to be security pack mates in minor bug fixes but we should be seeing iOS 18 at some point in mid September I would say somewhere around September 16th is when we can expect to see iOS 18 so if you're waiting for that that is when I would expect it so that is IOS 17.6 a relatively minor update as expected since all the big features and changes are being saved for iOS 18 in September but nonetheless hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did I would appreciate if you give it a thumbs up also be sure to subscribe for more iOS at in some more small ios7 videos in the future but anyways guys thanks again for watching and I'll see you soonwhat's up guys my name is Brandon and today Apple released iOS and iPad OS 17.6 to the general public after over a month of beta testing so in this video we're going to talk about what's new in this update the performance the battery life and if this will be the final iOS 17 update or not all right so now what's new here in iOS 17.6 and the first thing has to do with the TV application and sports so we now have a new catchup feature for live sports in the TV application and this was introduced for MLS season pass so if you do have the MLS season pass you can now use the catchup feature which means that when you join a live stream a live game that's in progress you can now catch up on the action by watching a series of AI generated clips of highlights that have already happened during the game so this is really cool and this is something that's existed on other services before but it's nice to see this come to the TV application and this is also a aailable on TV OS and iPad OS as well also if you go into one of the games here in the TV application you'll notice that we now have the share button up in the top leftand corner right here whereas before you had to tap on the three dots and the share button was down there so just a minor change to the now playing view in the Apple News application we now have the ability to schedule live activities so you can now schedule a live activity so you don't have to wait for a game to start or for instance the election to start to get those live activities in the dynamic Island there's a small privacy update in the shortcuts application so the first time you run a shortcut with one of these two actions get contents of web page or get contents of URL you'll see that we have this new wording right here so before in 17.5 point1 it just said allow but now in 17.6 we have a sentence underneath of that that says this might allow this shortcut to share content with the website so that's just a new little addition there in shortcuts and the settings application if we go into our privacy and security section and then into location services and then go down to where we see Siri before in 17.5 point1 that said Siri and dictation but now in 17.6 it just says Siri if you have an apple pencil Pro iOS and iPad OS 17.6 introduces lost mode for the apple pencil Pro so before on the 17.5 updates the apple pencil Pro was not fully supported and you could not enter into lost mode but now with iOS and iPad OS 17.6 as you can see you can find it nearby and you can also now Mark it as lost in the messages application if somebody messages you that is unknown if they're not in your contacts list before in 17.5 point1 even if they were International it would just say the sender is not in your contacts list but now is 17.6 if that user is international it will now say that it's from an unknown International sender so a little bit more specific with the wording there in messages if you have have the Beats Pill That is Now supported with iOS 17.6 and there's also now a matching beats icon in the control center when you're connected to that beats pill in the photos application if you go into the recently deleted folder and you go to permanently delete one of your photos there's now a new sentence at the end that says this action can't be undone before it did not say that if you have an apple card and you're in the wallet application and you notice that your Apple card account has been suspended before you would never know why until you called customer support but now starting with iOS 17.6 you get an alert that tells you why your account was suspended for instance if you declared bankruptcy it will now show that as an alert and there's also a few other small wording changes throughout iOS 17.6 for instance the text has changed when you're adding a legacy contact and a few other small changes but nothing really noteworthy now as far as bug fixes go if we take a look at the release notes here there's really not a lot going on in the release notes whatsoever really the only thing noteworthy here is this one related to audio so it says some Bluetooth headphones might not be usable as an audio output route with certain AV Audio session configurations and you can see a few other notes there as well but nothing too interesting now I will say that the messages bug appears to be fixed here with 17.6 so a lot of people had issues with messages either being slow to send or just not sending the first time the message would fail so it seems like 17.6 might have fixed that bug from 17.5 also if you're having cell connectivity issues those could also be resolved with this update so we did get a modem firmware update for certain devices so you might see an improvement in cell connectivity if you did have issues beforehand now as far as security updates go iOS 17.6 contains several important bug fixes and security patches now fortunately none of these were being actively exploited however there are a lot of bugs that have been patched here and some of these seem pretty serious so there are several kernel bugs image IO bugs there's a bug here that's really interesting related to the phone where it says a lock screen issue was addressed because an attacker with physical access may be able to use Siri to access sensitive user data there was also one where photos in the hidden photos album may be viewed without authentication there are multiple issues with shortcuts where a shortcut may be able to use sensitive data with certain actions without prompting the user and there were some with Siri here and then of course as always we have multiple webkit bugs that were patched as well so as I always say even if the update seems minor it's usually always worth it to go ahead and update just to ensure that your device is as secure as possible and then when it comes to the performance performance overall is going to feel about the same as 17.5 and 17.5 point1 I would not really expect any type of change in performance aside from just some bug fixes but as far as overall raw performance don't expect any type of major jump going from 17.5 or 17.5 point1 to 17.6 now I did go ahead and run a geekbench 6 test and we scored a 2421 on the single core and a 6063 on the multicore here on my 13 Pro Max so pretty similar results to what we saw in the previous updates and then when it comes to battery life battery life is going to be in the same boats I would not really expect any type of change to the battery life here with iOS 17.6 I have been using the RC which is technically the final release for over a week now and battery life has been fine for me I've really not been able to tell a difference from 17.5 point1 at least on this device so don't expect any major changes there we likely will not see any changes to Performance or battery life until iOS 18 which they'll probably be worse at the beginning with iOS 18 but it will get a little bit better as time goes on but at this point we're pretty much reaching the end of the iOS 17 release cycle so now should you update to iOS 17.6 or should you just wait for iOS 18 and I would say at this point in the release cycle there's really no downside I wouldn't really worry too much about having issues when updating usually once we get this late into the cycle they not really going to run into any major issues so I don't really see any reason not to update to iOS 17.6 unless you're just really worried about things going wrong and you're having a perfect experience on the version that you're currently on but let's go a and talk about what to expect next because we are getting pretty pretty close to iOS 18 which is coming in September so you know in the month of August we could see a release of a 17.6 point1 and I do think that iOS 17.7 is also possible but iOS 17.7 could be the final you know single point update for iOS 17 I think we're going to see a lot of double Point updates for instance 17.6 point1 17.62 versions like that that are mainly just going to be security pack mates in minor bug fixes but we should be seeing iOS 18 at some point in mid September I would say somewhere around September 16th is when we can expect to see iOS 18 so if you're waiting for that that is when I would expect it so that is IOS 17.6 a relatively minor update as expected since all the big features and changes are being saved for iOS 18 in September but nonetheless hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did I would appreciate if you give it a thumbs up also be sure to subscribe for more iOS at in some more small ios7 videos in the future but anyways guys thanks again for watching and I'll see you soon\n"