Apple fixes iPhone and iPad bug that affected many users

If you have a recent Apple iPhone, iPad, or both, your device might have been at risk from a recent update.

That’s right — Apple sent out a software update last week, and some users who updated reported the strangest of things happening.

The iOS 17.5 update was a major one and brought with it several features, bug fixes, and more to all eligible iPhone and iPad models.

But it did the opposite — the update induced unusual behavior on some devices, according to user reports.

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So, what was the issue?

Some iPhone and iPad users reported seeing deleted images in their device’s Photos app.

This included sensitive images that users deleted long ago, which appear at the top of the ‘Recent’ images section on their devices.

Now, that certainly sounds scary, doesn’t it?

As critical as it sounds, it didn’t end there.

Some people saw deleted images appearing even on factory reset iPhones with a new person using the smartphones.

That means even if you have a different Apple account running on the device, the images from your account might show up on the iPhone or iPad.

This made people wonder if deleted images would appear on iPad and iPhone models that were sold off to someone else.

It’s a fairly huge risk and could be misused if Apple doesn’t address it.

Fortunately, Apple did — and released an emergency iOS 17.5.1 update to fix the issue.

The update is available to all eligible devices now, and we recommend updating your device.

The update’s release notes said, “This update provides important bug fixes and addresses a rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted.”

It’s quite a task to precisely determine how many users were affected by this unusual bug without Apple’s help.

Hence, you might want to avoid the risk.

We don’t know which images have a chance of reappearing, but it could be sensitive media that you likely deleted for a reason.