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iOS 14.1 rolling out to iPhones, but no sign of a battery fix

iOS 14.1 has been rolling out to iPhones over the past 24 hours, but there's no indication of a battery fix.

Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributor on Oct. 21, 2020

As expected, iOS 14.1 has begun to roll out to iPhones over the past 24 hours, paving the way for the iPhone 12 release.

But does it fix the bugs that are plaguing users?

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The official release notes mention a lot of bugs, some really weird (like that Calculator bug).

Addresses an issue where some widgets, folders, and icons were showing up in reduced size on the Home Screen
Addresses an issue where dragging widgets on the Home Screen could remove apps from folders
Fixes an issue where some emails in Mail were sent from an incorrect alias
Fixes an issue that could prevent incoming calls from displaying region information
Fixes an issue on some devices where selecting zoomed display mode and an alphanumeric passcode could result in the Lock Screen emergency call button overlapping with the text input box
Addresses an issue where some users were occasionally unable to download or add songs to their library while viewing an album or playlist
Fixes an issue that could prevent zeroes from appearing in Calculator
Resolves an issue where streaming video resolution could temporarily be reduced at the start of playback
Fixes an issue that prevented setting up a family member's Apple Watch for some users
Resolves an issue where the Apple Watch case material was displayed incorrectly in the Apple Watch app
Addresses an issue in the Files app that could cause some MDM-managed cloud service providers to incorrectly display content as unavailable
Improves compatibility with Ubiquiti wireless access points

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There's also a new feature added that's essentially support for an iPhone 12 feature:

Adds support for 10-bit HDR video playback and edit in Photos for iPhone 8 and later

But that leaves a lot of bugs totally untouched. Battery bugs. Connectivity bugs. User interface lags and such.

My initial testing -- with the pre-release version and even pushing a few iPhones through a few recharge cycles over the past 24 hours -- suggest that battery life is, sadly, still an issue on this release.

iOS 14 quickly revealed itself as Apple's worse release to date. It's weirdly buggy, and I'm still coming across new and odd bugs (for example, the other day I noticed that the Camera app sometimes just wants to display a black screen).

There's also that annoying bug related to the Apple Watch and missing data and battery drain that requires users wipe their iPhones to fix. Sure, Apple's released information on how to do this, but any time you need to get users to wipe a device, and risk losing data, it's a massive fail.

Now that the iPhone 12 and iOS 14.1 release are out of the pipe, it's likely that Apple will go start swatting more bugs.

Want to install iOS 14.1? Head over to Settings > General > Software Update and kick the process off from there. It's quite a big update -- anywhere up to 500MB -- so make sure you have time on your hands to download and install it.