I thought my iPhone 6 Plus — running iOS 11.0.1 — had reached the end of its life as it began to lose functionality during a train ride home this past weekend. Apps wouldn't open, the app switcher just didn't work and I couldn't even swipe between the pages of apps on my home screen. Turns out, I wasn't the only one.
A Reddit thread on r/Apple, which currently has 2,317 up-votes and 804 comments, has been a dumping ground for other users whose devices have been rendered less-usable by this update. User metricrules has experienced nearly every flaw one could imagine, including freezing and rebooting, broken volume controls, muted alarms, loss of remote functionality on Apple headphones and even an inability to make phone calls.
Another user asks "anybodys phone start freezing 10+ times a day and then restarting? Since iOS 11 my phone has been freezing a lot and with iOS 11.0.1 it's doing it even more... so frustrating."
MORE: 12 iPhone X Features We Can't Wait to Use
Comments also show battery life issues with the new update, as one user claims they "Went to bed with 18%," and "woke up to a dead [redacted] phone."
Reports of these bugs are based on a variety of iPhones, including the 7. So, if you had thought — as I did — that your aging iPhone just wasn't fast enough for iOS 11 and that you were going to need to buy a new model, it seems the issues might be more about the update itself than the shelf-life of your phone.
I managed to make my iPhone more usable by draining its battery at the end of that night. Once I brought it back to life from a dead screen, its worst issues went away and merely stayed slightly sluggish, which is still frustrating me to a point where I'm wondering if I'll need to upgrade (even though I claimed I wouldn't).
Apple will likely release a fix to this, as the company already pushed a public beta version of iOS 11.1 out for testing. We've reached out to Apple for comment, and will update this story if and when we find out more.
