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Apple iPhone 5S users continue to discover new bugs in iOS 7, the latest of which has been dubbed the “blue screen of death”—or, a bit more friendly, the BSOD.
As early as Sept. 24, users have been posted to forum boards in confusion about the BSOD, which appears to be tied to iDrop, “an entirely new way to quickly and easily share content with people nearby,” as Apple said in a Sept. 10 statement, and iWork, the productivity suite that it made a show of offering for free—with iLife, iMovie and iPhone—Sept. 10.
“We were having troubles getting anything to show up,” wrote user GeekMoxie on iMore Forums Sept. 24, who was trying to get AirDrop to work between two iPhone 5 devices, “and while I was messing with the settings, my screen flickered to a bright blue blank screen and then power-cycled.”
Geek.com reported Oct. 11 that several other users have encountered the BSOD when switching between iWorks applications.
On the Apple Support Communities forum, another user posted, “How do I resolve the blue screen error while using iWork on my iPhone 5S? When I use Pages, for example, and press the home button to switch apps, my iPhone restarts after a blue screen.”
Another forum user sympathized with this: “I am having the same issue. I tried the ‘turn off pages access to icloud’ but that did not solve the issue, and I am still getting the blue screen of death with Pages on the iPhone. Pages runs fine on my iPad.”
A fix, said forum user Gurinders, is to turn off Pages, Numbers and Keynote from iCloud’s documents and data. “It worked on mine,” he wrote.
User Data Wrangler added that “double [clicking] to switch apps also appears to work .”
Geek.com was kind enough to point out that the offending screen could be more offensive.
“In fairness to iOS honcho Jony Ive, it’s a minimalist take on the BSOD. There’s no bothersome text output cluttering up the screen, just a bright blue hue from edge to edge.”
Apple has yet to comment on the issue.
BSOD is hardly the only bug that’s been found in Apple’s latest mobile platform. Days after its release, one user discovered a way to bypass the lock screen—by swiping repeatedly to the Control Center and then opening the alarm clock and holding down the phone’s sleep button.
Another bug was discovered involving the Touch ID fingerprint sensor. The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg pointed it out while reviewing the iPhone 5S. “Sometimes, while trying to use a finger to authenticate an online purchase, the phone asks for a password,” he wrote Sept. 17. “Apple says it expects to fix this bug very quickly.”