iOS 6 Upgrade Has Its Share of Troubles

Apple customers around the world got their first taste of iOS 6 on the iPad and iPhone Wednesday - and as with any major upgrade, there were headaches as well as delights in store.

The new OS had its share of teething troubles, most notably a Wi-Fi login bug that Apple quickly and mysteriously resolved. Other users saw ongoing problems with accessing music on their iPhones.

The troubles started with the process of downloading the massive update itself, which clocked in at a hefty 2.5 GB. iOS 6 is an “over the air” upgrade, meaning no connection to iTunes is required. It also meant that millions of early adopters were all trying to grab the file at the same time when it first appeared in Software Update Wednesday morning.

Apple servers seemed to hold up pretty well under the pressure, although users saw wildly different download times depending on their connection, location and time of day — from a few minutes all the way up to 5 hours.

Many found a greater problem was in store when the update installed itself, and froze with an apparently empty progress bar. If they were patient, however, the bar would suddenly show a lot of progress very fast — as much as an hour later.

Then came the Wi-Fi bug many users spotted at once. Attempting to log into Wi-Fi networks their phones and tablets had previously recognized and stored passwords for, users were assaulted with a login page that directed them to a non-working URL at Apple.com.

When confronted with the bug, the company acknowledged that it had existed, but shouldn’t be a problem any more. Sure enough, whatever switch was flipped on the backend worked, and the Wi-Fi bug vanished.

Meanwhile, some users — myself and this Apple support forum included — reported that their Music libraries had suddenly vanished. Playlist, Artist and Album names all remained, but the tracks themselves were unavailable.

A spinning wheel in the upper left corner of the device’s screen indicated that the Music app was trying to access something, but the songs remained stubbornly invisible, even to Siri.

We’ve reached out to Apple to see if this is another day-one bug that can be quickly solved. In the meantime, how was your iOS 6 upgrade experience? Let us know in the comments.

UPDATE: A MacRumors commenter offered a plausible explanation for the Wi-Fi bug — the fact that your device is supposed to ping “http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html” to test its connection, but that someone at Apple may have temporarily deleted that page.


Chris Taylor
Mashable.com