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Notifications bug affects iOS 8.3 users

Apple’s software engineers have been made aware of an apparent bug affecting notifications for of the native Mail application in iOS 8.3. The bug presents itself when users enable “banner” notifications for mail messages. Unlike previous versions of iOS, banner notifications for Mail now contain a preview of the entire message, even with the “show previews” setting toggled to off.

The scope of this bug appears to be widespread, though it’s unclear how many users are actually affected. Users have reported experiencing this bug on both iPhone and iPad. However, because banners are turned off under the default notification settings for mail, most users would not be aware of the issue.

The author of this post was able to reproduce the bug on several devices, including an iPhone 5, an iPhone 6, and a The New iPad. Yesterday evening, I was able to speak Angela [Redacted], an iOS Senior Advisor at Apple Care about this bug. Angela told me that while she had not previously been aware of the notifications bug, she was able to reproduce it on her own device after I explained the problem to her.

The notifications bug is the latest in a series of flaws introduced into iOS through updates. After installing iOS 8.2, many users reported that they were unable to use the Safari mobile browser. Previously, other users reported that their devices were “bricked” after attempting to install iOS 8.1.

It remains to be seen how soon this latest bug will be corrected. Some experts expect iOS 8.4 to be issued on or soon after the Apple Watch release date of April 24, though it is questionable whether a fix could be included by that time.

Comments

  1. Terrence Newton - 9 years ago

    I wonder, is this actually a bug? Or was it supposed to work this way all along, ever since iOS 8 debuted? Up until and including iOS 7, before actionable notifications, mail banner notifications would always give you a short preview of the message content. Now, I don’t recall if this could be controlled by the ‘show preview’ toggle, but these banners would only show up when your phone was unlocked anyway. When actionable notifications debuted in iOS 8, the previews went away. I personally didn’t like that, because I’d grown accustomed to being able to see a snippet of the message without having to open it. Furthermore, I was able to drag down that notification to reveal notification center, which would give me an even longer preview of the message. In iOS 8, all dragging down did was reveal the action buttons, and absolutely no preview option was available. The only way to see a preview was either in a lock screen notification, or by opening notification center after the banner is gone, and if your’re going to do that, you might as well open the mail app. Yes, the ‘mark read’ and ‘trash’ buttons were added, but I’m probably not going to do either of those things if I can’t see any of the message content. Now, with the 8.3 update, message previews are back in the banners. It gives you a much fuller preview than what was available in iOS 7. I’m a big fan of it. You can’t turn these off with the ‘show preview’ toggle, but they only appear when your phone is unlocked, so whether or not that preview appeared, anyone with access to your unlocked phone could read the message just by tapping the notification. Also, the preview only appears if you drag the tab to expand it, so your unlocked phone that’s sitting out there with banner email notifications turned on won’t be flashing your email content. The ‘show preview’ toggle still does control the preview on the lock screen however, which I feel is appropriate.

    tl;dr: Is this really a bug? I like the new functionality, I feel that it was the way it was supposed to work since 8.0, and I don’t think it’s a security risk. Please don’t change it Apple.

    • hbrilliant - 9 years ago

      Yes, this is a bug. If you turn previews off, it’s not supposed to show a preview. If you like the preview in the banner notifications, turn previews on in the settings.

  2. michaelg379 - 9 years ago

    I’ve been noticing this bug too – hopping it’ll be fixed in iOS 8.4

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