One of the new features in iOS 14 is the ability to change the default email or browser app to a third-party alternative such as Chrome, Edge, or Outlook. A bug in the first public release of iOS 14, however, causes your default browser or mail app setting to reset to Mail or Safari when your iPhone or iPad reboots.
For example, let’s say you wanted to change your default web browser from Safari to Google Chrome. You simply head into the Settings app, look for Chrome, then choose the “Default Browser App” setting and make the change. After you’ve made that change, all links will automatically open in Chrome instead of Safari.
In the version of iOS 14 released to the public this week, there is a massive caveat to the new default browser and settings. If you reboot your iPhone or iPad, the default app setting will reset to Apple’s first-party Mail and Safari applications.
What this means is that if you set Chrome as the default browser, but then your iPhone dies or you need to reboot it, Safari will once again become the default browser app until you go back into the Settings app and make the change again. The same applies to email apps such as Microsoft Outlook and Spark as well.
This is almost certainly some sort of bug on Apple’s side, because it is affecting email and browser apps from multiple companies including Google, Microsoft, and Readdle. On Twitter, a Google Chrome engineer has acknowledged the problem, though the ball is likely in Apple’s court to roll out some sort of fix — unless this is bizarrely the intended behavior.
iOS 14 users have also noticed that if you change the default email application, but keep your default browser app set to Safari, email links in Safari will still open in Apple’s Mail app rather than the third-party email client that you had set as your default. If your default browser is set to something other than Safari, mailto: links work as intended and open in your default mail app of choice.
Have you experienced any of these quirks related to default mail and browser applications? Or are you sticking with Safari and Mail anyways? Let us know down in the comments!
Read more:
- iOS 14: Here’s an early look at how you’ll be able to change default apps
- You can now make Microsoft Outlook and Edge your default email and web browser on iOS
- iOS 14: How to set Google Chrome as your default browser on iPhone
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