It won’t be much longer before Apple unveils iOS 8 but the company is still going to push out one last update to iOS 7.1 that will likely fix two critical bugs. MacRumors has noticed a distinct uptick in traffic coming from devices that run on an unreleased build called iOS 7.1.2 that it speculates will be used to patch bugs related to email encryption and text messages that don’t get delivered to former iPhone users who have switched to Android, Windows Phone or another mobile OS.
Earlier this month German security researcher Andreas Kurtz found that that encryption for email attachments has been disabled on iOS versions 7 and higher, even the recently released iOS 7.1.1 that was issued specifically to fix security flaws. Kurtz reported the problem to Apple, which acknowledged the issue and promised a fix in an upcoming release.
As for the text message issue, several former iPhone users who recently switched to Android devices have found that they are no longer receiving text messages from friends who are still using the iPhone. The problem arises when people switch from the iPhone to Android or Windows Phone without changing their phone number — apparently, Apple keeps that number in its data base and still has it marked as belonging to an iPhone user. This means that any text messages sent through iPhones to that number get stuck in Apple’s cloud and aren’t pushed out to smartphones that run on a different OS.
We don’t know when Apple will officially release iOS 7.1.2 but we’d assume it will come before Apple kicks off WWDC on June 2nd.
