Apple reportedly pauses iOS 18 development to focus on bugs

Apple has taken the step of temporarily pausing development of next year's iOS 18 to focus on fixing bugs in the code.

This is according to a new report by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who claims the delay was internally announced to employees last week.

The version of iOS that's currently available to the public is iOS 17.1.1, but Apple is already at work on iOS 18, which is likely to be launched in 2024. However, early versions of iOS 18 were so buggy that Apple decided to halt further development until the company's engineers iron out the bugs and improve the software's performance.

The report calls the move "rare" and "unusual," while noting that Apple's recent releases weren't as buggy — though we're not sure all users would agree, given the amount of bugs found since iOS 17's launch.

The pause in development will reportedly only last a week, after which work on new features will resume.

The report also claims that Apple briefly stopped the development of iOS 17.4, which is due for a release in March. Finally, the delay also affected the development of Apple's visionOS, which is the software platform for the company's upcoming Vision Pro headset. However, the delays were brief, and are unlikely to postpone consumer releases of any software.