iPhone keeps freezing after iOS 14 update

This is a long thread to read all the posts but if you do you’ll see that many people have tried a restore but it’s proven unsuccessful. This is an iOS 14 problem, because the same devices were absolutely fine when running ios13.

iPhone X s max, under 2 years old. Everything worked fine before this update, but now it keeps freezing randomly several times a day and the battery can run down from full to 55 % after an hour of reading the kindle app. This is rubbish. If not fixed soon, my upgrade will be a Samsung. Not happy.

I see that a number of critical posts have been removed from this thread. They were reactions from people to their poorly responding phones. Is this normal policy here to remove such things?

Anyway, regarding the freezing problem I strongly recommend that you upgrade to iOS 14.3, it’s made the response of both my iPhone X and iPad better.

I’ve tested the iOS 14.3 upgrade for more than 24 hours and can confirm that my earlier finding above doesn’t hold, and that it hasn’t fixed the app stalling issue. It’s particularly a problem in Safari and email. In Safari, an issue still exists on my iPhone X whereby if I scroll up and down a webpage it resizes the page before crashing.

I’ve had a long Twitter conversation with Apple Support over a couple of days about the problems affecting my iPhone X and iPad and those of so many other people since moving to iOS 14. Apple Support were thorough and very helpful and today ran remote diagnostics of my phone to identify whether it was a fault specific to my device.

Their response was “There were no hardware issues reported in the diagnostics. We’ve heard reports of this issue and it’s currently under review. Apple does not yet have a complete understanding of the issue, therefore, it is not possible for Apple to promise a solution or predict when any investigation will be complete. We recommend keeping your iPhone up-to-date in the meantime.”

I’m glad that they’re aware of the problem and hope that they’ll soon understand the cause and be able to offer a fix via an iOS upgrade.

My iPhone 11 did this in 14.1, 14.2 and now hopefully that Apple would fix this error - still happening in 14.3. I know it is going to happen because I open an app and instead of information populating the screen ie Currency; Stocks, Mail etc all that appears in the screen is the colour of the app and a close line at the bottom of screen. Then NOTHING works and you can’t even press on off button. After up / down Vol + on button several times black screen. Dead iPhone. After about 4 minutes there Apple start screen!! Not good for a $2k phone. I have never had these sort of errors before and a repeated mistake over 3 iOSs

Apple is a 2 trillion $ company and needs to start dealing efficiently with problems which are linked to the latest iOS asap. Bean counters too much control. I’ve been Apple Mac User since 1987 and this iOS issue on $2k phone is not good enough. And wait for service by genius far too long

@cmaryg, absolutely! It’s just not right that so many people are having problems with ios14. Apple is regarded as a premium product and expecting customers to suffer this software problem for 3 months to date is ridiculous.

This is a serious issue that’s affecting many Apple product users. Please share the link to this thread on your socials to help spread the word and allow others suffering similarly to come forward and post here. Perhaps the sheer volume of response will encourage Apple to provide a fix

I started experiencing this as well. Eventually iphone x got into a state where it would not respond even after hard restart.

fortunately i have Apple Care and phone was replaced.

Everything was fine for a few weeks and now I am back in the same situation. Phone not responding to even hard restart.

Observations

It seems to randomly occur. apps can sometimes freeze mid use. Often you find it has frozen when you next pick it up from a lock screen. Sometimes if you put it down it recovers after a few minutes to an hour or so inexplicably. A hard restart (vol up vol down then power button held down) will resolve. However eventually it gets into state where if the hard restart will not resolve it you can not resolve.

It eventually gets into a state where it wants you to unlock the phone but of course you can not do this and once there it seems that you can never get out. This is very circular and frustrating. Do I update to a new device such as Iphone 12. It seems i will end up in the same state reading this forum!

But having just gone through 6 hard restarts the last one worked, This is very time consuming.

This sounds very similar to my specific problem. I’ve had the same issue with 3 different iPhones now — two iPhone 8’s and now my iPhone 11. The problem actually seems to get WORSE with each subsequent update. At random times, apps on my phone will inexplicably freeze and then apps will not open. Weirdly, however, it’s not all apps. Some apps, like Twitter and Facebook, seem unaffected, while other apps like Google Chrome and YouTube become unusable.

Doing a hard restart on the phone used to clear up the issue, but now even that doesn’t seem to work as I just have to wait until it decides it wants to work again. My metric for whether or not I know my phone apps are open again is to tap “Password and Security” in my Apple ID settings, and whenever it decides to actually load, 95% of the time that means my apps are working again.

The only through line I can find between all three phones is my Apple ID. I’m convinced that there is some error or glitch with my ID that causes all my iPhones to freak out and not update properly. At this point I think my only recourse is to do a hard reset and start over with a new ID, which I don’t want to do because I have a bunch of purchases on here, but frankly it seems that’s going to be my only option.

Hi,

its not your Apple ID that has nothing to do with it. I’ve erased and set up my 7 with a new and my old ID. Apple still haven’t resolved this issue. It seems like the ram is over clocking and causing the phone to freeze and become unusable.

It's a matter of time it will come back and haunt again. I experienced it before. I use the clear memory method, reboot doesn't work. In the end, I remove any one app that hung, and reinstall. Thereafter, all apps are working again. Will monitor for a while. It might be too early to count the chicken.

I’ve updated to the recently released iOS 14.4 in the hope that it would cure the app stalling problems on my iPhone X and iPad series 5.

Unfortunately it’s made the stalling/freezing on my iPad even worse, and email is now almost unworkable. It’s slow to fetch email and regularly stalls for 5-10 seconds whilst fetching Mail, searching or scrolling through a mailbox. Worse than this, is that the upgrade has removed the subject text from messages more than 3 days old meaning I cannot search for messages anymore.

This problem doesn’t affect my iPhone and because the problem started with the installation of iOS 14 and is getting worse with every subsequent version I’m convinced this is a deliberate action by Apple to slow/ruin older devices to encourage owners to buy new devices.

My iPhone X and iPad series 5 have been locking up, and some apps stalling and crashing since changing to iOS 14 when it was released. Performance has been poor too, especially on the iPad, and there are frequent stalls which take 10 seconds or so for the OS to resolve. I’ve tried complete restore from backup and deletion of the apps that suffered most from these problems - Mail and Safari - but the problem persisted. Interestingly, each version iteration since iOS 14 has helped my iPhone regain the performance it had when running iOS 13, but my iPad either continued to perform badly or got worse with each new version. This lead me to believe it was a deliberate action by Apple to slow down older devices as a ploy to encourage users to purchase new replacements.

After installing IOS14.4 on my iPad performance was still terrible especially Mail. I deleted all Mail accounts and the Mail app before rebooting the device, and reinstalled the Mail app. After recreating the accounts things were even worse and all email subject lines were left blank and so email became unusable. This was a common problem when iOS 13 was introduced. Again, I removed email accounts and deleted the app. After reinstalling the app and recreating email accounts Mail is working properly and performance is restored to the level when running iOS 13.

I recommend installing 14.4 then reboot the device. Remove Mail accounts and delete the Mail app. Reboot again. Install the Mail app and recreate email accounts. Like me, you may have to repeat this process a couple of times. I hope it works for you as well as it has for me.