Notes App iOS16 Ventura -> iOS17 Sonoma // Unretrievable Data Due to Lock
I wish that I could find quickly my earlier post, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that here.
There is a nasty bug in the Notes app due to the OS updates. When I appended a Covid card image to my existing Covid cards that are stored in a locked Notes app on my iPhone, I didn't know that I wouldn't be able to open it on either iOS16, iPad16 or macOS Ventura. Fortunately, I have paper copies. Had I changed a digital only file in the Notes app, I might have had a major problem. To repeat the bug:
- Unlock the existing (iOS16) locked file in the Notes app on the iPhone running iOS17.
- Scan and save a new image to that unlocked file.
- Go to the device that is running Ventura, iOS16 or iPad16.
- Unlock the file.
- A pop-up box appears with the text "Editing this attachment is unsupported on this device. To edit it, upgrade to the latest version of macOS."
I got my 5K 27" Mac in 2019 brand new from Apple and added memory to the i5. I barely understand why Apple decided to obsolete my Gen1 iPad Pro from 2015, but not my Mac from four years ago. Fortunately I have a M2 Mbook that's about a year old. Again, fortunately I have paper copies too. I can't believe that Apple intended to gate keep my data that goes with these devices. So, today I ran a quick test to see if it's the "lock", or encryption that's causing the issue. It might be. When I removed the pin lock, all of the attachments were visible on both devices. But when I re-added the lock, I got the #5 message above. If the issue is related to time/space/frequency and CPUs, Apple should be displaying a large and clear warning message in the Notes app, and in all apps that feature pins/locks of user data, that we lose access to the data on older devices. I've heard that tens of millions of devices have been obsoleted with iOS17 and macOS Sonoma. That's not surprising, but this issue with losing access to locked data in the Notes app is a big problem. Forced updates to Sonoma, which is brand new, is not on my menu. I believe this is a fixable bug and I hope there's a fix soon for Ventura and iOS16/iPad16 devices.
iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 13.6