Phone app freezes/gets stuck since iOS 12

I called Apple Support today, and the first person said she hadn’t heard of the issue. She had me do a forced reset (hold power and home button down together until the apple appears). That worked but of course disconnected our call. Someone else called back about 30 minutes later to see if it worked, and she said if there was a reoccurrence, they’d have to figure another solution. I told her the solution would be to update what broke this in the last update. She said the update was a fix of things, and implied but didn’t outright say that the update had nothing to do with it. I told her to check the forums and google for articles, this is a widely known and experienced issue. She said she’s had a couple of calls, but not a lot. The whole “it’s your problem, we had nothing to do with it” attitude ticked me off, and gave me a really bad feeling about the direction of their customer service.

I have exactly the same issue. Additionally, the top part of the back of my phone heats up. The heat is quite noticeable. I contacted apple and they said that they are still working on a way to get around this issue. How frustrating!

Right, the person that was helping me was also very dismissive. She said "everyone depends on their phone, even 4-year-olds feel that they can't live without their phones." I use my phone for work in the healthcare industry. My concern with not being able to use my phone it's not the same as a 4-year-old's.

Having the same problem with an SE that was just updated to first 12.0 and then 12.01. But I have another SE that doesn't seem to be having the problem - yet. Fingers crossed.

Same problem as described by everyone else. Just adding my voice to those calling on Apple to fix this asap.

I have this problem on a SE. I agree with the others who say “backup, wipe, restore” is rather pathetic for Apple to use as an excuse for what to do. Apple screws up, asks us to do their work on the off chance this might work, we lose hours of our life trouble shooting and then week/months/years from now Apple will quietly patch it and it will “magically” work again.

Update: visual voicemail isn’t working either. Can’t record custom message, I get the ‘can’t load helper application’ message or error 1035 every time I try to save a custom message. Visual voicemail doesn’t work at all, I have to call my number to get my voicemails. If I turn it to airplane mode, I can get all my messages prior to the update. I turn airplane mode back off, and all messages disappear. I tried the network reset, didn’t help.

It seems to be getting worse about running The phone app. Siri can do most phone work but gee whiz, the phone out to be a phone.

Yes - I have exactly the same issue with my iPhone X since i updated to IOS 12 and it has even happened since the last incremental update to IOS 12 a couple of days ago (so not fixed yet!)

Complete screen freeze on the Phone App while other Apps are absolutely fine. You can even make a call if you access the number from another app such as Messaging or Contacts - just not from the Phone app itself.

Force quitting the app and re-opening doesn't work - only solution is to re-boot the device.

Happens every few days.

Really hoping Apple picks this up due to volume of concerns (that's why I'm adding my voice): Backing up, resetting and restoring is a bit of a cop out - especially since there's no indication that that will even solve the problem.

Best Regards,

C.

Yes. Frustrating though it is, I am finding some dark humour and irony in the fact that there is clearly an issue with the 'phone' part of an iPhone and it does not seem to be at the top of Apple's fix list. 😁

C.

Solution found.

All:

I have an SE that the phone app freezes on.

Contacting Apple support got an almost pathetically Microsoft bad answer: backup, wipe, install, restore.

I told them it had been two weeks since this mistake on their part crippled our phones. They suggested as a workaround, using Siri ("Hey Siri dial XXXXXXX") or Contacts to make outbound calls. "Hey Siri check my voicemail" can also be used to access voicemail!

Apple support was not able to help with fixing this problem. However, while chatting with a tech by the handle “Mikey” last night I found a solution. The key nugget of info was this:

-> Updating over WiFi only changes the sections of the iOS code on your phone that has been changed In the new version.

-> Updating over a wire with iTunes REPLACES the iOS entirely on the device.

So if your phone is jacked up, here is what you do:

1) Update iTunes on your desktop/laptop. You need the latest version.

2) Connect your iPhone to your desktop/laptop.

3) Backup your phone to your deskto/laptop.

4) Leaving the wire connected, hard reboot the phone:

- iPhone SE and older, hold down “home” and “power” for 45 seconds or longer.

- Other newer models do the vol up, vol down, power, hold for 45 seconds.

5) Phone will reboot. KEEP HOLDING!

6) iTunes will say “there is a problem with the iPhone...”

7) Click “update”

8) iTunes will download an update and will install when download complete... mine was about 2.8 Mb.

9) Your desktop/laptop will decompress the file and then start pushing it to the phone.

- “iTunes is preparing to update the software on the phone”

10) Wait a bit

11) “iTunes is updating the software on the phone”

12) you will see the “Apple“ screen in your phone with a progress bar below the Apple showing how far the installation has progressed.

13) When the update is finished, it will say “Verifying the updated iPhone”

14) Phone reboots

15) When your phone wakes up, you will have to unlock your phone for the push to continue.

16) When it reboots, you will see “Syncing iPhone”

Now your phone app should work.

So the lesson learned is to push iOS updates over a wire with iTunes rather than downloading over WiFi.

I am not sure why Apple could not figure out this smoking tire fire of a disaster, but based on my experience this solved the problem.

I also still have this problem with an iPhone 6s with iOS 12.0.1 (16A404) installed (I have no other apps installed that affect the phone or contact list, as far as I know).

I'm only posting this so Apple can see that it's still happening.

Thanks, Misc, unfortunately when I tried this, iTunes didn’t detect any errors with my phone and so wouldn’t let me update.

I have turned off automatic updates on the iPhone so next update I can try doing via iTunes and not WiFi. I hope they release another update soon!

Hi - i just tried this solution last night and it worked ok. iTunes didn't detect any errors on my iPhone X but i was able to force a complete download of IOS 12. I think I clicked on the update button. It takes a long time to download (around 25 mins), and if you click on the icon on the upper right towards the top a bigger window pops up with the download status. If you don't click on the icon in the upper right hand corner it actually looks like nothing is happening.

Darin

Hi - the apple support page talked about going into Apple store if you don't have a computer. Not sure if you actually need an appointment or if you can just walk in and use one of their computers for free.

Darin

This is an update to my earlier post...I have a 5SE with 12.0.1 installed and for the past 2 weeks my phone app was frozen on 'Recents' whenever I tried to open it. I finally solved the problem by going to Settings/General/Rest/Reset All Settings. I did this over wifi, and when the phone restarted it asked me to enter my password to install updates. For about 1 hour the screen just showed the apple logon on the screen. After an hour I did a second hard reset and the issue was fixed upon startup. My best guess is perhaps the 12.0.1 update didn't install properly the first time. Ridiculous that this is what it took to fix it, but at least now my phone is a phone again!

I just wanted to give an update. Ever since I did these 2 things (not sure which one worked), the problem did not arise in the past week.

1) Settings->General->Reset->Reset Network Settings

2) Did the force update of IOS 12 from iTunes (wired to computer). This apparently did a full IOS download and deploy to my phone rather than the partial update from the air.

I have 256GB iPhone X.