What’s in the base of your iPhone? Download Apple Music and you can find your way there.
david fella
A new bug has been discovered for the iPhone 13 series, as well as millions of previous iPhones, and now Apple has confirmed it. It’s not exactly malicious, and it won’t stop your iPhone from working, but it’s certainly curious and maybe a little rude.
The newly discovered bug potentially affects many users because it relates to iPhones running iOS 15, and possibly earlier, and concerns a very particular set of circumstances around Apple Music.
kevin archer, an iOS developer, spotted the strange behavior. It’s about what happens when you download Apple Music from the App Store. When you do this, the app will be installed somewhere on your iPhone, in the next available place, right? Wrong. If you have a third-party app in fourth place on your home screen dock, that’s where Apple Music will go.
So if, like Archer, you had Spotify in position four in the dock, when you download Apple Music, Spotify will launch and relocate you to the home screen while installing Apple’s rival app in the dock. Archer’s tweet shows this in action.
I mean, it’s kind of fun instead of a serious problem. And it requires a very specific use case to see it, i.e. you need to have deleted Apple Music before and decided to download it again. Only then will it appear on the dock.
Now, let’s be clear, this is a bug, not a feature, and Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac and several other publications that it’s looking into it. Also, it’s emphatically not targeting Spotify specifically: other apps will be kicked out if they’re in that fourth position in the dock, which is the default position for Apple Music on the iPhone. In other words, it’s like Apple Music is returning to where it feels most at home, you see.
In fact, it’s a more complex bug than that, as some Twitter users have pointed out that Apple’s own apps like Safari or Mail can be kicked out of the dock by a freshly downloaded Apple Music and can sometimes be installed on assumption. three on the dock, for example.
Another developer, Dim Sartz, claims that this is an issue that has arisen since iOS 12, when Apple made it possible to remove its apps. Apple Music is “the only removable app of the 4 that are in the dock by default, so it seems they forgot to consider what happens in this case.”
Whether that’s correct or not, it’s clear that iOS seems to want to place certain default apps in particular places. It doesn’t seem likely, as has been claimed, that Apple is rigging the system to get Apple Music’s rivals to move: the hit happens to any third-party app in that grassroots position.
Apple is close to releasing iOS 15.5, so you may be able to fix this issue in time for that update. If not, expect iOS 15.5.1 to arrive in no time.