Apple’s iOS 18.4 update, released earlier this week, is reportedly causing long-delete apps to make a return engagement on some users’ iPhones. Several iPhone users on forums and social media seeing apps make a return engagement after installing the update. Apple released iOS 18.4 on Monday.
Posts in several Reddit threads (1,2,3,4), as well as posts on Apple’s Community Support pages complain that after updating to iOS 18.4, they discovered third-party apps and/or games showing up on their device that were not there before.
The iOS 18.4 update apparently has a bug that is causing deleted apps to reappear, even when the apps had been deleted by the users months or even years ago.
While this could happen when a user has Apple’s Automatic Downloads option, as it enabled automatic downloads of apps purchased on other Apple devices, many of the affected users say they don’t own another Apple device.
As reported by MacRumors, the affected users have never jailbroken their device, nor have they used an alternative app store.
While Apple will likely fix the issue in a future update, iPhone users in the meantime will need to manually re-delete the prodigal apps until the bug is fixed.
