Software in the new Apple Watch 4 smartwatch suffers for quite a serious vulnerability. Australians have found out about it firsts. Recently in Australia there was a change of time from winter to summer, which caused a continuous reset loop. The problem concerns a new function that draws the user’s activity from the last 24 hours on the watch face. It is a pity that Apple employees have not completely thought about the new amenity.
It seems that Apple should start employing better testers. Designers of the new Apple Watch 4 smartwatch have forgotten to check how their product behaves when changing time. While the transition from summer to winter time can cause at most the data overwrite in one hour, the other way is worse. At the transition from winter to summer, the watches move one hour forward. This means that there is a gap in historical data (or more accurately on the graphs showing them). Therefore, IT solutions designers always check the behavior of their program when changing time. Unfortunately, Apple forgot about it.
The troublesome bootloop on Apple Watch 4 is a one-time problem
You probably wonder why the problem occurred only on the latest Apple smartwatches. The problem is related to the new functionality that displays a graph summarizing user activity from the last 24 hours. Apparently the developers from Cupertino did not foresee that the displayed data can be “leaky”. Therefore, a sudden shift of time one hour ahead caused the smartwatch to fall into a loop of continuous resets. The problem ceased only after the batteries were discharged and waiting for several hours (i.e. until 24 hours after the time change).
I am convinced that Apple will soon release an update that will fix this error. Thanks to this, residents of the United States and Europe will not face a similar problem. In turn, Apple testers will from now on check new products (this also applies to software) in terms of behavior when changing time.
Source: AppleInsider
