iOS 17 So Far, Continued

Here is another post on the newest generation of iOS and a flaw, which had been detected in it, relating to media apps. I had gone into detail in my last post on the software, but here it is again, with words about what had clinched it for me.

This particular and much unexpected and unwelcome flaw with iOS 17, has everything to do with music and TV and how they sync up when you purchase new music, or new TV shows and episodes of TV shows and not the alert or ringtones. Before iOS 17, I would purchase either new music, movies or TV shows and I would download a previously deleted episode of The Simpsons, in order to help sync both the music and TV apps up with each other. For some odd reason, The Simpsons is my go-to TV show for syncing up my music with TV and everything in both apps and respective libraries. I don’t know why, but that is just how it is. Something else which is odd, sometimes I seem to lose all of my Simpsons episodes in the downloaded episodes. I obviously haven’t lost them, because things hadn’t been synced up with the new album purchase.

In the past, I would download from the TV app and yesterday, I purchased an album on iTunes, which relates to one of my favourite bands, namely Queen and a Freddie Mercury compilation from 2019. I tried the usual thing, but for some reason things did not sync up. The first clue I had that something was wrong was when I would do the download of the episode I had deleted, get out of it by closing the TV app, come back and it said that it could not download the episode. What happened? I don’t know, but I had tried deleting an entire season and redownloading it and the same thing happened again, unless I had stayed and babysat the download. So, I tried deleting again and this time, downloading from the iTunes Store app and it worked from there. Why?

The clincher for me was when I went into my Settings app, general, iPhone storage and then review TV downloads. This includes both TV and movies including anything I may have purchased from the Classic Albums series. I tested this out on the A Night At The Opera Classic Albums documentary and the same thing happened. What was that same thing you may ask? Well, when reviewing TV downloads, those Simpsons episodes and the documentary were missing from there when I had re-downloaded them onto my phone from the TV app. When going into the iTunes app, I found them under TV and movies respectively, then downloaded them again and when I did that, everything showed up as if nothing was wrong and my TV seasons and movies were all there, in the TV app and when reviewing TV and movies in iPhone storage.

Just a note of warning, when you go into the iTunes app, go to more, then purchased and either music, TV shows or movies, then download either a movie or TV episode or episodes, it will probably say “Play” when you wish to do the download back onto your phone or maybe even your iPad. This may confuse some of us so, now you know why that is, if you have an iPhone 15 and had noticed that some things haven’t come back in the transfer. However, if you tap the “Play” button in the iTunes app, it will download everything as is and it will all be back and everything will match, with both the TV app and with iPhone storage. The catch is that you can only download each episode one at a time, but at least you can start the download and not have to babysit it. The other thing is that while downloading episodes one by one by one, you can just keep moving along while movies and episodes are redownloading and in my case, when I hear the words “cancel download” I know that the download has started and I can move on to the next one and so it goes. I had tested this out with my movies, seasons of TV shows and an entire HBO special from 2014. Yes, I have the Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways special on my phone as of June 2022 and there are a lot of episodes to download, including bonus material and interviews with various musicians and even Barack Obama. When I did the test I had found I had missed the episode on Washington DC and the track The Feast and the Famine and I had to go back and get it again, after closing the iTunes app. Yes, I close my apps when I know I won’t be needing them for a while because they do not need to stay open.

Can you imagine if you have a lot of TV episodes, seasons of shows and a bunch of movies to download onto your iPhone 15, if and when you upgrade to it? For some reason, both books, TV shows and movies do not come back by themselves when doing the transfer of data and the upgrade to a newer phone. I do not expect this to change any time soon and now, I hope I will not have to upgrade for a while, because of this flaw. By the way, isn’t this kind of a disincentive for those who have a mast a collection of music, books, movies and TV shows to upgrade with something like this going on with iOS 17? By the way, the music app allows you to download music and you can download it from the iTunes app and everything shows up in all appropriate places, including iPhone storage.

Otherwise, iOS 17 works just fine… … unless there is something else hiding in there which needs attention and needs to be talked about, to Apple and to other users. I hope that this will certainly get attention from not just myself, but others who still purchase music, movies and TV shows on their phones, rather than only streaming.