So Apple just pushed out iOS 7.0.2, and if you've been anywhere near a tech forum this week you already know why. It patches that lock screen bug, the one where you could get into someone's photos, Twitter, and email without ever typing their passcode. I want to talk about it because I actually tried it myself on my own phone, sitting at my kitchen table on Tuesday night, and it worked embarrassingly well.
Here's the trick, for anyone who missed it: from the lock screen you swipe up for Control Center (new in iOS 7, in case you slept through the last two weeks), open the Camera, then work the multitasking gesture just right and you can pop out into other apps that are still running underneath. Photos. Messages. Whatever was open before the phone locked. No passcode required. I saw a video of a teenager demoing it and figured there was no way it actually worked on a real phone, not a jailbroken one, not some beta build. It did. Took me maybe four tries to get the timing right and then I was staring at my own camera roll like an idiot, impressed and annoyed at the same time.
Annoyed because I'd just spent two weeks defending iOS 7 to basically everyone I know. My brother-in-law kept sending me screenshots comparing the new Control Center icons to a kids' toy, and I kept saying the redesign was fine, people just hate change, give it a month. And then the lock screen, the one thing a phone's security is actually supposed to do, turned out to have a hole you could drive a truck through. Not a great week to be making that argument.
To be fair to Apple, six days from "teenager posts video" to "patch is live" isn't bad as these things go. iOS 7.0.2 also fixes a second, dumber bug where you could bypass the passcode entirely and place FaceTime calls to any number from the lock screen. I don't know who at Apple's QA team missed both of these on a shipping OS, but I also don't envy whoever had to explain it internally.
This is the second security story out of iOS 7 in about a week, if you're counting. The Chaos Computer Club guys in Germany cracked Touch ID a few days back using a fake fingerprint lifted off a photograph of a glass surface, laminated with wood glue of all things. I'm less bothered by that one honestly, since it takes real effort and a decent photo of your actual finger, and most people trying to get into my phone are not German security researchers with a laser printer. The lock screen bug was worse specifically because any idiot with thirty seconds and your phone in their hand could do it, no equipment needed.
None of this has made me want to go back to Android, for what it's worth, and I say that as someone who ran a Nexus 4 for about four months last year before switching back. I just think the launch got rushed. iOS 7 changed basically everything about how the OS looks and works, and Control Center is a genuinely new attack surface bolted onto the lock screen, so maybe testing that specific intersection should've been priority one instead of getting caught after the fact by a fifteen year old with a YouTube account.
Anyway. If you haven't updated yet, go do it now, it's sitting in Software Update and it's a quick download, nothing like the iOS 7 update itself which chewed through most of an evening on my home wifi. I'll say one nice thing about the actual redesign while I'm here: I've come around on the new Messages app, the green bubbles don't bother me anymore and I like that Control Center exists at all, bug aside. The Camera app switching between modes with a swipe still feels a little laggy on my 5, but that might just be my phone getting old. It's a year and a half now, which in iPhone years is basically retirement age.
Go update your phone. Then maybe don't leave it on the bar when you go to the bathroom for a while, just in case there's a 7.0.3 waiting to happen.