Apple confirms an iPhone 18 Pro Face ID fix is coming next weekApple confirms an iPhone 18 Pro Face ID fix is coming next week

Apple has confirmed that a software update fixing the Face ID reboot on the iPhone 18 Pro will be released early next week.

The confirmation was given to 9to5Mac, which first reported the fault on Monday and reproduced it on demand. On an affected handset, a Face ID attempt that fails inside an app - the Passwords app in 9to5Mac's demonstration - leaves the display unresponsive to touch, and the phone hard reboots a few seconds later, leaving a panic log in the Analytics section of Settings. MacRumors reported separately on 23 September that Apple is testing iOS 27.0.1, which it expects to be the release carrying the fix.

Apple has not said which version number the update will carry, what caused the panic, or whether the other complaints reported alongside it are included. AppleInsider, which gathered owner accounts from Reddit and Apple's own support forums, notes that the same Reddit user whose reports it cites was told his handset was faulty and had a replacement arranged - while Apple was concluding the problem lay in software.

What the statement covers

Both models are affected. The iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max reached customers on 18 September, and reports of unexpected restarts began within days. Neither Apple nor any outlet has put a number on how many devices are involved; the reporting consistently describes a small proportion of owners rather than a general fault.

Our take

We wrote on 22 September that this had the shape of software rather than a manufacturing defect, and that the advice some owners were being given to swap the handset looked premature. Apple has now said the same thing in the only way that counts, by committing to ship a fix. We are not claiming a prediction; the reasoning was available to anyone who read 9to5Mac's reproduction steps. A bug you can summon by following four written instructions on a phone that worked a moment earlier is not a defect in one unit.

The replacement advice is the part that now looks worst, and it is worth being precise about why. Apple Support ran diagnostics on at least one handset, judged it faulty and began arranging a swap, and that happened while the company was preparing a software fix for the same symptom. Those two facts sit in different parts of Apple. A support diagnostic checks whether the sensor array responds correctly, and on a phone whose fault lives in the retry path of an authentication alert it will find nothing wrong and say so. The owner is then steered towards an appointment, a restore, and a replacement that arrives running the identical build.

Anyone currently inside a return window has a decision to make this week rather than next. The 14-day window on a phone bought on launch day closes around the time the update is due, which is an uncomfortably tight overlap. Our reading is that the fix landing first is the likely outcome and that returning a working phone over a bug Apple has committed to fixing would be an overreaction - but that is a judgement about timing, not a promise, and Apple has given a week rather than a date.

What is still missing is a cause, and its absence is why the scope of the fix cannot be assumed. Several distinct complaints have been reported around the same hardware: the reboot after a failed in-app authentication, a Face ID is Not Available message during setup, and Require Attention not being honoured. Apple has confirmed a fix for the reboot. Nothing said so far indicates the other two share a mechanism with it, and treating one announcement as covering all three is how owners end up believing a fix failed when it was never aimed at their problem.

For anyone shipping an app that gates content behind biometric authentication, the advice from Monday stands and now has an end date. There is no defensive code to write, because no process catches a kernel panic, and the useful step is to avoid misreading your own telemetry. From inside an app, a device that restarted mid-prompt and a user who abandoned the prompt are indistinguishable. If your authentication abandonment rate rose on new iPhones this month, wait for the point release before you go looking for a regression in your own integration.