Apple’s app for reading e-books has been bothering some users since the latest iOS update. Sudden crashes occur, the possibilities for help are limited.
Apple Books is currently annoying users of the latest iOS version crash problems. The application crashes immediately when trying to open a book that has just been purchased or is already in the library. Affected users are currently venting their anger in the application’s rating column in the App Store, but also in forums.
App now “crazy bad”
This has the application’s rating on 3.0 pulled down. Among other things, it says that since the update to iOS 15.5 everything has been going “crazy bad” with the app. “I can’t open a single book anymore.” In addition to the iPhone, the iPad also seems to show the bug when running iPadOS 15.5. All affected devices are operated with the latest software, i.e. both Apple Books and the operating system. The application is part of the system anyway and is automatically updated, even if it can now be deleted afterwards.
Many users use Apple Books as a universal reading and listening application. The tool is not only the access to Apple’s in-house store for digital books and audio books, but also accepts EPUBs and PDFs from outside, then synchronizes them across all devices thanks to iCloud. It is correspondingly annoying when the app fails so massively.
Workaround hardly possible
It is currently still completely unclear what triggers the problem. The crash is being reported more in the US, which could indicate that there is a conflict with certain language settings; however, there are also crash reports from Europe. In addition, not every e-book rubs off – but many do. A rendering problem could be another reason for the many crashes, although Apple’s rendering engine for EPUBs couldn’t handle certain control characters. However, all of these analyzes are currently pure speculation. Adequately readable crash reports that would help with debugging are missing.
Until Apple has addressed the problem itself – currently support does not even admit it as a known bug – users can only resort to a radical solution: Apparently the bug is neither in the beta version of iOS 15.6 nor iOS 16. The news blog 9to5Mac recommends those who are particularly annoyed to upgrade to exactly these betas. This, in turn, should be considered very carefully, after all it is never a good idea to use pre-release versions on productive devices – especially since they could contain other bugs.
