Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by minkzilla 1001 days ago
Apple does however continue to provide security updates, they released a security update for ios 15 earlier this year. As an iphone 8 user this is perfectly fine for me. My phone works great and none of this new stuff is something I can't live without.
1 comments

Looking over the list, so much of it seems like application-level changes to stuff like messages, calls, contacts, etc. For a user who has opted out of most of that in favour of GMail, Whatsapp, Signal, and so on, it's hard to see the big draw.
I'm not sure what you mean - the last security update fixed massive 0-day which was an arbitrary code execution caused by the image decoder. CVE-2023-41064

AFAIK every app that uses the ImageI/O api is effected by it, which includes every app you mentioned. You often don't need to even open the message for the image to be decoded.

From my understanding most vulnerabilities are from either the image decoder, text decoder, or webkit which again, effects nearly all apps. All apps can only use the webkit view, which affects nearly all of them to some degree.

I think you might be confusing the attack vector - messages is the easiest to attack since you just sent a regular text. Even if you don't normally use messages, it'll parse the image and you'll be hit by the 0 day. In theory this will work with most messaging apps.

I was referring to the opposite side of things— not the security patches but the actual new features of iOS 17. Rather than being OS-level capabilities that feel like they would impact the whole ecosystem, they're more like app features, and a lot of the app features don't apply to me as I use alternatives to those specific apps.