Bottom line: One of the many welcome new features in iOS 14 was the ability for users to set third-party apps as their default email and browser clients. And while the feature is finally letting apps like Outlook and Chrome become the new defaults, users who reboot their iPhones/iPads are finding their preferences have been automagically reset to Apple’s Mail and Safari apps.
Alongside a plethora of new features baked into iOS 14, Apple also opened its mobile OS to third-party browsers and email clients by letting users set them as defaults instead of Mail and Safari. While the feature has arrived with iOS 14, which rolled out to the public yesterday, users are now finding out that their app preferences are being reset to Apple’s first-party clients if they reboot their device.
9to5Mac reports that the bug has also been acknowledged by a Google Chrome engineer with a fix likely to arrive from Apple in a future iOS update as the functionality is breaking for almost all other third-party mail and browser apps.
Although iPhone/iPad reboots aren’t a frequent occurrence, the event is still a major use case when it comes to QA testing of such a system-wide feature and could cause inconvenience for users who’d have to manually dig into Settings after every restart. There have also been reports of other minor annoyances with this feature, such as email links tapped in Safari still opening in Apple’s Mail app despite users setting a third-party mail client as default.
Nonetheless, with the boatload of features that Apple maintains and keeps adding with every iOS update, it’s becoming increasingly challenging for Cupertino to ship bug-free releases, even with several public betas in place. Expect this issue to be addressed in a future iOS update.