The IT Nerd

Tomorrow, Apple is expected to announce among other items, the ship date for their latest OS which is macOS High Sierra. But before you upgrade, here’s some tips on what you might want to do before you pull that trigger.

1. Don’t Upgrade… At least not yet: macOS High Sierra brings a brand new file system called APFS to the table as well as the fact that Microsoft has warned that Office may not work with High Sierra. There’s likely other things out there that may be problematic such as bugs like the ones that Apple had with WiFi a few years back or other incompatibilities that nobody knows about. Thus you might want to wait to upgrade until the dust settles from the early adopters finding all the problems that exist.
2. If You Must Upgrade, Make A Backup: Needless to say, making a backup of your current setup is vital before upgrading. That way you have a way to go back to where you were if things don’t work out. There’s plenty of backup solutions out there from Apple’s own Time Machine to third party utilities such as Carbon Copy Cloner that can be used for this purpose.
3. Make Sure Your Apps Are Compatible With High Sierra: Seeing a Microsoft is out there saying that Office compatibility with High Sierra is sketchy at best, it would serve you well to check this site to see if the rest of the apps on your Mac may have issues and what you can do about it.
4. Upgrade Your Software BEFORE You Upgrade: You should ensure that all your application software is up to date before you pull the trigger on upgrading. Ditto for the current version of macOS that you’re using. That will reduce the risk that something might go sideways during the upgrade.
5. Run A Disk Utility BEFORE You Upgrade: The last thing I would do is boot of the Recovery Partition and run Disk Utility to verify the volume that you plan to install the upgrade on. It likely wouldn’t hurt to do a permission repair as well. Alternately you can run a third party utility such as DiskWarrior to do the same thing.

At this point you should be good to go. Key word being SHOULD. Upgrading an operating system isn’t a trivial process. But if you take these steps beforehand, you should reduce the risk of any issues. Or you can take my first suggestion which is to wait a bit. Then follow the rest of my advice.

Something that I come across from time to time are people who insist of force quitting iOS apps which is done by double clicking the home button, and then swiping the app or apps that they want to force quit. The word on the street is that you save your battery life, RAM and CPU power by doing so. But is that true or not? The answer is perhaps a bit more nuanced than a simple yes or now answer. Let’s start discussing this by looking at what Apple says in this document:

When you double-click the Home button, your recently used apps appear. The apps aren’t open, but they’re in standby mode to help you navigate and multitask. You should force an app to close only when it’s unresponsive.

In other words, the apps that are in the background aren’t consuming that much RAM and they aren’t using any CPU or battery life. And the thing is, iOS is exceptionally good at making sure that these apps behave. In fact, it actually takes more CPU and battery power to force quit and restart an app than it does to simply leave it there. Thus you shouldn’t force quit an app unless it’s crashed or something.

Now there is one scenario where I can see where that you might save some CPU and battery power by force quitting an app. It is possible that an app that uses location services functionality that is set to always active may not be put into standby as it is periodically polling for your (or more accurately the iPhone’s) location. Thus logic suggests that force quitting one of these apps may actually save you battery life if you don’t need the functionality that the app provides.

Now you’re likely wondering what I do. I will admit to force quitting apps like Garmin Connect, Runtastic Pro among other fitness apps that I have on my iPhone for the reasons that I stated above. But most of my other apps like Maps, Calendar and the like are always running. I can’t say if that makes a difference or not and perhaps someone should take a look at this empirically to see what the truth is. In the meantime the question of whether you should force quit an app on the iOS platform is not a yes or no answer. At least not at the present time.

A few days ago, I noticed that the battery life on my Apple Watch took a significant nosedive. Instead of lasting about two days between charges, it would be requiring a recharge at about 9PM at night. Given that I wake up at 6AM, that wasn’t good. Clearly there was a problem, but I needed to figure out if it was software or hardware as if if it is the latter, I would have to make an appointment with the Genius Bar at my local Apple Store. Here’s how I went about isolating the problem:

1. Reboot the Apple Watch: It sounds simple, and it is. Sometimes a simple reboot will work. So what I did was I rebooted by pressing and holding the side button and crown at the same time until the screen went blank and the white Apple logo appeared. I did it first thing in the morning so I knew that I was starting out with a fully charged Apple Watch. Then every couple of hours I would note how much battery life I had left by swiping up from the bottom to see control center. I also noted how much battery life I had left at the end of the day. In my case, by the end I would usually have something between 60% and 70% battery life depending on what I was doing that day. For example, if I was out for a ride on my bike, I would be closer to the 60% mark in terms of battery life. In my case, rebooting didn’t work as I was still noticing excessive draining of the battery. Thus, on to step 2.
2. Un-pair the Apple Watch from your iPhone and re-pair: What this process does is basically reset your Apple Watch from a software perspective. The reason why you would want to do this is that maybe there’s some piece of software that is draining the battery excessively. Thus by doing this, you get the option of starting out with a virgin Apple Watch from a software perspective. Then you can add back all your Apple Watch apps until you find the one that is causing your problem. Or you can simply add them all back and see if things stabilize. I would recommend that you try the former for best results. Though I will admit that it is time consuming. Apple has a document for un-pairing your Apple Watch from your iPhone here. Now you can pair your Apple Watch using these instructions from Apple and I would recommend setting it up as a new watch rather than using a backup so that you avoid the possibility that you are reintroducing a problem that was part of a backup. In my case, doing this process seems to have worked. At least so far. I will continue to monitor this to ensure that it stays “fixed.” Warning: You’ll need around an hour to do this and if you have any credit or debit cards added to the Apple Watch to use with Apple Pay, you’ll need to add those back as well.
3. Make an appointment with the Genius Bar: Let’s pretend that neither of the above solved my issue. At this point I have eliminated most of the possible software causes and I am left with a hardware issue. That means a trip to the Genius Bar. When you go, you need to make sure that you tell the Genius that you’ve done the above and be prepared to explain it in detail. That way your time at the Genius Bar is minimized and they can either repair or more likely replace the Apple Watch in short order (assuming it is under warranty or AppleCare).

Do you have any other tips for solving battery drain problems with the Apple Watch? If so, please leave a comment below and share your tips.

This morning, I had this pop up on the screen of my iPhone 7 Plus:

I had no idea what this was and there was zero chance I was going to grant access to an application that I didn’t recognize as that’s a excellent way to get pwned by hackers. Thus I clicked “Don’t Allow.” But that got me nowhere as no matter how many times I clicked “Don’t Allow”, the prompt came back.  Thus I was ultimately forced to reboot the iPhone to get rid of this prompt.

My concern was that I had some sort of malware lurking around my phone. So to cover myself, I did two things that I found by searching around the Internet for solutions to this problem, and a third that falls under the category of “just in case.” The first thing that I did comes via this Apple Discussion Boards post:

1. Close Safari completely from the multitasking window by double clicking the Home button and swiping up the Safari preview pane until it disappears from the screen.
2. Go to Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data.
3. Do a forced restart of the iPhone.

It made sense to do this as I was thinking that maybe I had picked up some drive by malware via browsing the web that was responsible for this. Thus this would clear it up.

The second thing that I did came from this Reddit post:

1. Turn off all notifications for Twitter in iOS’s settings app.
2. Completely uninstall Twitter.
3. Sign out of iOS’s Twitter in the Settings app.
4. Reinstall Twitter.
5. When you open Twitter, it’ll ask for notification permission. Grant it.

Doing this makes sense as it clears the Twitter app and the data along with it and resets all the permissions too. Now the Reddit post references jailbreaking. I do not jailbreak my phones as that’s another great way to get pwned by hackers. Thus whatever this issue is, it affects non-jailbroken devices as well.

Finally, as an security precaution, I will be changing the password to my Twitter accounts. That way if I have been somehow pwned, at least I will maintain control of my Twitter account.

It still leaves me with this question. What is this “exited?” app and why does it want access to my Twitter accounts? Is this perhaps a bug related to the Twitter app that’s been around for a while (some web results on this go back to 2012), or is it something more sinister? I’d love to know the answer to that question. If you have any feedback on this, please leave a comment below. In the meantime, I will be watching my iPhone carefully to see if this comes back.

These days, you cannot take security for granted. And that includes locking down your iPhone from people who would want to get some of your personal information. If you want an example of how easy it is to get personal information from a locked iPhone, try these Siri commands with a random iPhone that is locked:

• Siri, who am I
• Siri, navigate me to home
• Siri, show me my recent calls

What you’ll see is that the contact card belonging to the owner of the phone will appear. Plus Siri will route you to the address of the owner of the iPhone. Finally, you’ll see the last call that was made from the phone. And you get all of this while the phone is locked. That’s not good. What’s worse is that this is how the iPhone is set up by default which is a bit of a #fail from a company that values privacy. I’ll also add that the Today View, Apple Wallet, notifications as well as control center are also exposed for anyone to see by default on the iPhone. Any of those could expose personal information, and having the control center available could be leveraged to disable the phone’s ability to connect to cellular networks if it is stolen. Which means that you won’t be able to find it or remote erase it using iCloud. For those reasons, I suggest that you take the time to lock down your iPhone. I will admit that by doing so you take away some convenience, but you will make your phone a lot more secure. Here’s what I would suggest that everyone disable:

1. Go to Settings
2. Go to Touch ID & Passcode
3. Enter your passcode
4. Disable the following:
   1. Today View
   2. Siri
   3. Reply With Message
   4. Home Control
   5. Wallet
5. Now go back one level and go to Control Center
6. Disable “Access On Lock Screen”

By doing all of that, it will take away most of the ways that your personal information can leak out. For bonus points, you may want to consider disabling Notifications View under Touch ID & Passcode. I didn’t do that as I find that it is handy for me to have notifications from my various apps pop up on the screen. But if there’s info from those notifications that you don’t want a third party to see, it is worth considering whether you should disable it or not.

The next thing that I suggest that you do is not only improve your passcode, but set your phone to self destruct. I’ll start with the former. Most people use 4 digit passcodes which means that there are 9999 possible combinations. That sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t. Someone with a lot of time on their hands, like a border agent for example, will take the time to crack the passcode. Thus try using a 6 digit passcode or better yet an alphanumeric code for improved security. Now to the part about self destructing the phone. No, you cannot set the phone to self destruct in 5 seconds like they do in Mission Impossible. But iPhones do have a feature that erases the data on the phone after 10 failed passcode attempts. You can enable it  like this:

1. Go to Settings
2. Go to Touch ID & Passcode
3. Enter your passcode
4. Enable “Erase Data”

Now, you don’t want to enable this unless you back up your iPhone on a regular basis using iTunes. But in my case, I use iCloud Backup which automatically backs up my phone is plugged in, locked, and connected to WiFi. That means that I always have a backup that I can fall back on should the need arise and I can get my phone back to a working state anywhere. Not to mention set up a new phone with the same settings if I have to. Here’s how you set it up (This is assuming that you have set up iCloud before hand. If not, you should create an iCloud account as it is free to do so and it gives you 5GB of storage):

1. Go to settings
2. Go to iCloud
3. Go to Backup
4. Enable iCloud Backup

One thing to note is that it will only backup your health data, accounts, and phone configuration info. It does not backup music, apps or pictures. But music and apps are easy to restore from your computer using iTunes on your Mac or PC. Ditto for photos if you’re not using something like iCloud Photo Library which keeps your photos in the cloud.

Full disclosure: I use a 4 digit non-obvious passcode (in other words, one that isn’t easily guessed or is tied to anything else in my life) and I have the iPhone set to erase data. My logic is that this configuration will keep my data away from prying eyes because the phone will erase itself after 10 failed passcode attempts. This is on top of the fact that I use Touch ID to unlock the phone which means I am not entering the passcode most of the time. But you have to decide how paranoid you want to be on this front and what steps you’re willing to take to protect yourself.

Now, all of this sounds like a fair amount of work. But I ran through this and it took me 20 minutes to set all of this up. In my mind, that’s a good investment of time to make sure that your phone is locked down and doesn’t reveal personal information about you should it fall into the wrong hands. Thus it is something that every iPhone user should do.