What happens to your iPhone when you don’t update it largely depends upon the duration you’re skipping the update. For instance, if you don’t download the latest update, your iPhone could work fine unless the update fixes a critical security issue, which we’ll address. However, if you don’t update your iPhone for months, you’ll start coming across a lot of bugs and performance issues. Let’s browse through the latest iOS versions and check what bug fixes or improvements you might have missed.

With iOS 15.1, Apple fixed an issue that shows users an incorrect report about their iPhone running out of storage, another bug that caused the Weather app not to show the current temperature for their location, and the iPhone unable to detect nearby Wi-Fi networks. Then Apple released iOS 15.2, which came with fixes for overexposed ProRAW photographs, video streaming apps not loading content on iPhone 13 models, and more such errors. The latest iOS 15.6 fixes an issue where braille devices slow down or stop responding while navigating text in Mail (via Apple).

While these fixes not only remove the bugs, they also improve the general performance of an iPhone. As a result, you would still face these issues while others who have installed the latest version of iOS simply won’t. In conclusion, you won’t get the best experience if you don’t update your iPhone.

Often, iOS updates contain patches to security vulnerabilities that could allow hackers and bad actors to gain access to kernel privileges. To give you a fair idea, kernel refers to the core of a device’s operating system that manages almost all the operations on your device. It is responsible for managing hardware resources on your iPhone, such as the RAM and the CPU, to apps you’ve installed. Hence, by gaining access, bad actors can access your iPhone, including all the hardware resources such as storage, data transmitters, and more. 

While Apple does its best to keep such issues under control, some of them slip into the final build of iOS that is released for users. Bad actors are not always aware of all the vulnerabilities, and Apple is good at fixing them in time. However, those security flaws actively exploited before the company can fix them are called zero-day vulnerabilities. Then there are other vulnerabilities specific to apps and services such as Safari web browser, Apple’s HomeKit, iCloud and more (via Apple). 

Compiling information from several pages on the company’s website, Apple has fixed more than 170 security issues since it launched iOS 15, including 39 fixes released with the latest iOS 15.6. We’re not even counting the fixes released as a part of fractional updates. Hence, you’re risking your iPhone if you’ve been running an older iOS version or even using the iPhone 13 with an older version of iOS 15.

This content was originally published here.