Smartphones are complex devices designed to make our lives easier, but sometimes they end up causing frustration instead. We’re impressed by the iPhone 8 and the iPhone 8 Plus, but they’re not perfect. While Apple’s devices are generally well made and smooth-running, things can — and do — go wrong from time to time. We’ve gathered together some notable issues with the latest iPhone 8 Plus and common iPhone 8 problems here, along with advice on how you might deal with them.
After discovering a bug in FaceTime that allows callers to hear and possibly even see call recipients without them accepting the call, Apple has temporarily shut down the Group FaceTime feature.
This is a common problem with phones in general, but we have seen threads about it on the iPhone 8 Plus in the Apple support forum. If you find that you keep losing your Wi-Fi connection there are several possible causes.
A few people have had trouble connecting to LTE and have been stuck with 3G instead. There’s a thread about it at the Apple support forum. Luckily, this one should be an easy fix.
If you’ve been suffering from any or all of these issues then it may be down to the logic board in your iPhone 8. Apple discovered that a small percentage of iPhone 8 handsets sold between September 2017 and March 2018 in Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Macau, New Zealand, and the U.S. had a manufacturing defect.
We use our iPhones so much that battery life can be a problem, but in the Apple support forum, some people have been complaining about unusual, rapid battery drain. We found that our iPhone 8 drains quite quickly when playing AR games, but generally the battery life is pretty good. If you’re suffering with an iPhone 8 battery that drains quickly, here’s what to try:
You may have seen some reports about iPhone 8 Plus batteries swelling up and causing the screen to detach from the body of the device. The first report, picked up by TNW seems to have centered on an iPhone 8 Plus in Taiwan, but MacRumors has since reported a few more similar incidents in Japan, Canada, and Greece. It’s not clear how widespread the issue is, but it appears to be a relatively rare occurrence.
Several iPhone 8 and 8 Plus owners have been complaining about a crackling earpiece during calls. A repetitive, intermittent static sound or distortion makes it difficult to hear properly during normal calls and FaceTime calls. The problem has popped up on the Apple support forum, on Reddit, and elsewhere.
If you load up the App Store and find that it just repeatedly refreshes every few seconds, then you are not alone. We encountered this problem on our iPhone 8 review unit, but it has been reported elsewhere and it doesn’t seem to be confined to Apple’s latest devices.
There have been a few reports on the Apple forums about the iPhone 8 or iPhone 8 Plus becoming unresponsive and freezing on the lock screen or the home screen. Unusually, in a few of these cases, some of the hardware buttons and certain gestures still work, but everything else is frozen.
If you find that your iPhone 8 or iPhone 8 Plus is getting very warm, or even hot, to the touch, then there’s generally no reason to panic. We found that our iPhone 8 got very hot when playing AR games, but it can also get warm when you’re first setting it up, restoring a backup, or using GPS and a game simultaneously, like with Pokémon Go. If it gets too hot, the iPhone 8 is designed to disable certain features, like the flash, display a temperature warning on the screen, and shut itself off.
Are you tired of paying for streaming services you never watch just to get a phone plan feature you actually want? T-Mobile has good news for you! The carrier is rolling out new plans, called T-Mix, in early November to replace its old Experience lineup with a build-your-own perks system called Picks.
The benefits you choose vary from streaming and gaming to food delivery, AI, satellite service, and phone discounts. But if you are satisfied with your existing plan, you can keep it.
Merely days after the iPhone Duo hit the shelves, images of broken screens on the phone started popping up across social media. Until now, it’s been unclear what’s causing the line of defective pixels that appears vertically along the crease, as well as horizontally, on the phone’s inner display.
Apple has finally acknowledged the issue, which has shown up on iPhone Duo units owned by customers as well as demo units in stores. In a statement shared with Bloomberg, Apple says that not all iPhone Duo units are affected and that those that are tend to show the display fault early on. The company added that users who experience problems with their iPhone Duo display should contact AppleCare for a replacement.
Not long ago, Apple treated independent repair like an act of outright hostility. The Cupertino giant locked down parts with serial-number pairing, while repair tools remained firmly out of reach of anyone outside its authorized repair network. More importantly, the company waged a legal and lobbying battle against right-to-repair legislation.
I've covered enough of these fights over the years to know what a shift looks like. That's why what happened in October 2026 genuinely caught me off guard. The day the iPhone Duo went on sale, what may be the most mechanically complex iPhone to date, Apple pulled off a surprising about-face. It published teardown-style repair manuals for a handful of major components.