iOS 18 may be only a month away from public release, but Apple is still churning out important updates for iOS 17. Following hot on the heels of the iOS 17.6, which itself was mostly about bug fixes, comes iOS 17.6.1 which – you guessed it – is all about bug fixes.
While July’s update did add some new features for sports fans, this latest one is purely to patch some urgent vulnerabilities Apple has discovered. In particular, a recent issue has stopped users being able to access (or deactivate) Advanced Data Protection, a security feature that encrypts everything you store in iCloud.
For that reason alone it might be worth the update, although if you know that you don’t use that feature, skip this one at your own risk. And if you haven’t installed the previous iOS 17.6 update yet, know that it contained over 30 security fixes to keep you safe. If you missed that, update ASAP.
Then you can start looking forward to iOS 18, which – unless any more urgent vulnerabilities are discovered in the interim – should be the next software update to hit your device.
How to get iOS 17.6.1
Note that even with Automatic Updates switched on in Settings, it’s often faster to manually trigger the update process. Go to Settings > General > Software Update to check for the latest version of iOS, and App Store > Account to see which apps are due an update.