This Goofy iPhone Bug Could Really Mess You Up

Having just migrated two new iPhones, Apple needs to address this specific issue, because it can really really mess you up. 

After migrating from an older phone using iCloud backup, any Apple apps that use an account other than the primary iCloud account requires an extra step of authentication — but the user is never prompted for this, and until you authenticate the app just doesn’t work. 

This affects Apple apps Mail.app and Contacts, but I suspect it also affects Calendar. 

Mail.app - I use a Gmail email address and the first time I opened Mail.app on iPhone after migration it displayed zero emails. That was a huge indicator that something was wrong. I knew to go to Settings>Mail and re-authenticate Gmail from Mail.app. After authenticating, I saw all my email.

Seeing ZERO emails in Mail.app certainly indicated that there was a problem, but there was no indication of what to do next, so that's not great. Most regular users are going to get stuck here and simply think their iPhone is broken.

Contacts - My wife and I use a completely separate third iCloud account for Contacts because we want to share all of our contacts, and there's no built-in way to do this. (As an aside, it’s utterly ridiculous that Apple still doesn’t support sharing Contacts.) After migrating, I opened Contacts and it appeared as though my contacts were there. But because I’m paranoid I always do additional tests to ensure that syncing between devices is working properly. I created a brand new contact on the new iPhone named Krusty The Clown and sure enough, Krusty was not syncing to my other devices, and vice versa. 

All I needed to do was re-authenticate in Settings>Contacts but this was far more insidious situation because there was no clear indication that the new iPhone wouldn’t sync its contacts. A customer could go for weeks without realizing their contacts are not syncing properly.

And this wasn’t just a “me” thing. This happened with my wife’s iPhone (she also used iCloud backup to migrate to the new phone) and my mom (who also used iCloud to migrate), who spent an hour on the phone with AppleCare in order to figure out that she needed to re-authenticate Gmail for Mail.app.

A Feedback has been sent to Apple.