My only phone since 2007 has been an iPhone. Every year or two I upgrade to the latest model. Tired of having to worry about disk space I paid for the 256GB iPhone 7+. The iPhone 7+ has been the absolute worst device I have ever owned.

The timeline:

Mid-May 2017: My phone restarted on its own. Later that day it ‘restarted’ again but never came back. The screen only showed the Apple logo. I could not update it, restore it, or restore from backup. It was just gone. The phone company replaced it.

Late-May 2017: The replacement phone had bits of white glue sticking out of the sides of the screen. The phone company replaced it.

8 July 2017: I unplugged my phone in the morning and it rebooted. It took 4 minutes to reboot again and then 1 minute to boot enough for me to log in. All of my saved passwords are gone. No apps are logged in and all the apps on my phone think it is a new device. I restore the device from a 4 day old backup and all of the passwords are saved again.

10 July 2017: I open Messages but I’m unable to type anything or select any conversations so I reboot the phone. After the reboot all of the history in Messages is gone. I restore from a 2 day old backup and my messages are now there minus ones sent in the last 2 days.

11 July 2017: While driving my phone stops responding. The screen is black, the home button does not work, and the power button does not shut it down. I force reboot the phone and it starts working again. I plug the phone into the computer and looked at the crash logs from the device. locationd crashes anytime it is accessed.

I try to back up the phone to my computer but get an error. I try to do an unencrypted back up but it fails. I try to backup to iCloud but I get an error that says “Some files were unavailable to backup.” I try changing the encryption password and it fails. I reboot my phone and the computer. I still cannot back up the phone.

12 July 2017: Any app that tries to access location data either crashes or hangs for 10 seconds (which is apparently the longest apps will wait for locationd to respond). Almost every app I use accesses location data for something: Twitter, Calendar, Maps, etc. So every app hangs for 10 seconds before allowing any input.

I get fed up with waiting so I decide to restore the device from a 4 day old backup. I still cannot backup the iPhone. Each backup that fails creates the backup directory and grows the file size to within 100MB of the older backup before failing and removing the directory.

After the restore location services still do not work, apps still take 10 seconds to accept input, and locationd is still crashing. The apps that rely on locationd still crash. Loading the Settings app takes ~20 seconds and it also crashes or hangs before allowing any changes. I CAN back up the phone which I do immediately. The phone company will be replacing the phone.

Out of the 6 iPhones I have owned I have never restored any of them more than once. This device has had to be restored 3 times in the 2 months that I have had it. After it crashed while I was driving I can no longer use any location services even after a complete restore of the phone software.

I have entertained the idea that all of this could be my fault. But it seems highly unlikely. I haven’t jail broken the device, dropped it, or installed an iOS 11 beta. I really doubt my ability to cause Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) Exception Subtype: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000000.

What the hell is wrong with my phone?