iPhone group calls still not working properly after FaceTime bug update

Apple's rush to fix issue has left some features missing

Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi demonstrates group FaceTime as he speaks during the 2018 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Group FaceTime calls on the iPhone and other Apple products are still not working properly, after the company rushed to fix a major bug.

Earlier this month, it emerged that it was possible to listen in on people through their iPhone by exploiting a bug in FaceTime, the app used to make audio and video calls over the internet. By adding someone into a group conversation, their phone would start ringing – and during that entire time, the microphone would be switched on and allow the caller to hear everything a person was doing.

Apple rushed to fix that bug, first by switching off the service entirely and then pushing out a software update that stopped it happening.

But that update has still left some problems and the calls are not working entirely since the update was released.

Even with the latest version of the software, users are still unable to add other people into conversations. It was this feature that could be exploited to snoop on phones, but it also is the primary way of starting a group chat – a feature that was one of Apple's central announcements at its WWDC event in June.

If a person is already in a call, the button that would normally allow them to add another person into that conversation is greyed out and can't be used, as first noted by Macrumors and seemingly confirmed by Apple's official support account.

The feature does work if a group of people are in a chat from the beginning. And it is still possible to begin group FaceTime calls with multiple people from the start.

However, even those workarounds do not seem to be working in every case. Some users are even unable to add people into chats that have multiple people in them.

What's more, anyone not updated to the latest version of iOS will not be able to join in a group FaceTime call, since that feature has been cut off by Apple. To ensure that there is no way to use the dangerous bug, everyone attempting to use group FaceTime must be on the latest version of iOS and so safe from any of those bugs.