Following the release of iOS 12.0.1 on October 8, Apple has stopped signing iOS 12, the previous version of iOS that was available to consumers.
iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch owners who have upgraded to iOS 12.0.1 will no longer be able to downgrade to the release version of iOS 12. iOS 12.0.1 introduced fixes for a Lightning charging issue and Wi-Fi problems, improving performance over iOS 12.
Apple routinely stops signing older versions of software updates after new releases come out in order to encourage customers to keep their operating systems up to date.
iOS 12.0.1 is now the only version of iOS that can be installed on iPhones and iPads by the general public. Developers and public beta testers can download iOS 12.1, an iOS 12 update that's being beta tested.
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Remember that these problems are generally impacting only a small percentage of the users. Rarely do they even impact more than a double-digit percentage of people. If they did, they'd be national news. We're not talking MacRumors reports but New York Times/USA Today reports if something like battery drain was happening on a wide-scale. Every large news outlet knows that stories about Apple bring far more viewership than others like Microsoft, so they're hoping for something that can be really newsworthy for them.
Research has shown that online forums like this make problems appear bigger than they generally are. You see a thread with even a couple hundred replies about a problem and think it's widespread. What you don't consider is that that's just a couple hundred people, out of hundreds of millions of devices. You'd be talking less than 0.001% of users impacted. On top of that, you have no way of telling how many of those replies are multiple posts from the same couple people. So even a post with 1000 replies often turns out to be largely due to several individuals, rather than 1000 people with a problem.
Just something to consider when thinking about problems with iOS. All in all, it's pretty well done. There will always be some people with issues, as with every single operating system out there. But for the vast majority of us, things are pretty darn good.