Updated on Jan. 16 with new data on Apple’s iOS 26 upgrade problem.
This is not optional. Apple warns that iPhone attacks are underway and has released fixes to keep users safe. The bad news is that hundreds of millions of those users are now at risk. Check your iPhone now. And if you need to reboot, do so immediately.
Go to Settings > General > Software Update. If your iPhone is not running either iOS 26.2 or iOS 18.7.3, go to Settings > General > Shut Down and power the device off. Or you can press and hold either volume button and the side button until the power-off slider appears,” Apple says. If that doesn’t work, you can force it to restart.
Given the latest data suggests 50% of all eligible iPhone users have not yet upgraded to secure those fixes, the situation has now become urgent. Resistance to the iOS 26 upgrade has been exacerbated by Apple’s decision to make the fixes available only to iPhones or newer that have upgraded. Sticking to iOS 18 is no longer possible.
A reboot will kill any spyware running on your iPhone. At least until the spyware reloads, either because it’s automatically persistent or because you repeat whatever action started the software running on your iPhone in the first place.
While it might seem that because Apple’s warning that attacks are highly targeted, most users are unaffected, that’s a dangerous defense. The WebKit exploits behind the latest attacks will become more widely deployed, targeting ever more users.
You should really upgrade if you’re an iOS 26 holdout. If not, you must restart your iPhone weekly — at least until you update to either of those two versions of iOS. Until Apple clarifies iOS 26 upgrade numbers, we will not know for sure how close the analyst data is to the real numbers. But worry not, regular reboots are a good idea anyway.
While the latest StatCounter data on Jan. 16 continues to show iOS 26 adoption remains well under 20%, these numbers are now under investigation.
Ars Technica says “we’ve taken a high-level look at all iPhone traffic across all Condé Nast websites for October, November, and December of 2025.” And while “iOS 26 is being adopted more slowly than iOS 18 was the year before,” it not as cataclysmic a drop-off as StatCounter’s data suggests.”
Mashable, first to dig into those numbers, says “the adoption numbers are wrong.” That’s because “there’s actually a bug in the reporting system, and it’s Apple’s fault.”
Put simply, the issue is that the Safari identifying tag picked up by analysts to measure OS version numbers when browsers load websites is reporting iOS 18 even when a device has upgraded to iOS 26. This could be falling foul of fingerprinting defenses in Safari, which deliberately obfuscate data, or a different, deliberate measure to ensure broad compatibility for Safari users visiting sites while using a new OS.
The mistake doesn’t hit Chrome or other browsers on iPhones — just Safari.
The numbers are less stark, but still leave hundreds of millions of iPhones yet to upgrade. The corrected data, Ars Technica says, “does suggest that ‘normal’ users aren’t in a rush to get the update,” albeit early adopters seemed to move as expected.
“By December 2024, our data shows that 76 percent of iPhone Safari page views were going to iOS 18 devices, compared to just 45 percent for iOS 26 in December 2025.”
