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iPhone XS randomly Un-Jailbreaking + Syncing Issues


Flexuser

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Hello, @Architect & @Dakota - I am an old development  and software professional here trying to troubleshoot my Flexispy install.

SPECS

  1. Device: iPhone XS
  2. iOS Version: 13.4.1
  3. Flexispy version: 8.5.2 - I have not upgraded to Flexispy  9.0.3 because it seems those upgrades only apply to devices earlier than the iPhone X - please let me know if there is any reason to currently upgrade when on an iPhone XS.

 

Overall, since the early June 2020 update, Flexispy has worked pretty solidly. But in the past month or so, I have seen some "quirks" requiring me to get the phone in my hand and jailbreak it again. As you can imagine, this is not ideal for phone monitoring software.

***

iPhone XS Randomly Un-Jailbreaks

The issue is that sometimes the target phone stops responding. When I get the phone in my hands, I see the Unc0ver icon is viewable, but not the Cydia icon. When I see this, I usually can just run Unc0ver directly on the phone, it Jailbreaks and starts working again. I do this without tethering to the computer to fully Jailbreak again using 3Utools

If the phone runs out of battery and restarts, then I see both the Cydia and Unc0ver icon and I have to do a full tethered jailbreak

***

I saw this issue happen in real time today. I know the phone did not restart, it was fully charged. It just stopped responding.

Also, it seems to have coincided with push server issues - issues that persisted even after I re-jailbroke the phone. (Then it cleared up after another 20 minutes)

Other things I noticed: The phone went off of Wifi to data

***

Deleting Data from Server

Another question: Please tell me how to delete data from the server so I don't have 3 months of data hanging around.

Thank you

Flexuser

 

 

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15 hours ago, Flexuser said:

Hello, @Architect & @Dakota - I am an old development  and software professional here trying to troubleshoot my Flexispy install.

SPECS

  1. Device: iPhone XS
  2. iOS Version: 13.4.1
  3. Flexispy version: 8.5.2 - I have not upgraded to Flexispy  9.0.3 because it seems those upgrades only apply to devices earlier than the iPhone X - please let me know if there is any reason to currently upgrade when on an iPhone XS.

 

Overall, since the early June 2020 update, Flexispy has worked pretty solidly. But in the past month or so, I have seen some "quirks" requiring me to get the phone in my hand and jailbreak it again. As you can imagine, this is not ideal for phone monitoring software.

***

iPhone XS Randomly Un-Jailbreaks

The issue is that sometimes the target phone stops responding. When I get the phone in my hands, I see the Unc0ver icon is viewable, but not the Cydia icon. When I see this, I usually can just run Unc0ver directly on the phone, it Jailbreaks and starts working again. I do this without tethering to the computer to fully Jailbreak again using 3Utools

If the phone runs out of battery and restarts, then I see both the Cydia and Unc0ver icon and I have to do a full tethered jailbreak

***

I saw this issue happen in real time today. I know the phone did not restart, it was fully charged. It just stopped responding.

Also, it seems to have coincided with push server issues - issues that persisted even after I re-jailbroke the phone. (Then it cleared up after another 20 minutes)

Other things I noticed: The phone went off of Wifi to data

***

Deleting Data from Server

Another question: Please tell me how to delete data from the server so I don't have 3 months of data hanging around.

Thank you

Flexuser

 

 

  • Upgrading — 9.0.3 contains several bug fixes and performance improvements which apply to your device, so we strongly recommend that you update to the latest client, which you can do remotely from inside your Account
  • Random Un-Jailbreaks — After checking with our developers, we are led to believe that this is a stability issue with the Jailbreak tool itself and not with FlexiSPY. To help us confirm, please tell us the version of Unc0ver you are using to Jailbreak the phone.
  • Deleting Old Data — Please see our article on this here
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Thank you @Dakota

unc0ver Version on the Target Device is 5.3.1: Which is the latest version, according to https://unc0ver.dev/ - interestingly, I rebooted the phone to reveal the unc0ver app icon and was able to re-jailbreak without tethering.

Upgrading to the Target Device to Flexispy 9.0.3 - Completed: I have verified that Key Logs, App Screenshots, App Activity, and Emails are working  - is there any documentation that details what was improved or fixed other than iOS 14 support? By the way, I am anxiously waiting for iOS 14 support on the iPhone XS

Deleting Old Data: Thanks for the article link. I was hoping there was a way to bulk delete old data within a time range, some of these events can really accumulate which equals a lot of individual checking and trashing! I see that I can delete all data by deactivating the device, but I am not sure I want to do that right now. I guess we have a feature request!

***

  1. I'll check back to find out the answer with regard to the unc0ver un-jailbreaking issue.
  2. Has the portal viewer app for Android been updated recently?

Thank you Dakota, I truly appreciate your quick and informative responses.

 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

@Dakota

Random un-jailbreaking is back! It didn't happen for a couple of weeks.

 

Then I had to reset the cable modem/router/WIFI repeater in the area the target phone was.

Then email stopped working, both viewing it through the portal and on the target device.

So I restarted the target device, ran the unc0ver jailbreak again and got everything working.

But since then, the phone has gone offline frequently and usually the unC0ver icon appears (Which is suspicious to the phone user) and usually, but not always, I can just run the unc0ver without tethering and jailbreaking via 3utools.

***

But this is happening almost every day - sometimes more than once a day. Do you have any insight please?

Thank you.

 

 

 

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It has now happened twice in under 12 hours. Both times I was able to re-jailbreak the phone without tethering.

The phone definitely did not lose power or reboot either time.

In my reading, this seems to be a "reboot" of unc0ver.

When I have a chance I am going to un-jailbreak, then uninstall and unc0ver, Cydia, and Flexispy.

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It just happened again. The phone was plugged in, but it was powered down. I turned it back on and re-installed unc0ver from 3U tools. Then when I ran unc0ver, this time I checked to re-install Cydia. Hopefully that helps with stability.

I haven't had time yet to do a full uninstall/re-install on the target device, but hopefully this works because this has happened several times in the past less than 2 hours.

This is absolutely making the target device suspicious because it is showing the unc0ver icon frequently, I need to have the phone in my hand constantly to jailbreak it again and again. And it is pretty much useless for monitoring. Please help me!

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@Dakota Replies to these problems I am surfacing would be wonderful.

However, I am good at troubleshooting technical stuff so hopefully I can help somebody else out.

At the moment it appears that there was some sort of conflict between "unc0ver", which is the jailbreaking tool, Cydia, and perhaps Flexispy.

As noted above the phone was frequently coming up offline and unjailbroken with the Uncover icon sitting out when it should be hidden.

 

After many times over many weeks of just re-jailbrekaing the phone, I tried this: I ran unc0ver - untethered to re-jailbreak the phone. But I went into the options so it would re-install Cydia when it did.

That bought me about 24 hours, but then instability came back, the phone was unjailbroken again.

I was planning to uninstall Flexispy, do a complete unjailbreak, which uninstalls Cydia and restore the root file system (turn on rootfs in the unc0ver options)

 

But first I wanted to back up the phone and that takes time. So I was going to do a untethered jailbreak to buy some time.

And while I was doing that, the phone rebooted in my hands while I hadn't done anything. It took a while to boot back up - I was afraid it was bricked.

But it came back up and I ran the Jailbreak. It helped for a couple of hours, then I was able to get the phone in my hand for a while.

Here is what I did, in this exact order:

  1. I uninstalled Flexispy
  2. I backed up the phone
  3. I Unjailbreaked the phone returning it to the rootfs (root file structure)
  4. Uninstalled unc0ver
  5. Rebooted
  6. Re-installed unc0ver
  7. Re-installed Flexispy

The phone has remained jailbroken and online for over 48 hours. Let's hope it sticks.

By the way, the reinstallation process was not entirely smooth. The unc0ver icon would not hide, so I had to run the jailbreak again, so it wasn't as clean as I would have liked.

Finally, I strongly recommend you enable the "'Disable Auto Updates" option in unc0ver because you don't want the phone updating to a version of iOS that defeats the jailbreak.

***

Long story short, if you are experiencing the Unjailbreaking problems I have been experiencing, their is probably a conflict between unc0ver, Cydia, and Flexispy. Perhaps that is causing random reboots that will unnjailbreak the phone, rendering Flexispy unfunctional and exposing the unc0ver icon.

The other possibility is that I had the app data option turned on in Flexispy. This might have caused instability. I will test that once I feel the phone is stable as is,

Possible solution: Backup, uninstall everything, then re-install everything so it is cleaner.

Good luck. I will update if this process fails me.

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16 minutes ago, Flexuser said:

@Dakota Replies to these problems I am surfacing would be wonderful.

However, I am good at troubleshooting technical stuff so hopefully I can help somebody else out.

At the moment it appears that there was some sort of conflict between "unc0ver", which is the jailbreaking tool, Cydia, and perhaps Flexispy.

As noted above the phone was frequently coming up offline and unjailbroken with the Uncover icon sitting out when it should be hidden.

 

After many times over many weeks of just re-jailbrekaing the phone, I tried this: I ran unc0ver - untethered to re-jailbreak the phone. But I went into the options so it would re-install Cydia when it did.

That bought me about 24 hours, but then instability came back, the phone was unjailbroken again.

I was planning to uninstall Flexispy, do a complete unjailbreak, which uninstalls Cydia and restore the root file system (turn on rootfs in the unc0ver options)

 

But first I wanted to back up the phone and that takes time. So I was going to do a untethered jailbreak to buy some time.

And while I was doing that, the phone rebooted in my hands while I hadn't done anything. It took a while to boot back up - I was afraid it was bricked.

But it came back up and I ran the Jailbreak. It helped for a couple of hours, then I was able to get the phone in my hand for a while.

Here is what I did, in this exact order:

  1. I uninstalled Flexispy
  2. I backed up the phone
  3. I Unjailbreaked the phone returning it to the rootfs (root file structure)
  4. Uninstalled unc0ver
  5. Rebooted
  6. Re-installed unc0ver
  7. Re-installed Flexispy

The phone has remained jailbroken and online for over 48 hours. Let's hope it sticks.

By the way, the reinstallation process was not entirely smooth. The unc0ver icon would not hide, so I had to run the jailbreak again, so it wasn't as clean as I would have liked.

Finally, I strongly recommend you enable the "'Disable Auto Updates" option in unc0ver because you don't want the phone updating to a version of iOS that defeats the jailbreak.

***

Long story short, if you are experiencing the Unjailbreaking problems I have been experiencing, their is probably a conflict between unc0ver, Cydia, and Flexispy. Perhaps that is causing random reboots that will unnjailbreak the phone, rendering Flexispy unfunctional and exposing the unc0ver icon.

The other possibility is that I had the app data option turned on in Flexispy. This might have caused instability. I will test that once I feel the phone is stable as is,

Possible solution: Backup, uninstall everything, then re-install everything so it is cleaner.

Good luck. I will update if this process fails me.

Thanks for sharing your detailed analysis.

We will have our developers review the method you have just described — which you say is, for the moment, stopping the issue where the phone loses jailbreak.

Also, yesterday I received an update from the Development team regarding stability that may be of use for you.

For the iPhone XS onwards, there has been an update for Substitute (a Substrate alternative) that may improve the stability of the Jailbreak and stop the device from losing the Jailbreak.

The only downside is that this leaves the Substitute icon visible on the phone, and the fix for hiding this icon is not yet released to production. (we believe this should be deployed in 1-2 weeks time)

If you wish to test whether this improves stability here's how you would update Substitute.

  1. Jailbreak the device
  2. If the Cydia app icon is hidden, make it visible using the FlexiSPY portal or via a remote command
  3.  Launch the Cydia app and wait till Cydia completely starts (no more spinning)
  4. The badge number should show in the Cydia tab bar at the bottom ("Changes tab")
  5. Update all changes (one of them should be "Substitute")
  6. After the update is complete device will reboot
  7. Once rebooted, re jailbreak the device
  8. Hide the Cydia icon again 
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  • 2 weeks later...

@Dakota I have not tried the "updated substitute" method because leaving the icon exposed on the phone is not an option for me.

For a week after my last post I only had to re-jailbreak once and I am pretty sure that was because of the phone running out of battery.

However, I have had to re-jailbreak 3 times in the past 1.5 days including twice in 6 hours. I don't know why this is happening because the phone is never in my possession enough for me to know. Is there some way of running a diagnostic?

 

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The phone just lost Jailbreak again. This time it lasted about 20 minutes.

I definitely need some help here, I am constantly trying to get the phone in my hand to fix it.

I think I have to go all the way to rootfs again, re-jailbreak, re-install etc.

I really need to figure out what is triggering this instability.

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1 minute ago, Flexuser said:

The phone just lost Jailbreak again. This time it lasted about 20 minutes.

I definitely need some help here, I am constantly trying to get the phone in my hand to fix it.

I think I have to go all the way to rootfs again, re-jailbreak, re-install etc.

I really need to figure out what is triggering this instability.

Let me follow up with our development team regarding the ability to hide substitute. I'll get back to you by the end of tomorrow.

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8 minutes ago, Dakota said:

Let me follow up with our development team regarding the ability to hide substitute. I'll get back to you by the end of tomorrow.

Update, we are sending the new version that contains the fix to our test team tomorrow. If it passes we will release to production. Probably early next week but I'll confirm the timeline with you tomorrow.

 

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12 minutes ago, Dakota said:

Update, we are sending the new version that contains the fix to our test team tomorrow. If it passes we will release to production. Probably early next week but I'll confirm the timeline with you tomorrow.

 

Thanks for the reply.

It just lost the Jailbreak again (under 30 minutes). Meanwhile I think I will need to backup, restore rootfs, re-jailbreak, re-install etc.

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Just uninstalled Flexispy, did a rootfs reset removal of the Jailbreak, and re-installed everything again.

It took a few minutes for everything to start syncing.

I turned on Application Life Cycle to see if I could get some insight into whether a certain app is related to the issue.

@Dakota - I also did not update Cydia even though it wanted me too (I had done it before) so let's see if that helps.

Can you ask the tech team if Cydia automatically updates itself in the background or anything like that? If so, any way to disable it from doing that?

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@Architect and @Dakota

I've been observing and I think I am much closer to locating the issue.

Since my last post on 1/28, Flexispy had been running rock-solid, no jailbreak issues.

Then today, it was offline. The phone was displaying the Unc0ver icon, meaning it was no longer jailbroken.

I looked at the dashboard, and the last power reading was 20%. This leads me to believe the phone ran out of power and was rebooted when it was recharged.

***

  1. I ran the full tethered Jailbreak and everything was up and running again within a few minutes.
  2. I check the dashboard 6.5 hours later, and the phone was offline again. For 6 hours, meaning it lost jailbreak within about 30 minutes of my restoring the jailbreak.
  3. I got the phone in my hand again and uninstalled Flexispy, and ran a full "rootfs" uninstall of the jailbreak, and uninstalled unc0ver.
  4. I then re-installed everything. After about 15 minutes, the phone started updating as normal.
  5. I had a weird glitch with Cydia, so I hope it doesn't cause any issues.

OBSERVATION: After a clean install of the Jailbreak, Flexispy ran perfectly. But after it lost the Jailbreak and had to be re-jailbroken, the jailbreak was unstable and un-jailbreaked quickly without losing power to the device.

HYPOTHESIS: Once the iPhone XS running iOS 13.4.1 loses its jailbreak, the jailbreak is unstable until it is fully uninstalled, restored to rootfs, and reinstalled.

PROPOSED TEST:

  1. Allow an iPhone 11 XS running iOS 13.4.1 with Flexispy installed to run out of power, so it loses the jailbreak.
  2. Turn on and jailbreak again, tethered
  3. Do not let the phone run out of power again - See if the jailbreak remains stable.

***

I would love to run more tests to see if there are easier ways to restore the stable jailbreak. For example, maybe just deleting the Unc0ver app, rebooting,  and reinstalling the app will work to return the jailbreak to stability instead of doing the rootfs.

Unfortunately, this phone is in actual use so I cannot run regular tests to isolate the issue.

QUESTION: Do we need to have the unC0ver tweaks installed and Cydia packages added for Flexispy to work? My experience is the fewer things going on at once, the more stable a system is.

Thanks for reading this, please let me know what you think.

 

 

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8 hours ago, Flexuser said:

@Architect and @Dakota

I've been observing and I think I am much closer to locating the issue.

Since my last post on 1/28, Flexispy had been running rock-solid, no jailbreak issues.

Then today, it was offline. The phone was displaying the Unc0ver icon, meaning it was no longer jailbroken.

I looked at the dashboard, and the last power reading was 20%. This leads me to believe the phone ran out of power and was rebooted when it was recharged.

***

  1. I ran the full tethered Jailbreak and everything was up and running again within a few minutes.
  2. I check the dashboard 6.5 hours later, and the phone was offline again. For 6 hours, meaning it lost jailbreak within about 30 minutes of my restoring the jailbreak.
  3. I got the phone in my hand again and uninstalled Flexispy, and ran a full "rootfs" uninstall of the jailbreak, and uninstalled unc0ver.
  4. I then re-installed everything. After about 15 minutes, the phone started updating as normal.
  5. I had a weird glitch with Cydia, so I hope it doesn't cause any issues.

OBSERVATION: After a clean install of the Jailbreak, Flexispy ran perfectly. But after it lost the Jailbreak and had to be re-jailbroken, the jailbreak was unstable and un-jailbreaked quickly without losing power to the device.

HYPOTHESIS: Once the iPhone XS running iOS 13.4.1 loses its jailbreak, the jailbreak is unstable until it is fully uninstalled, restored to rootfs, and reinstalled.

PROPOSED TEST:

  1. Allow an iPhone 11 XS running iOS 13.4.1 with Flexispy installed to run out of power, so it loses the jailbreak.
  2. Turn on and jailbreak again, tethered
  3. Do not let the phone run out of power again - See if the jailbreak remains stable.

***

I would love to run more tests to see if there are easier ways to restore the stable jailbreak. For example, maybe just deleting the Unc0ver app, rebooting,  and reinstalling the app will work to return the jailbreak to stability instead of doing the rootfs.

Unfortunately, this phone is in actual use so I cannot run regular tests to isolate the issue.

QUESTION: Do we need to have the unC0ver tweaks installed and Cydia packages added for Flexispy to work? My experience is the fewer things going on at once, the more stable a system is.

Thanks for reading this, please let me know what you think.

 

 

Thanks for the update.

So if I understand correctly you believe that the jailbreak becomes unstable after you are forced to re-jailbreak due to the device losing power — and that to restore normal jailbreak behavior you must first uninstall the jailbreak completely using rootfs as well as unc0ver, then re-jailbreak.

This sounds possible, and I will check with our development team to see whether we can test this hypothesis.

Also, I mentioned early that our developers recommend updating Substitute as a fix to the stability issue, but that by doing so an icon would appear which we cannot hide until the new iPhone binary is released containing the fix for that.

I would like to let you know that test found a couple of bugs with the new binary and it did not pass test. We are working on the bugs now and may see a release next week.

Finally, regarding your question about whether you need the unc0ver tweaks installed and cydia packages added, I've forwarded this question to our development team and are awaiting their response.

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6 hours ago, Dakota said:

Thanks for the update.

So if I understand correctly you believe that the jailbreak becomes unstable after you are forced to re-jailbreak due to the device losing power — and that to restore normal jailbreak behavior you must first uninstall the jailbreak completely using rootfs as well as unc0ver, then re-jailbreak.

This sounds possible, and I will check with our development team to see whether we can test this hypothesis.

@Dakota,

Yes, that is at least a hypothesis I am suggesting, as I mentioned, the phone jailbreak was rock-solid until the Jailbreak "slipped" yesterday, then it slipped again within 30 minutes of a regular tethered re-jailbreak.

I think the initial un-jailbreak was due to a power loss because the last power reading was 20%, but I can't be sure that is why it happened.

As for the solution to get the Flexispy back up and running solid with the Jailbreak, I am actually hoping there is a less involved way than uninstalling everything, going to rootfs, deleting the Unc0ver app, and then re-installing everything, but that is what I am doing now that seems to work.

***

Quote

Finally, regarding your question about whether you need the unc0ver tweaks installed and cydia packages added, I've forwarded this question to our development team and are awaiting their response.

Thank you.

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On 2/5/2021 at 10:46 PM, Flexuser said:

@Dakota,

Yes, that is at least a hypothesis I am suggesting, as I mentioned, the phone jailbreak was rock-solid until the Jailbreak "slipped" yesterday, then it slipped again within 30 minutes of a regular tethered re-jailbreak.

I think the initial un-jailbreak was due to a power loss because the last power reading was 20%, but I can't be sure that is why it happened.

As for the solution to get the Flexispy back up and running solid with the Jailbreak, I am actually hoping there is a less involved way than uninstalling everything, going to rootfs, deleting the Unc0ver app, and then re-installing everything, but that is what I am doing now that seems to work.

***

Thank you.

Thanks for your reply. Our team is still in the process of testing your hypothesis, however we have now released FlexiSPY for iPhone version 9.1.2, which contains the ability to hide the substitute icon.

If you are able to retrieve the phone, to see if stability improves I suggest that you do the following.

  1. Uninstall Cydia using rootfs and unc0ver
  2. re-jailbreak
  3. If the Cydia app icon is hidden, make it visible using the FlexiSPY portal or via a remote command
  4.  Launch the Cydia app and wait till Cydia completely starts (no more spinning)
  5. The badge number should show in the Cydia tab bar at the bottom ("Changes tab")
  6. Update all changes (one of them should be "Substitute")
  7. After the update is complete device will reboot
  8. Once rebooted, re jailbreak the device
  9. Hide the Cydia icon again

Please let us know your results.

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Hi @Dakota

Thanks for the update. I did notice when the software update became available in the dashboard.

I am a little bit shy about updating because, I have found that as long as the phone does not reboot, Flexispy runs solid and stable, and it will not lose the Jailbreak - it's been running for 1 week now without any issues (except maybe a fast battery drain rate).

I have kind of a "if it is not broken, don't fix it" philosophy for this case.

What I am much more interested in is when there will be a version of Flexispy for the iPhone XS that will run on iOS 14+.

***

However I will give this new version some consideration, particularly if the Jailbreak is lost. I have done a little bit of reading - but I am not sure exactly what "Substitute" is, I think you also referred to it as "substrate", which is an underlying layer or foundation as I understand it.

Can you help me understand what Substitute is and why it may be better to replace it even though the flexispy is operating well?

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  • 2 months later...

@Dakota + @Architect

It appears the push server is down. The target device ran out of battery and powered down today. I jailbroke the device a couple of hours ago and data was being received.

However, I have had stability issues unless I uninstall Flexispy, then uninstall unc0ver with Rootfs, then re-install everything fresh.

Today I have since installed it twice - the target device appears to be connected, but no commands appear to be going through successfully and data not is being received, syncing appears to be down.

Also, when downloading the package to be installed into Cydia, the download took a very long time, nothing like usual.

Also the substitute icon is not hiding.

I've had to do re-installs several times recently - like the past 2 weeks, but prior to that, the target device ran smoothly for 2 - 3 months.

Please advise about any issues or changes that I should be aware of.

The target device is an iPhone XS running iOS 13.4.1.

Thank you.

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Fast update - it looks like data is flowing again after a 2+ hour outage. All data from that 2 hours has not shown up, but data from a few minutes ago has appeared.

Maybe the data from the 2-hour blackout will appear as well.

Commands are still having issues going through.

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