If you installed iOS 15 already, you’ve probably noticed that Instagram has been doing an annoying thing where it won’t play audio on Instagram Stories unless you turn your iPhone ringer on. Today Instagram has pushed out an app update that fixes the bug.
This has been an issue since iOS 15 first rolled out as a beta. Instagram muted audio on Stories if the iPhone ringer was switched to silent. That’s not really how the ringer switch is supposed to work—it only mutes sounds for texts, calls, and alarms, not sounds in apps. After all, just because you keep your phone on silent doesn’t mean you don’t want to blast your favorite music or watch your nemesis make a complete fool of themselves on Instagram.
It’s unclear how widespread the problem was, with some folks on Reddit claiming that silent mode has been causing issues in Instagram since iOS 14. However, it appears that this wasn’t an issue limited to the developer and public iOS 15 betas.
Instagram has also fixed another bug, as spotted by 9to5Mac, that had to do with the iPhone 13's smaller notch. If you’re using the newest iPhone, you may have noticed that the search bar at the top was layered beneath the iOS status bar, which made it difficult to search, access your DMs, etc.
You don’t have to do anything special to get the fix. All you have to do is download the latest update. That said, this is a good example of why you might want to wait a bit before upgrading to the latest software or phone. Facebook has pushed out a fix relatively quickly for folks running the public release, but anyone who’s been running the developer or public betas has been dealing with this irksome bug for months. Granted, it’s not a system-breaking bug and iOS 15 has thus far been pretty stable. Even so, the first few weeks of a new software release are generally when you have to deal with some small but annoying bugs like this one. Now if only we could get Instagram to push out an update that restores the chronological feed.