New Apple security feature reboots iPhones after 3 days, researchers confirm

Periodic reboots are actually a PCI requirement for payment terminals heh, basically every point of sale on the market reboots every 24h.

Seems like a good defence in depth strategy. These days most systems have a pretty good boot chain security, so after a reboot you know the system is in a valid state and any potential malicious changes have been flushed out.

Probably also helps with other kinds of transient hardware faults (and cosmic-rays) that can cause bitflips.

That said, on principle, there is no reason why ECC RAM should not be the standard (c.f. Linus Torvald’s ire at Intel using ECC as a market-segmentation ploy)

> reboots the phone if it’s not unlocked for 72 hours

Scheduled reboots would help more with clearing malware or transient errors.

But for now, for anyone periodically using the phone, which I bet is most users, the phone will never reboot automatically.

Not never; phones also reboot when there are critical OS updates to apply — and that happens as long as the phone is both charging and locked at any time during a vendor-defined daily maintenance window (usually something like 2AM-4AM in the user's local time.)

This happens even if the user just put the phone to sleep a moment ago. The only way to prevent it is to never leave your phone locked and charging at the same time.

> phones also reboot when there are critical OS updates to apply

Of course, or when they run out of battery, or you drop them too hard, etc. But realistically you could go for weeks or months without a reboot. From a transient fault or malware perspective, that might as well be never.