I wonder if the Apple representative who said this would be "fixed later this week" realizes this allows any attacker to wiretap any iPhone user (that has the vuln)
The team might be able to fix it today, but the fix needs to go through testing and then be built alongside the rest of iOS (a multi-hour process). I wouldn’t be surprised if this takes two or three days to roll out.
You didn't even bring into consideration the app store approval process which can take 2-3 weeks and likely would reject this as a feature removal without user notification.
I'm not sure if they have a special process for emergency bug fixes, but for internal testing a new build is done about daily from source, yes. One of these ends up being polished a bit and sent out to users.
So my confusion is generally it's best practices to keep branches off of these releases and then just apply fixes to that. Even better is if you can keep the meta build around or use a distributed build system so that you can do incremental builds for patches to that release getting the time way down, unless of course you're changing core libraries and have to recompile or re-link everything. It would seem a risk to me security wise that there wasn't a fast way to get patches out to prod per app or fo the os that don't require full blown rebuilds.
I guess I may also not be accounting for the QA process.
