Microsoft has acknowledged the Windows Phone 7.8 Live Tile issues consumers have been experiencing. Developers have approached the company with reports that problems have been caused by the magic tiles, with a MSDN forum thread prompting a response from Mark Chamberlain, Microsoft Principal Developer Support Escalation.
Now, this isn't to say that an update has been confirmed to be well on the way to consumers, but we are aware of Microsoft halting the current rollout of Windows Phone 7.8. It was only the other days when Vodafone pointed at Microsoft as to the cause for the delay to its customers. It's looking increasingly likely that the halted release and Live Tile issues are part of the same picture.
Here's what Chamberlain had to say on the matter (consider it an official confirmation that the issue has been documented and looked into):
"An update: this issue has been recorded and the problem is understood. There are actually two issues:
- Live tile causing continuous web requests (and side effects such as battery drain)
- Live tile failing to update.
The fixes will be considered for inclusion in an update to the phone operating system. In the forum post above, several posters have been able to get around the problem by unpinning and repinning the live tiles. This might be a temporary workaround."
We've covered the problem with Live Tiles in Windows Phone 7.8 quite extensively. Heathcliff, a well-known name in the Windows Phone homebrew community, wrote up a piece on how the issue could be worse than previously believed, leading to increased battery drain and data usage, should a device become affected by the documented problem.
With Microsoft evidently delaying the rollout of Windows Phone 7.8, we can speculate that a fix is in the works to be applied to Windows Phones that have already received the update, as well as implemented into the release for those yet to receive it.
