iPhone Experiencing issues that prevent me from using my phone normally

[bjangles]

I’m having serious issues that prevent me from using my phone normally. I have a 7+ and I’ve been running the iOS 11 betas since they were released and have had no issues until the GM candidate. Since updating to GM I’ve experienced the issues I’ll list below. Last night I even erased my phone and reinstalled using the downloadable release candidate that you can get from Apple’s developer site, and that didn’t help and I’m still experiencing all of these problems throughout the day:

• The music widget on the lock screen displays no data when music is playing. The sliders respond to touch but they don’t change playback or volume. When this happens, any bluetooth devices (like my car) don’t receive any data about the music. It displays “unknown” for everything. However I can still skip songs using bluetooth controls.
  • 
• When the phone is unlocked, pressing the volume buttons doesn’t display the volume indicator. The volume changes, and I can verify by switching to between vibrate and ring and seeing the change in volume when the volume indicator shows up. I have “Change with Buttons” set to on in the Settings app.
  • 
• At times when the volume indicator works, pressing them shows the volume indicator but instead of changing “Ringer” volume it says “Volume” which from my understanding is for media playback. I know this usually occurs when I have YouTube or some other media app open. And I can fix that by force quitting that app. But sometimes this happens when I’m not using a media app.
• The weather app widget displays “Tap to Setup” even though I’ve set it up. It doesn’t fetch data for the weather until I tap on it, when it sends me to the weather app. But the weather app is frozen (more below)
  • Currently the weather app is fine, I'll attempt to capture a screenshot when I catch it again
• Apps constantly freezing, this is honestly the biggest issue. I’m experiencing random freezes and I’ve yet to pinpoint anything particular that would trigger this. I’ve noticed two types of freezes
  • Frozen showing launch screen
  • Frozen showing snapshot of last state of the app
  • Sometimes a background app will freeze showing me the launch screen instead of the last snapshot. And conversely sometimes an app that hasn't been running will freeze showing me a snapshot of its last state.
  • This happens to stock apps just as often as apps from the store, most notably on these apps as these are the ones I use on a daily basis:
    • Messages
    • Safari
    • Weather
    • Instagram
• When an app freezes, so does the phone. It doesn't respond to touch, to volume button presses, to home button presses, and not even to the lock button. After about one minute it unfreezes and sequentially executes all the buttons I pressed. Usually I press the home button first to back out of the app, and on some occasions it responds after 30 seconds and it takes me back to the home screen with the phone responding to touch, but, any app the I launch after that (whether its the same app or a new one) freezes the phone completely all over again.
  • If I don't press any buttons, sometimes the app will finally load while other times it crashes. I also haven't pinpointed what causes one result vs the other

I experience these issues every few hours throughout the day. The music issue has been happening every time I get into my car. The freezing issue happens quite a bit throughout the day. Restarting the phone doesn't help and neither did reinstalling iOS. My last resort is going to the Apple Store but maybe someone has experienced these issues and can weigh in. Thanks for reading the lengthy post!