June was a tense month for the engineers and designers on Apple’s iPhone team with “a sense of panic in the air,” a source with knowledge of the situation tells me.

The company has been working feverishly to fix software problems in its hotly anticipated 10th-anniversary iPhone that could ultimately cause production and delivery delays, the source says. If the software problems aren’t resolved quickly, the new flagship iPhone could even launch with major features disabled.

The all-new iPhone, which some speculate could start at $1,200, is expected to debut at a press event this fall, and may be called the iPhone 8, iPhone Pro, or iPhone X. It’s expected to pack several new technologies that have never before been built into iPhones, and some of them are tricky to implement.

One of those is wireless charging. The iPhone 8–let’s call it that for now–will reportedly use a type of inductive charging, where the phone sits directly on a separate charging device. (Our source believes Apple is using the Qi wireless charging standard, or a variant of it.) The wireless charging components, which are provided by chipmaker Broadcom Ltd., are not the key issue, the source said; it’s the software that’s not ready for prime time.

If the company can’t get the technology to work smoothly in time, my source said, it might ship the first phones with inoperable wireless charging hardware, then enable the feature later on. There’s precedent for this approach: Over the years, Apple has sometimes shipped hardware but activated it later. The last example of this was Portrait Mode in the iPhone 7 Plus: The sensors and chips were built into the phone from the start, but the feature was activated only later on after the software was perfected.

Apple faces similar problems with the new 3D sensor. A recent Bloomberg report says that sensor is front facing and will be used to recognize the user’s face to unlock the phone. The report even suggests Apple may rely on the 3D sensor for authentication in lieu of the familiar Touch ID fingerprint scanner. Especially in light of the fact that Touch ID plays an integral role in the security of Apple Pay, it seems farfetched that Apple would suddenly abandon it for a brand-new, untested technology.

Without confirming that’s what the front-facing 3D sensor is for, my source says Apple has been struggling to get the sensor to work reliably. Again, the sensor hardware is not the problem, but rather the accompanying software.