iOS 11 reviewed | Hacker News Reader

iOS 11 reviewed

arstechnica.com

226 pointscstuder289 comments

> Practically speaking, do I need to be able to play phone games from 2009 on my 2017 iPhone? Not really.

The problem is not that you can't play phone games from 2009 on your 2017 iPhone, tying 32b deprecation to a hardware revision would actually have been nice (regardless of the hardware still being able to run in 32b mode).

But that's not what's happening, the problem is that you can't play phone games from 2009 on your 2013~2016 iPhone which had been able to run them right until you updated iOS.

> users (who get some free space back in iOS 11)

"Free space" which they could already have gained back by removing the applications in the first place.

And not only does the upgrade semi-arbitrarily make old apps stop working, it's impossible to go back.

Apple is still signing 10.3.3, so it's not impossible to go back (yet).

True, but that will only last some days or weeks.

The iPhone 5C won't update past iOS 10 so Apple will keep the signed version of that around and you can find 5C's for cheap. I mean if you really want to keep using 2009 apps. (I am not claiming that this is at all a reasonable work-around, just that there is a work-around.)

That's a good point. They can be stupid and inconvenient about it, but it's not making this stuff completely inaccessible.

You can still download iOS 5 for the original iPad and restore it.

The newest version of iTunes still supports the first generation iPod as far as I know. I know it still supports the first generation iPod Touch.

It's not that games from 2009 don't run, only games that haven't been updated since 2009 don't run. All a developer needs to do is recompile and push an update.

I have a ton of apps no longer supported on iOS 11. They come in 2 main groups:

- apps which were abandoned

- apps which were replaced by a successor. In the absence of update fees, this is the easiest way to generate new revenue for continuous updates. I am happy to pay for app maintenance, but this scheme means, that there is no automatic data migration from the old to the new apps.

> apps which were replaced by a successor

Hello, Omnigraffle. I bought this on iPad, used this something like, three times before having a need to use it over a year later and "Sorry! There is a new version to buy and your version is no longer supported, or runs!". It wasn't cheap, as apps go.

Never, ever buying anything from Omni, ever again.

Edit: To add details, I bought this for £35 on iOS 7. When iOS 8 came around, it was discontinued, left to crash on open, and you had the "opportunity" to buy version 2 all over again.

They rightly don't want your "business".

What do you mean by that? Of course a developer doesn't have to support version X forever, but the damn thing no longer runs at all? This was paid software. I guess OP was renting it for some undisclosed period of time, and you think that's acceptable?

That seems wrong. I wonder if you could petition apple for a refund in the case where developers purposefully sunset an app purposefully but for no technical reason (which I understand isn't really what this thread about, nor may not match your situation entirely).

I don't think the dev went in and broke the old version. I think it didn't run on the new OS and they built a new version that did. This happens in the desktop space as well where there are apps that worked on Windows 7 but don't on Windows 10. You can buy a newer version that does work on Windows 10. This is generally for much more involved apps that are quite expensive to build and to buy.

Same with the American History Dictionary of the English Language. The app costs about $30 and they release a new version every year or two and kill the old version. After the second time this happened I stopped playing that game, which is a shame since this is my favorite dictionary.

Similar with Tweetbot, which seems to release a new version as a separate app every couple years or so? The version I reluctantly bought (knowing they do this) is no longer updated but had long-standing bugs even when it was being actively developed. The experience makes me reluctant to buy any apps at all on App Store, tbh.

You pay $5 for Tweetbot, and they work delivering updates for years before asking for another (usually b/c of many new features or hard work updating the UI for modern iOS)

It's one of the most polished apps around. You don't owe the Developer's time indefinitely from one $5 purchase, and you're free to move to an alternative. I'm happy to continue to support the apps I love -- they generally aren't asking a whole lot.

Additionally, in the case of Twitter clients, they also can't add a lot of new customers b/c Twitter has capped their allowed clients. If they didn't charge customers again, they wouldn't be able to sustain the work with new ones.

Same thing with WeightBot, which I have been using for years and now doesn't work with iOS 11, and I'm losing years of data. I would pay for an update to the app, but it's completely abandoned.

I also loved weightbot, but gave up on it long ago. You might be able to pull the data off with one of the filesystem, readers, if that's worth anything to you at all.

This is par for the course with Omni software - a lesson I've learned as well.

You seem to have no understanding whatsoever of the funding system and life cycle of games.

Games are generally funded by a publisher who retains all rights to the game, the developer is contracted for some time, then goes on to work on something else. A publisher is not going to pay for the update of a paid-upfront game from 5+ years ago, there's no ROI in that. Without a continuous revenue stream, publishers don't keep updating games.

Furthermore, both publisher and original developer can fold, leaving the game orphaned.

I made a game in 2009, it was quite popular, got a bunch of positive reviews, I gave it away for free.

I had to keep giving Apple £100/year just to let people keep downloading the game for free. At some point I tried recompiling it for a newer iOS, and I get hundreds of message about depricated APIs that I had to change to get it accepted by Apple. Instead I let it drop.

I can't even put a copy online for people to download, the game is just dead and gone thanks to Apple. I can still run Windows games from 20 year ago and with DOSbox, DOS games from 30 years ago. My own iOS game on the other hand is dead, never to be revived.

Open source it? Or try to sell it.

Those probably are the only valid options. But let's face it. Unless the game was extremely popular, or has a cult following, it is rather unlikely that anyone will want to pick it up and run with it.

I play board games and there are games nowadays that require an app to play (see for example Alchemists). I've argued that this is a bad idea since at some point the apps will probably stop working as we see happening in iOS 11. But people always argue back that someone will be sure to create a version of the app to keep it going. I may be a cynic, but I think that is incredibly naive to believe that will happen.

I used to have a board game or two that required a VHS tape. Sure, VCRs exist and can be found, but it’s such an outdated technology that people aren’t going to search them out. I know there are some games that require LaserDisc too, same thing but even worse. It’s not necessarily a new development.

Probably won't happen if he just throws it out on github, but if he can show and prove that it "was quite popular, got a bunch of positive reviews" somehow AND gave some brief overview of the project and effort required to update it then the chance is higher.

If your interested seeing it continue to run and are up for selling it message me. I buy old ios apps that still trickle in a small amount of sales and keep them running.

I don't mind fixing it up if you still want to publish it. Put it on github and post a link to the thread? Or you can email me at lnanek at gmail. I need an app store account for my own apps anyway.

This is a pretty fascinating anecdote to me, as I preserve software as long as I possibly can (still having boxes of games like Marathon, Myst, Spectre, SimCity for example). I had a strong feeling that the ultra-closed App Store would result in extremely ephemeral software. It's very difficult to preserve software that is so "encumbered" and reliant on the continued distribution by a 3rd party who sets all the rules.

>I can't even put a copy online for people to download, the game is just dead and gone thanks to Apple. I can still run Windows games from 20 year ago and with DOSbox, DOS games from 30 years ago.

On the other hand, thanks to this kind of "burning bridges" users are not tied to 20 year old compatibility kludges and legacy BS in the OS and libs.

>My own iOS game on the other hand is dead, never to be revived.

Which, App Store or not is the fate of tons of games -- most 8bit/16bit era games we have, we just have thanks to emulators.

> I can't even put a copy online for people to download

Sure you can.

Put the source code up on Github and anyone can download and sideload it on their device. Don't even need a developer account to do that these days.

I think you stopped reading before you reached this part:

>At some point I tried recompiling it for a newer iOS, and I get hundreds of message about depricated APIs that I had to change to get it accepted by Apple.

Yea, your refusal to keep it up to date is Apples fault.

I think you have no experience with updating legacy iOS applications to modern SDKs. It is not just a matter of "recompile and push", it is:

* Ensuring your code still works now that CGFloat and ints change size (can easily trip up code, I've seen things fail subtly and then grow into huge errors with combinations of NSInteger and "-1" etc)

* Updating all UI to handle new behavior (yes, just linking with a new compiler will automatically opt-in to new behavior that might totally break interactions and taps)

* If your app is really old, rewrite all UI to not assume a 320px wide screen (this can be brutal)

* Handling new restrictions and requirements such as supporting IPv6-only network (fun if your app is used to configure an IoT device over IPv4 LAN), and Transport Security (fun if your app allows users to connect to random servers around the world)

* Handling new permission models for camera/gps/contacts/photo library/audio library access, including refactoring your code to deal with asynchronous results

* Updating all your graphic assets for @2x and @3x resolution as well as new app icon sizes (hope you still have those .PSD files, and hope your designer wasn't doing pixel-perfect painting for your bitmaps!)

* The original developer must still be in business, still pay the $100/year developer fee, and still have the source code and the talent to fix it.

On top of all the technical details, you also have to abide by all the new AppStore policies to even get approved.

And this is the relatively easy case of an app built using Apple technologies.

It can be much more difficult if you built a game using a cross platform game engine filled with binary 32bit libraries. If the engine is still around, you might be able to pay for a license for a newer version of the engine, but then you likely also need to deal with the SDK and format changes in the new engine as well as any iOS specific things you have.

Still, if software is your business and this software in particular makes you money, it's really not _that_ expensive to do.

Exactly. I had a legacy app like this that was generating next to nothing in revenue. I lol'd at all the work I would have had to do to bring it up two versions of iOS, and left it alone.

As someone who has been developing iOS apps for 8 years, it’s preetty easy. If you wrote code that depended upon sizes of fundamental types, you didn’t write good code. if you weren’t using resources to lay out UI, you didn’t think ahead. 2x and 3x graphics can be created from your originals with OSX preview.

It’s far easier to rewrite old apps today than ever. The tools are far better. The APIs are far better. Asynchronous code is trivial to implement with GCD nowadays.

The real truth is you won’t pay the developer for their time, so they won’t give it to you. It has nothing to do with Apple.

I didn’t say it was impossible, I was just argung that updating legacy apps is a lot more work than clicking a recompile button and uploading the result. The loser here is the end-user, who can’t access their files inside legacy apps or control devices that depend on legacy apps or even just enjoy a paid-for game. And that’s all on Apple, who surely could have offered 32bit support for several more years, even if they froze the api level on 32bit uikit/corefoundation to iOS10, and as an optional on-first-use download, for existing app-owners only (so obviously they get to hold their app store storefront clean).

No the winner is the user who doesn't have to host hundreds of megabytes of 32 bit libraries in memory on their device.

That could easily be solved by offering 32bit support as an optional download, just like how 32bit windows10 prompts to install the 16bit ntvdm support libraries on first use. Or just like how iOS itself mounts a developer disk image provided on-demand by xcode during the first debug session, adding more items to the general ios settings menu in the process

A few hundred megabytes is certainly a small price to pay for users who need those legacy apps to unlock files/documents stored inside or the features the app might to provide to interface with legacy IoT devices or even a car.

It's a huge price to pay for a user who doesn't understand that their decrepit app is the reason the rest of their phone doesn't work as well as it used to.

The simple solution is for developers to recompile the apps. The developers of any apps that are truly still needed by customers, can easily convince those customers to pay for the update.

But the phone worked "as well as it used to" on iOS10 with support for 32bit apps. So why would it not work as well as that? I think what will happen is the user don't understand why their precious legacy app doesn't launch at all.

Also, they could just continue to pop up an alert saying "this app may slow down your phone" like they already did in iOS10.

Also, I doubt there is much of a performance hit anyways. For example, the current facebook app is 64bit and it is a slouch to start.

Unfortunately a lot of developpers will not be able to update their app with the new Apple Guideline released this Year. They are currently blocking any app that look alike or have the same features. The guideline is so vague that a huge amount of Developpers including my company are forced to remove their apps or wait until apple removes them with no ability to update the app or communicate to the users that the app is being removed.

> Unfortunately a lot of developpers will not be able to update their app with the new Apple Guideline released this Year.

Which part of the guidelines, specifically?

So you wrote clones of better selling apps?

>"Free space" which they could already have gained back by removing the applications in the first place.

Were apps previously installed as fat binaries with 64 and 32-bit architectures included, and the 32-bit chunk has now been removed?

Or was that already taken care of with the "app thinning" stuff a couple of years ago?

The free space here mostly refers to 32-bit system libraries.

> Or was that already taken care of with the "app thinning" stuff a couple of years ago?

It should have been. And the update only removes 32b applications, not 32/64, if they were not doing so before I doubt they're going to thin fat binaries now.

If I have to choose between my beloved Tetris app and iOS 11, I stick to my Tetris app.

The latest processor doesn't support 32 bit code. All 64 bit phones can support the latest OS. Why should Apple waste time, resources, and space on the device to support 32 bit code?

Backwards compatibility.

The bane of everyone's existence. No thanks. I'm glad one company at least isn't willing to do that. I've had it up to here with "Windows XP is good enough for me, make your software run on it" types.

On the one hand I agree with you: on the other I quite like the fact that relatively large bodies of code I wrote 12 years ago still run unmodified (albeit in Windows desktop apps that have received updates and enhancements since then).

Due to these updates I don't know that they would still run on Windows XP but it's nice that the code hasn't needed to change.

Much of the code needs nothing more than a recompile. It’s just no one is doing that.

To run 32 bit stuff you need copies of all the system libraries. You lose a lot of RAM to that. You have to continue to ensure they don’t have bugs. All for apps that are abandoned.

I totally understand what apple is doing. I bet you a ton of those apps were never updated for iPhone 6 screen shizes either.

Oh, for sure - iOS is a different world from Windows though, and it's annoying when apps are left to rot. Does make me think twice about which apps to invest in nowadays though.

You would only lose the RAM and the disk space if the 32bit support is actually needed and installed. What’s better - having unused RAM and your app refusing to launch, or using RAM to run your important legacy app?

Backwards compatibility doesn't come without trade offs in security, maintenance, resource usage, etc.

How far back should Apple go with backwards compatibility?

Do you also think that modern Macs should support 65C02 from the Apple II days? 68K Mac programs? PPC Mac programs?

Apple dropped 32 bit processor support in 2011. They will probably drop 32 app support in the next two years.

> The latest processor doesn't support 32 bit code.

Don't they, though? I've seen a few people assert that, but no hard facts yet.

> Why should Apple waste time, resources, and space on the device to support 32 bit code?

Because users paid good money for 32b applications and phones which could run them at the time, and this is going to hold back users updating on iOS.

Yes and I also paid good money for my Apple // software, my 68K Mac software and my PPC Mac software. How far back should Apple go supporting older platforms?

> my PPC Mac software

Rosetta was bundled with OSX for 4 years. That's for PPC mac software running on hardware which literally could not run it natively.

> my 68K Mac software

The Mac 68k emulator was only deprecated with the Intel transition, 68K mac software remained supported for about a decade.

> How far back should Apple go supporting older platforms?

Supporting software which runs natively on the hardware doesn't seem exactly reaching.

32 bit apps don't run natively on the new ARM chips. Heck many old apps don't run at all on iOS 10.

Apple was able to reduce the size of iOS by not having 32 bit support libraries in memory. Since iOS doesn't have paging, that saved memory benefits 64 bit apps.

> 32 bit apps don't run natively on the new ARM chips.

Which is not my issue, have you considered reading my comments? Here, let me make it easy for you:

> the problem is that you can't play phone games from 2009 on your 2013~2016 iPhone which had been able to run them right until you updated iOS.

> Apple was able to reduce the size of iOS by not having 32 bit support libraries in memory.

Is that why capacity available went down 730MB on a 7?

> Since iOS doesn't have paging, that saved memory benefits 64 bit apps.

You could already save that memory by not using 32b software. Don't use the software, the libraries don't get loaded. Furthermore given iOS will kill background applications to reclaim memory, the "saved memory" is just about non-existant.

All of the 64 bit programs can share the same 64 bit libraries. Once you load one 32 bit app it going to take up memory causing the 64 bit programs to killed.

There is always a performance hit going from 32 bit to 64 bit processes. There is a hit to performance when running both 64 bit and 32 bit processes on Windows. Why take the hit to support some old 32 bit apps that probably haven't been updated to take advantage of even the 4" inch phones let alone the larger phones? Why take on the support and security concerns for a few old apps - many of which already don't work on iOS 10?

I think a slight "performance hit" to run essential 32bit apps is better than the "performance hit" of the apps not launching and the data inside them rendered inaccessible.

I guess knowing my RAM is unused helps me feel better while I'm wondering which files I've lost to the forever locked away 32bit app containers.

Essential apps that the developer has decided not to update in two years. Not even a simple ‘recompile and submit’ that many apps would require.

The developers of the apps clearly don’t think of them as essential.

I first bought Infinity Blade in 2010. I had forgotten about it for years and then redownloaded it recently just to find out that it was never updated to be 64 bit and that it hadn't been updated in 5 years - February 2012.

I was going to play it for a little while before I updated to iOS 11. To my surprise, Epic decided to update it for the first time in 5 years and port it to 64 bit code. It couldn't be because it was still making much money, but I did appreciate it.

EDIT:

It was also updated to support the iPad Pro.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/infinity-blade/id387428400?m...

> The developers of the apps clearly don’t think of them as essential.

Or, like the vast, vast majority of games, the developer was contracted for the initial development and the publisher who owns the right to the IP and specific software has no financial incentives to pay for additional work to update it and thus won't, regardless of the developer's wishes or whims let alone the users's

Users paid most of that money to the apps developers, yet the developers won’t even recompile the apps to keep them on the store. Why should Apple punish all the other iOS users by sucking up memory to support abandoned apps they don’t use?

They could offer 32bit app support as an optional download, just like how 32bit Windows 10 still offers the 16bit NTVDM and MS-DOS support as an optional install on demand.

Really sucks to lose 32bit support for legacy apps that used to work, especially when it might be a companion app for hardware/equipment that cost much more than the iPhone X (like your car).

Do you realize how many security vulnerabilities have been found in Windows caused by supporting legacy apps?

I have some 32 bit apps that already don't work with newer versions of iOS.

Do you realize that "legacy apps" are much more important to people who use them than the hardware that it runs on?

Apple is a hardware company, and its need reason to push it. But what I do with hardware is run applications, and the applications matter more to me than the shiny (or not) box they run on, insofar as the box has the hardware to provide the UX that makes the software usable.

I am not talking in abstract; when Everyday Looper goes, iOS will lose about half its value to me.

(See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzQLRPwZjIo for usage example).

Looks like everyday looper added 64 bit support in an update last week, fyi.

Good news for me, thank you!

Do you realize that "legacy apps" are much more important to people who use them than the hardware that it runs on

Seeing that Apple is the most valuable company in the world and they have a long history of abandoning legacy software (Apple //e, 68K, PPC, and soon 32 bit x86) and moving customers with them, that statement doesn't jibe with the reality on the ground.

What are the chances that people won't upgrade their iOS devices because they want to run an abandoned 32 bit app?

All the other transitions could be handled by virtualization and emulation, and the software and the corresponding data files could be copied between file systems and drives, so if you have built a workflow around a legacy app, you could still access it on new hardware.

But iOS being such a locked down and closed platform means there is currently no way to preserve legacy apps or the data stored within installations. This is why dropping 32bit legacy app support is such a big deal.

This is apple not microsoft. Move off of 32-bit, there's no reason to be on it. And corporations have the means (or there are third parties willing to help) to rewrite things to the new 64-bit mandate.

If the developer doesn’t care enough to recompile an app as 64 bit, why should Apple jump through hoops to keep it alive?

We're in a different era than before. Software is more likely to be internet connected and needs to be seen as an ongoing service to be maintained rather than a one-off program. This applies to simple things like recompiling for 64 bit support (a rather low bar), as well as more important things like security updates as new vulnerabilities are found. In addition, mobile UX has really evolved in the first decade of iPhones and mobile apps are in large part defined by their UX, as they're first and foremost consumer oriented (rather than more backend utilities). All these factors drive the need for mobile apps to stay relatively current, and those who can't cross that rather low bar tend to be a niche within a niche.

That said, to your point I'm sure most people who have been on iOS for a while have that one app that seems to be abandoned that they love, myself included. I'm glad 32b is going away as it really does clean up the App Store and gains some efficiency, but I'm annoyed the developer has given up on the app I like.

I find it hilarious that every time Apple does anything like this, people complain and Apple still sets record sales. You're fundamentally wrong and Apple knows it. They can rip the headphone jack out. They can deprecate 32 bit apps. They can remove TouchID. They can block installing third party apps. Keep complaining; neither they nor their customers care.

Your comment reminds me of a time when the same was said about Microsoft. It will be interesting to see when/if Apple falls the same way MS did.

I think Apple has a far greater advantage than MS did (if not quite the marketshare, although the markets are different). MS was never seen as 'cool' or an aspirational status symbol like Apple products are.

Fair point. I always thought that was mainly due to Steve Jobs, but so far it looks like they're able to stay one without him.

> MS was never seen as 'cool' or an aspirational status symbol like Apple products are.

Sure it was.

In Portugal during the 90's, there were lots of CS students applying to work there.

Apple not so much, specially since they were about to close, and except for the Interlog shops in Lisbon, it was almost impossible to get an affordable device in a country where the average salary was about 400 euros on today's money.

>if Apple falls the same way MS did

Are we thinking of the same MS?

What MS are you thinking of? Back in the day (I'm thinking 20 years ago), anything MS said was law. They had the power to destroy all other browsers so we were left with just IE6 for so many years. MS no longer has that kind of power. They can no longer dictate the technological landscape like they used to be able to do. Now the landscape is dictated by standards and consensus set forth by Google, Facebook, Apple, MS, etc.

Ms only fall on mobile platform. Desktop app has good backward compartibility. Because of politic inside microsoft, every version of mobile platform has different language. Wp6.5 wp7 wp 7.1 wp8 win10 . 5 times must change the source code make developer escape to android. Microsoft at that era was untrusted

That is rubbish, Microsoft never acted like this. They allways favoured backwards compatibility. Apple OTOH has behaved this through their entire existence. Yet Apple still grew to a large company.

Quite the contrary it is this behaviour which has saved Apple. It made sure they could move forward with new technology quickly.

MS moves slowely because they accumulate so much cruft pulling them down. That is the flip side of always being backwards compatible and "nice" to the customers.

> Apple OTOH has behaved this through their entire existence.

Rosetta, Carbon and the Mac 68k Emulator are examples of the exact opposite.

Apple does not hesitate moving forwards, but historically they provided large amounts of backwards compatibility, just not as cruft inside the existing system.

Rosetta was also removed after two or three releases. 32 bit support for applications in iOS was also supported for a couple of releases and is now gone.

How is that not similar? I can't still run Rosetta to this date...

> Rosetta was also removed after two or three releases.

4 years.

> How is that not similar? I can't still run Rosetta to this date...

iOS 11 removed 32b support to hardware which supports it, Rosetta added PPC support to hardware which did not.

Something similar to Rosetta would be emulating Aarch32 after having removed hardware support for it, not removing software support for Aarch32 despite the hardware implementing it.

4 years

Apple's cadence of releasing Mac OS upgrades was a lot slower back then. x86 Macs were introduced with 10.4. Two releases later (10.7) they dropped support for PPC apps and 32 bit Macs.

> Keep complaining; neither they nor their customers care.

Apple has reversed several business decisions. Error 53, in app purchase gouging through developer fees, allowing apps instead of web apps (after realizing the iphone was pretty useless without apps), allowing bitcoin apps, etc etc.

>I find it hilarious that every time Apple does anything like this, people complain and Apple still sets record sales.

I hope you are not so naive to think that buying a product implies people like every single feature/change. Also, I don't quite see the hilariousness in a company ignoring valid complaints.

Not mention allowing non-Xcode apps (e.g. Flash + JavaScript) in the app store. This reversal happened even after Jobs' open letter "Thoughts on Flash" [0]. IMO, it's their biggest reversal in the iPhone era [1].

[0] https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ (April 2010)

[1] https://www.wired.com/2010/09/apple-lifts-app-store-flash-ba... (September 2010)

> allowing apps instead of web apps

For what it's worth, people who worked on the original iPhone have said that internally Apple knew that 'web apps' were always a stopgap until they could get a native SDK out the door. Time constraints preventing them from shipping one in the first year.

I'm sure Don Melton and/or Nitin Ganatra discussed this on Debug podcast a few years back https://www.imore.com/60-melton-ganatra-episode-iii-shipping...

Speaking of games, are there any archival initiatives for a future retro apps scene? Not that I can think of any games that would be worth it — but just for the sake of it.

Occasionally there are some apps which aren't games: https://www.f150forum.com/f118/ford-abandoning-remote-access...

"good luck unlocking your car with abandonware lol" https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/91013013057141964...

Sure, this is Ford's fault in this case, but it means that anything which has a tie-in iOS app needs to either budget for or bill for ongoing updates to make sure it keeps working.

It's going to be more than an annoyance in some case, but IMO, anything that has processor and access to the internet already needs to budget for ongoing updates to make sure it is secure.

> the problem is that you can't play phone games from 2009 on your 2013~2016 iPhone

Devil's advocate: you don't have to install iOS 11 on your four-year-old iPhone.

> Devil's advocate: you don't have to install iOS 11 on your four-year-old iPhone.

That is in fact my plan, but is nonetheless frustrating.

It only takes one "This app requires iOS11 to run" and there you go.

There are very few apps that require the latest OS to run unless they are 64 bit only. Even then, if there is an older version on the app store that was supported by your OS, you will be given the option to download an older version most of the time.

I can still download older versions of apps on my first gen iPad that hasn't been supported by iOS since 9/2012.

The typical lifetime of an iPhone is so short, I can imagine that Apple will one day save themselves a lot of pain and cost and just limit each iOS release to a single phone / ipad release.

That's not accurate. I keep my iPhones for two years, and when I upgrade I give them to family members who have always gotten another 2-3 years of use out of them. (And Apple has continued to support them during that time with software updates.)

It's actually one of the main things that keeps me in the iPhone ecosystem.

That's strange, I still see iPhone 4s/5/5s on the regular. The lifetime of my iPhone is typically a year, yes, but my used phones live on for many more years through other people after I sell them.

Yes, 5 years of constant updates for every phone is so short, especially compared to Androids zero years.

This, unfortunately, means no more security updates. So if someone finds a new exploit you are vulnerable. Plus the software update will keep nagging with its damn badge on the settings icon (that alone would drive me crazy enough to just do it).

If your phone can't upgrade to 11 you may very well get security updates, this has been the case in the past. I don't know what's the situation is like when you can but won't update to a new major version.

The arbitrary removal of 32-bit app support could be thought of as a heuristic to clear away abandonware. Which, for obvious reasons (security), Apple would like to have as little of in its App Store as possible. It also lets them aggressively deprecate and remove legacy APIs going forward.

You know. It just occurred due to me, due to your post, how convenient it must be to have every app using your APIs in one place like the app store.

Yeah lockin has huge advantages for the company.

It's great for asking "who uses this function" and "how do they use it"?

CPAN is used by the perl community to make lists of modules broken by new perl releases. They use this to find how intrusive proposed intentional changes are, as well as to find accidental breakage.

Take it further - they can look at all the apps in their App Store and make decisions like "Okay, lets improve this instruction set in the next ARM processor we make".

Someone was/is tracking "zombie apps"; the percentage of iOS apps that aren't/can't be found is huge, like well over 70%.

It's a longstanding practice at Apple. At some point hardware & software are old enough that not only are they not supported, they're pointedly ignored when some appropriate new development "breaks" them.

Other platforms garner some favor by supporting ancient software, but I've long seen the subtly crippling consequences of preserving such backwards compatibility.

I for one think that that's great. It helps encourage people to upgrade but it also makes things a lot easier to support. It's not friendly to the poor though. If you bought an older all aluminium macbook say in college and due to it being built like a tank you use it for 5+ years and it goes out of support what then if you're not making enough free cash to dole out on a 3k macbook?

I am admittedly pretty solidly middle-class, but I've never had a non-Apple computer last anywhere near 5+ years, so I'd say they were still getting a pretty decent deal relatively speaking.

But in any case Macs and iDevices are different; Macs tend to stay backwards-compatible for quite a while longer. 32-bit apps still work fine and will as long as Macs are on Intel processors. Even Carbon[1] apps still work (compiled as x86 binaries) on the latest MacOS, and those will also run (compiled as PPC binaries) on MacOS 8.1, from 1998.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)

Next year my mid 2013 MacBook Pro will be 5 years old and the thing still smokes most lesser PC laptops. The battery still has more than 50% of the charging cycles left and it all runs really well. I figure I’d keep it until it died which could be another 5 years.

Agreed. On a sort-of-but-not-really-related note, I assume Android specifically because I can run an emulator (SNES, OSX, etc.) on it. If I could do that on iOS I'd jump back over.

It's not just the games. I've paid some 45 USD for a dictionary which won't work on iOS 11 on the same phone where it worked three years.

The developer however wasn't able to renew the license, so he can't make a new version even if he would like to do it.

Is t only 32 bit? Three years ago we’d already had 64 bit phones for a year.

Or is it some kind of API incompatibility?

I've bought the dictionary in 2013 and used on my previous model of iPhone too. My point is that the same phone which run the program for 3 years will stop running it as soon I allow the "upgrade" of the same phone to iOS 11. So I'm motivated to keep running iOS 10 and sacrifice security. Which is bad.

There are TONS of apps that aren't game that haven't been updated or are never going to be updated, but are good or very useful.

And they have been replaced by better, compatible apps.

"Free space" which they could already have gained back by removing the applications in the first place.

It's not the free storage space that is a big deal, it's the freed memory from not having to keep 32 bit and 64 bit dll's in memory.

* iPhone which had been able to run them right until you updated iOS.*

Every OS update whether they had deprecated 32bit apps or not breaks abandoned apps. Apple also removed support from the Mac years ago for PPC apps that could run on x86 apps up to 10.6.

Considering the fix is simply re-compiling, I don't think this is the end of the world. There aren't THAT many apps that are both still very good, and haven't been updated in YEARS. Yes there are some, but not that many.

Review is not thorough.

One huge change in the control center is that the wifi “toggle” doesn’t toggle wifi off anymore (wait what?). It just disconnects from the current network and doesn’t reconnect for a minute or so.

If you don’t want to be tracked by wifi APs it seems you have to force touch settings into wifi and disable the adapter from there. Huge step backwards IMHO.

Agreed. That's bad and a lot of people will expect the old functionality.

It feels like they’re trying to educate me as a user that switching wifi off to save battery is not super smart.

It’s true, the difference is minuscule at best (20-30 minutes of battery life) but maybe I want to micromanage to get these 20 minutes. Or because I am concerned about privacy.

My take is that if you want to “educate” users on how best to use a feature you must leave them the freedom to do it wrong (depending on the consequences). If you’re right they will do what you want (profit) and if you’re wrong then you have avoided alienating them.

> My take is that if you want to “educate” users on how best to use a feature you must leave them the freedom to do it wrong

This is diametrically opposed to Apple's tradition, about which they have been clear and consistent.

Those 20-30 minutes matter when you travel, which is when the iPhone's undersized battery is already a liability.

After about a year of wear and tear, a day trip to Manhattan requires an external battery or finding an outlet somewhere. Ditto on killing or removing abusive/"too big to fail" apps like Facebook and Facebook Messenger.

Before getting on the train to the city, I try to remember to put my phone in battery-save mode preemptively.

Turning off Wifi is not something anyone - whether average or intermediate user - should be needing to do on a frequent basis. Airplane mode already takes care of the primary use case, namely disabling all radios. Someone intending to disable Wifi "temporarily" and then forgetting to re-enable it may wind up paying hundreds of dollars for cellular data. That goes against the "it just works" mentality, which is "Wifi automatically wherever possible. ALWAYS. Cellular as last resort only."

Privacy is less of a concern on iOS; the MAC address is rotated frequently specifically to prevent passive tracking. The battery savings are going to be minimal; with Apple's history with these kinds of optimizations, you'd probably save as much battery by reducing screen brightness by only 5%.

tldr; There's no real reason outside of developer testing to ever disable Wifi. Users who care should not mind the extra tap. And frankly, most who are obsessively toggling their Wifi are probably not receiving the benefits they believe.

MAC randomization seems to be broken security-wise on iOS: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researchers-b...

> There's no real reason outside of developer testing to ever disable Wifi.

When I go for a ramble or cycle in the countryside there's no point having Wifi enabled for four or five hours with no APs within several kilometres, so I disable it.

Likewise I disable Bluetooth and GPS when not needed. Being a 'good RF citizen'.

> Being a 'good RF citizen'.

And saving battery power by not having extra radio equipment polling for connection apportunities. Win win.

Registered for this. This is so wrong.

I have iPad and currently I use wifi _only_ to download iOS updates. All the other (voip, netflix and spotify for example) is done over LTE/3G. Why? Because I can.

I don't want to be scanned and located by APs or have unnecessary radars in my backpack.

tldr; ever heard of terms privacy and need to _not_ use specific networks? kthxbye.

No. Sometimes at work I don't want to use my employer's wifi. Sometimes I do.

But you don’t need to turn OFF WiFi for that, simply disconnecting (as the button does) will accomplish that too.

You realize lots of people these days have unlimited data and don't about overage charges because they don't get them.

You can turn on airplane mode to turn off all radios, then turn on the radios you want on if you really want to micromanage.

You cannot enable airplane mode and then proceed to enable the cellular radio without first disabling airplane mode. At least you can't on an SE.

Ah, you're right. The other option is force-touching the Settings icon... but the SE doesn't have force-touch, I believe.

Correct, no force-touch on the SE.

Eh it sounds to me that this is a great quick fix for the "I'm slightly too far from the AP to have bandwidth but I'm still maintaining a connection" problem I have almost daily. Will make an obscure security concern you've identified slightly more difficult to deal with. If you don't prefer trade offs like this, Apple likely isn't the best digital provider for you.

You’re right it’s an excellent solution to that issue and sometimes it’s exactly what I want. I’m worried about the security aspect because a stock iphone is what you should get if you care about privacy and security yet the UI actively misleads you on the purpose of the toggle.

If they wanted a disconnect button they could have designed a new icon for it. Maybe a toast so that people understand what just happened.

I found this out the hard way because my phone kept trying to connect to the subway APs and aside from giving them a nice transit map I lost about 30% battery.

The most common use case is toggling WiFi to drop a bad connection, and then forgetting to turn it back on, costing you who knows how much in LTE data when you’re back at home thinking you’re on WiFi.

This UX change is like cash money to most users.

Although they did the exact same change for the Bluetooth toggle in the Control Center, and that one has less of a financial benefit.

I don't mind the change, but I do wish that the force touch "pop" menu toggles would completely turn off those radios instead of simply disconnecting.

For those who haven't used iOS 11, you can force touch the Control Center icons to pop in a full menu with additional toggles.

Apple also randomizes your MAC address when probing to alleviate that privacy concern.

WiFi should take hours to drain 30% of your phone battery. Did you check the battery usage in Settings?

repeating failing reconnects can cause some quick draining, or constant connect/disconnect, as is often the case with public wifi.

Who's a better digital device provider than Apple for security & privacy?

Nobody. I think a better statement would of been maybe this "feature" isn't for you. Head to settings and turn it off.

For me the more common case for switching off Wifi is that I'm gonna connect to a network that is slower than the cellular network.

And no, I'm not turning on the Apple "feature" where it drains out my cellular data limits even when I am connected to excellent Wifi at home.

I was under the impression that the feature you are referring to wouldn't take cellular data unless you were not getting a good signal from the WiFi connection, or if you are moving fast enough to be dropped off the network.

Fix for this use case is also in Android 8 - you can turn off wifi, but turn it back on once you're in proximity of known network. Helps save battery too, I suppose

They could have built a nice ui for that, like cough windows phone. Turn wifi off now, but turn it back on in 1/4/8 hours/when I ask for it/when I get to a 'favorite place'. This was great when wifi at work mostly worked, but had bad days (turn it off until I probably left, maybe it'll work tomorrow). It's much less convenient on Android, because there's a good chance I'll forget to turn it on when I get home.

Humans aren't that good at estimating time related to future actions, so building a UI that asks them to do so isn't a very good UI. Sure power users might appreciate it but it's quite a bit of cognitive load and still error prone. Much better to just leave it a toggle.

The same is true for the Bluetooth toggle. It just turns it off for any new connections.

That's pretty bad for a number of reasons.

Such as?

Such as not wanting to get owned when the next bluetooth stack vulnerability inevitably pops up.

Yikes, this is a security issue.

Does airplane mode still turn off wifi and bluetooth?

It does. You can also see that the adapter is disabled (there is a stroke through the wifi icon then). It’s just the “I’ll quickly turn off wifi/bluetooth” that has gotten harder/misleading.

Like others have brought up - it isn't a security issue. Since iOS 8 MAC addresses have been randomized until the phone connects to the AP. Your real MAC is not exposed to random listening APs nearby.

It's been 3 years since your phone has been giving up its real identity while simply walking around.

There may be good reason to want your WiFi radio off (battery?), but the cited privacy issue has been solved on iOS for several years already.

Unfortunately multiple people here, and study posted today[0], have pointed out that MAC address randomization in iOS is still flawed.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15287100

And remember the wifi hack?

https://www.wired.com/story/broadpwn-wi-fi-vulnerability-ios...

For that reason, I keep my wifi off as much as possible.

Your reply seems a bit out of touch, considering the recently discovered and fixed vulnerabilities in the bt and Wi-Fi stacks of iPhones.

I remember reading that iOS 11 also come with MAC address randoming so that you can't be tracked by wifi.

Pretty sure MAC randomisation has been in since iOS8.

It looks that way:

> An information disclosure existed because a stable MAC address was being used to scan for WiFi networks. This issue was addressed by randomizing the MAC address for passive WiFi scans.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201395

Looks like it's been broken across nearly everything. Here's where I read about it. Anyone know if this is addressed? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researchers-b...

Hmm, I figured this was an iOS 11 beta bug? It certainly didn't reconnect reliably after a minute, but would do so maybe once an hour.

Misleading ui is terrible and making me consider other phone OS. I have wanted a toggle for location services in the control center for so long. Now they are going even further to remove useful functionality like toggling wifi and bluetooth. just horrible.

Why is apple moving further away from intuitive ease of use?

The reason the WiFi and Bluetooth controls now work the way they do is to leave Apple's accessories (Watch, Pencil, etc.) connected and working while disconnecting you from other networks and devices.

It works the same way for people that don't have any accessories paired. To me it looks like a bug TBH.

Oh, that's really annoying. I turn wifi off when I leave home.

More and more things are pushing me to one of the fringe-phone platforms. Which is too bad - I otherwise really like the iPhone.

But, it's only one extra motion to force click settings, select wifi and toggle wifi off vs swipe up to control panel and click the wifi.

I like the new wifi toggle because iPhones are AP sticky usually.

Except if you have the SE there is no force-touch and you are still forced into the main settings menu. I turn off the WiFi when driving or doing outdoors stuff because I don't want the battery to drain searching for a network for 6 hours...

I was not aware that wifi on the SE was that battery inefficient.

Perhaps it is not, but I'm thinking about using this same phone and battery for at least couple more years (had it over a year now) so I like to conserve power where I can.

Battery replacements are cheap

I don't think you need force touch. From what I've seen people do, you can just long press and it'll be the same as force touching the item.

No dice.There's no long-press on that button for me.

You can long press and get a more detailed menu, but the button there still doesn't turn off the wifi...

Is there some sort of interface element that indicates when a setting can use force touch? Or does a user just have to do a long hold on everything to find out what does and doesn't accept force touch?

No, the discoverability problem still exists. You find out by trying it and hoping you remember the answer.

The 32-bit deprecation issue points to a larger issue of cultural decay. We can still obtain old Commodore 64s, Nintendos, Gameboys, and other old HW and run old SW on it.

However, the way these walled garden DRM'ed online app stores work, once something is taken out of circulation, it's just GONE. You won't be able to buy an old iPhone 5 10 years from now and go download an old game.

My son really liked this old Simpsons game on the iPhone, but now there's no way to run it, or even find it in the store anymore.

This isn't an Apple specific problem, but I wonder, if future archaeologists will even be able to find anything left of our culture, as it digitally disappears behind upgrades and silos.

One thing I love about the Web, is we can have sites like Archive.org. And I can still view the very first Web page ever in my browser. Spacejam still works!

But what if the first iOS games I loved on my original 2007 era iPhone? Will there be an Archive.org emulator? Unlikely.

Why not just keep the iphone, and make a backup of the whole phone? If your phone breaks, then you can always restore the same backup file to a new one.

It's best to think of iOS apps exactly as they are, a service. When you buy/download an app, it's not your own, you're using a service in the form of an app.

The app will continue to work as long as it's supported by its developer and Apple doesn't forcibly remove it. If the developer no longer supports it, it's just a matter of time before it'll stop working.

>You won't be able to buy an old iPhone 5 10 years from now and go download an old game.

Why not? You can't sideload apps on iOS? If not, it definitely is a Apple-specific problem (at least as compared to Android, where applications can be backed up and restored without any use of google's store).

Why not? The App Store has always kept around your older apps when you stated on older operating systems.

There is one thing I hope they that they fix in iOS, and that is to guide app-makers to understand bilingual users, I type a lot on both danish and english, and having to switch language in the keyboard for every conversation can get pretty tiresome.

Luckily both iMessage and WhatsApp seems to support it now, so I hope they somehow can get other apps in on it. Telegram does not support this :/

Try 3rd-party keyboards like Swiftkey, where keyboard/autocorrect is bilingual, so no more switching needed (now I would only need a trilingual keyboard for my use case...).

This. Swiftkey solved this problem for me. The only remaining problem is that iOS is so annoyingly buggy wrt third-party keyboards.

I admit I'd never even considered that. I suppose the ideal is to remember the active keyboard language for different documents as well as chats, so most apps should be looking at this.

iMessage has done this since iOS 6. iOS 10 lets you type in two languages on the one keyboard and not fluff around with autocorrect.

Bilingual user here. I think predictive typing is a keyboard issue, not an app issue, and the iOS keyboard has been smart enough to use dictionaries in both languages without switching since iOS 9 or 10.

Not every language.

Can you explain what you mean? I type in both English and German. On latest iOS 10, regardless of which keyboard I have selected, I can start typing in either language and word prediction/autocomplete/spellcheck pretty quickly picks up which language I'm using.

Hmmm, maybe I don’t type in German enough but iOS has always given me trouble with German words trying to correct them to English words.

You may need to have the German dictionary installed.

It actually works with the native keyboard between Spanish and English but not between Dutch and Spanish or English. I just start typing in English while it's on Spanish and after one or two words it will autocorrect in English and vice versa. I guess Danish and Dutch are too niche at the moment.

Also Siri is pretty much useless. E.g. It's simply impossible to ask Siri to play my German podcasts when I set Siri to English. I have podcasts in three languages (German, English and Swedish).

Also maps does not pronounce street names natively when I know the language. I have a much harder time understanding the weirdly pronounced stuff maps tells me.

After using iOS11 for a few hours I have to say my favorite new feature is the gigantic “iMessages” header.

The “Contacts” one is pretty good too but the “iMessages” one seems much faster and it consumes far less RAM in some benchmarks I ran.

It’s a real disappointment that they didn’t add a banner in Safari. I generally find myself using Safari and wonder “am I using safari?” I end up having to close my apps and reopen safari to double check.

Update: I am currently using Safari. My heart was racing for a second totally didn’t know what app I was using.

What's up with the absolutely MASSIVE title text at the top of every single app?? Looks horrible.

To add to the list of questionable UI changes, they are continuing to push iMessage Apps and there is no way to remove the icon from the input bar. Now with iOS 11 they have added an additional bar whether you use any apps or not.

If you click the gray app icon it will disable that secondary bar at least.

The wildest thing to me is you'd think this space would be used for the "forehead" on the iPhone X... but it's NOT: https://developer.apple.com/ios/human-interface-guidelines/o...

There's actually just even MORE wasted space

IMO there are some extremely questionable design decisions in 11. Some of these are just ugly (like the super bold date on the calendar icon) or wasteful of space (like the headers), but others hide useful info or decrease discoverability (like requiring force touch for normal flows).

I’ve only been using it for half a day but right now the details feel sloppy and the bigger picture UX feels poorly thought out.

iOS 11 running on the new iPad Pro is pretty awesome. Its incredibly responsive, and the combination of Files and the task bar make it possible to get real work done. (Surprisingly, even without a keyboard--I've almost gotten to be able to type with my thumbs without looking.)

It's not so hot on an A7 iPad. Just reading and responding to a text message (in the old notification mode, not even the side docking) grinds the CPU badly. I'd recommend that iPad Air 1 and Mini 2 users stay in the past, and start saving for new hardware.

I hear that A7 iPhone 5S performance is just dandy, though.

I have a beta on the Mini 2. Didn't update yet to the GM beta. Seeing a ton of glitches and stutters but it's a beta from two months ago. Battery life is abysmal as well. I'm waiting for the official release to see how it goes. It's not really bad once inside apps. I expect it to work a bit better, if not I'll reinstall clean.

The new default image/video codec that no other browser supports seems like it's going to be ... interesting. Of course they couldn't use VP9, just like USB-C - this is marginally better, and completely fucks over everyone developing outside the tiny Apple ecosystem.

It's for the camera, not the browser, and it looks like you can change back to h.264 and JPG [1]:

> If you’re currently running iOS 11 beta 1, you can verify this by switching between the High Efficiency and Most Compatible formats under iOS Settings → Camera → Formats. Under the High Efficiency format, images will be saved as HEIC and movies as an HEVC .mov file. Under Most Compatible, images will be saved as JPGs and movies as an h.264 .mov file.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/08/ios-11s-new-heifhevc-camera-f...

It seems unfortunate that photos shared from iOS will be subject to an extra step of lossy compression in order to go to JPG.

HEIC and HEVC are both lossless, so there shouldn't be an extra step of lossy compression.

HEVC is definitely not lossless.

They may have lossless modes but I'd bet money iOS is not using them. The file size would be huge even compared to JPEG.

To be fair; HEIC and HEVC are industry standards. If browsers don't support them, that's on the browser.

An industry standard nobody wants to use in the industry is not a standard, it's a 'tentative' one at best.

Simply put, the patent groups behind HEVC got so greedy, far more than they had been with h264, that this thing is pretty much dead on arrival. The only consumer facing company that's still pushing for it is Apple. Everyone else has joined an alliance to come up with a replacement open codec, AV-1, which includes companies such as : Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Cisco, Amazon, Netflix, ARM, Adobe, the BBC, Broadcom, Realtek.

There is no backing your term of HEVC being an 'industry standard' other than it being supported by the MPEG group. But MPEG group standards were industry standards because people adopted them, not because the MPEG group in itself has some divine providence given power to call everything they make a 'standard'.

When the fight for which video codec should be 'the standard' was about WebM vs h264, h264 won and became a true standard not just in name but in practice because it was welcomed by every major company, while WebM was mostly pushed and cared for by one (Google), so Apple could get away with not supporting WebM in Safari and showing hostility to more open formats. This time it's not going to happen. HEVC on the web is not going to happen, at all. AV-1 is the only thing that could succeed H264.

Nothing you wrote is even remotely true.

Consumer facing companies that support HEVC: Microsoft, Sony, Adobe, Nintendo, Netflix, BBC, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Samsung, Dolby, GE, MediaTek, Philips, Mitsubishi, Warner Bros etc. In fact there are 100+ more companies supporting HEVC than AV-1 and is in shipping hardware today from Sony, LG, Samsung, Intel, AMD, ARM, Nvidia etc.

H.265 is also an ITU-T standard and was adopted as the standard for broadcast television ATSC.

And irrespective of all of this the fact that iOS has 350+ million users means whatever Apple decides will have a major sway on the rest of the market.

Really? Which industries? Who, other than Apple, uses HEVC?

HEVC is a standard produced by industry, sure but it's not an industry standard as no industry that I'm aware of actually uses it. You can't put it on a Blu-Ray, you can't broadcast it and you can't stream it over the internet so that's pretty much the entire consumer content industry for one.

The HEVC patent holders _want_ it to be an industry standard but it's not yet and I hope it never is. I really want AOM to kick its ass with AV1 so we don't have to deal with patent encumbered video codecs again.

HEVC is an industry standard for broadcast television and is already available today on most platforms: OSX, iOS, PS4 Pro, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Windows etc.

It is available on 4K Blu-Ray, HEVC content is widely available on Torrent sites and on commercial sites e.g. iTunes.

I think Apple's response to that is, 'come, enter our walled garden!'

Apple's ecosystem is a lot like the Hotel California: you can check in any time you like, but you can never leave.

Their walled garden of industrial standards? You can criticise both HEVC and HEIF as being patent-encumbered and pushed by big companies, but there's no "walled garden" about these two. Hell, fabrice bellard pioneered using HEVC for images with BPG.

There's a big difference between a standard produced by industry (like HEVC) and an industry standard (like ProRes).

HEVC is the former but it is not yet the latter. You can't call a standard nobody uses an "industry standard".

tiny?

Also be aware that iOS 11 seems to be incompatible with Windows Server 2016. Seems to be an http2 implementation problem.

In what way? That seems like an extremely serious problem, given how many LOB apps run on Windows Server.

I don't have much details.

https://portal.smartertools.com/community/a89593/ios-11-and-...

http://www.kraftkennedy.com/critical-issue-apple-ios-11-mail...

Where I work we received an email urging us not to upgrade, I believe for that reason.

Seems to be Mail.app if it's a fault on Apple's side. I wonder if the Outlook.app works correctly?

I think the thing I'm most excited about is Multipath TCP. I can't even count the times my cell signal has been strong and my phone favors some crappy wifi and it seems like I've been time traveled back to a 28k modem.

One of the most annoying things in iOS is not being able to change your wifi network from the control center. Apparently this hasn't been fixed in iOS 11.

At least it seems we can now add a quick access button to Settings.

That's interesting. You do that a lot?

What's this about a quick access to settings? That's something I've wanted forever, but I don't see a way to add it?

I do it a couple of times every day.

As for the quick access you can customize control center in the Settings app. It doesn't make much sense to me that you can't access that customization directly from control center, but Apple works in mysterious ways.

I think I misunderstood. I thought you were saying there was a way to add a link to the settings app to the control center. In other words, having a button in control center to open settings.

I go there enough I wish there was a fast access to it.

Yes, that's what I meant in the first part.

But in the second part I meant accessing the settings of control center particularly.

I was wrong. I thought you could add any app to the control center but it’s only certain predefined features like flashlight.

No VPN button in Control Center? Do Apple employees use public wi-fi?

VPNs are configured in Settings->General. Any reason why that would need to be regularly toggled, out of interest?

I haven't used it in a while, but when I did, it wasn't very good at reconnecting after sleeping the device or switching networks.

Sounds like it may have been an issue with the remote end of the VPN tunnel then. I've been connected to VPN for days at a time, switching between Wi-Fi and cellular (including switching between IPv4-only, IPv6-only, and dual-stack networks), and have never had an issue with the device automatically re-establishing the VPN tunnel.

Of course things could have also just improved over time.

Which VPN provider or enterprise gateway? Does your VPN Profile have an "Always-On" setting? That's only available on managed devices and it ensures that no traffic is passed unless the device is connected to a VPN, which is what causes the VPN to automatically reconnect.

If you have a standalone VPN app, it may also reconnect silently. But the system VPN does not stay reliably connected across device sleep and network status changes.

You don't need managed devices. You just need to configure the VPN in the Configurator app and push a profile to your device. Though there are still some manual plist editing required to get this working.

Always-on VPN is possible on non-Supervised devices? Would appreciate a pointer to the relevant XML tags. Is it selectable, e.g. can you have multiple VPN profiles and then toggle (in Settings) which profile is Always-On?

It's not possible, but you can use VPN on Demand and it should solve the work VPN problem.

If I remember correctly you just specify the OnDemandRules key and make its value an empty array.

Yes I have multiple VPN profiles and all of them allows me to specify in Settings whether to "connect on demand."

Thanks!

OpenVPN's iOS app automatically reconnects from sleep.

I know a few people who use it a lot and toggle it based on where they are. However those people definitely aren't your average consumer types. I'd imagine probably 90% of iOS users don't even know it has a VPN toggle.

(I don't use it on cellular, do use it on insecure wifi, don't use it on some secure wifis depending on who controls it, never use it at home/parents/etc. Some days that's 4/5 toggles.)

Typically for turning it back on when it failed to automatically connect, again.

Some reasons:

  - VPNs do not stay connected
  - VPNs use a lot of battery
  - switching VPNs (e.g. work, personal)
  - mandatory for public wifi, optional elsewhere
  - some sites block VPNs (netflix, best buy, american airlines)
  - some networks block VPNs

VPNs can stay connected if configured correctly. For cases when staying connected really is an issue (non-IKEv2 MOBIKE), you can also configure it to auto-connect whenever anything tries to establish a network connection (this is misleadingly called "Connect on Demand"), though the configuration process involves pushing a profile to your device.

I use a VPN 99% of the time, but when I want to watch some Netflix I have to turn it off. Not often, but enough to appreciate a nice toggle!

> Do Apple employees use public wi-fi?

There are apps and security profiles for that. My company uses a VPN-on-demand, where the VPN is used only for select sites when on public networks.

I'm sure they do. Do you think most of iOS 11 users do? I'm willing to bet they don't.

Gutted that they removed the 3D Touch App Switcher. That was was more comfortable and intuitive for me than double-clicking the home button.

It's especially annoying that there was no good reason to remove it on devices that already had it. I don't know if they took it out because it didn't work on the new X or what, but dang. Feels like a significant UX hobbling to me.

They switched the way you do it on the X, so I guess for ‘consistency’ they removed it.

It wasn’t a bad feature but I could never remember it was there. Too many years of muscle memory double-clicking the home button.

I always see a lot of flak around space on iOS upgrades. I seem to always have a ton of space.

I never delete iMessages, I take a fair amount of photos (16GB) and I have about 10GB of podcasts and 3GB of Spotify tracks...

What generally burns up people's space on their iPhones? Am I just not taking enough photos?!

I seem to be in the same ballpark:

- Photos & Camera 16.89 GB

- Overcast 2.57 GB

- GroupMe 1.12 GB

I have a bunch of random apps w/ 200-300MB but I still have about 79GB available of 128GB

I have 47GB available out of 128.

~30GB of music, 2GB podcasts, 1GB photos & videos, the rest is a large subset of my ios applications.

Wow! Thats a seriously impressive amount of music.

I think iMessage is the worst offender for most (at least it is for me). Every video or photo I receive eats up space until I remove it or it gets removed in 1 year.

Also, the base model only came with 16 GB for a long time, which I imagine most people didn't upgrade.

iMessage is! Woah. I must be pretty tame. I saw a screen shot in the article with iMessage eating over a GB. I'm at a messily 61MB.

I've gotta up my social game.

Messages on iCloud might be useful for you when it comes out, then :)

Yeah, that's one of my most anticipated features from this release, to be honest. And ARKit :)

No. You have the 128Gb version. If I recall correctly when buying the iPhone the options where 32Gb/128Gb.

As you did calculate, 32Gb is not enough for the usual person. 128Gb on the other hand, is very plenty.

The base configuration was 16GB until the 7's release in September 2016 (following which the 6S and SE were updated with 32GB base configurations as well).

Do you bring over your old photos from your previous iPhones?

34.2 GB photos - 4 years worth, 10k items

5.5 GB audio

3.9 GB apps

4.8 GB documents & data

400 mb "other"

I haven't edited my photos in the past year, but I probably could delete 500 images and maybe a few videos. In general, I plan on doubling the storage with every upgrade (every 2-3 years).

I "do" except one upgrade where I don't exactly know wtf happened but my phone synced to my laptop and my phone deleted my photos in the old iPhoto. So... Im missing about 3 years worth of stuff... Yes, I work in ops and did not have a back up of my laptop because I trusted in the cloudz.

I now have 2 backups.

I'm sorry to hear. Apple's sync works in mysterious ways which I cannot trust 100%.

I've installed iOS 11 on my iPhone and iPad and one thing I've been disappointed with is third-party integration on the Files app. From everything I've read before installing iOS 11 I've got the impression there would be true integration, as in, the files from the provider would appear inside the interface of the Files app in the same way; however, what I see is that, when I select for example Dropbox in the Files app, a popover appears and shows the Dropbox app interface unchanged (in fact, on the iPad the popover does not even goes full screen). Now I'm wondering if this is that the way it's supposed to be or if the apps need to be updated.

Dropbox has an update coming soon that I believe will make it do what you're looking for.

Edit: Maybe? Discussion on the topic here: https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/91008319169595392...

It appears that Dropbox has pushed version 64.3, which contains this feature, to the App Store, but it's not available yet.

Is it normal for arstechnica.com to be taking up 30-60% CPU in Chrome whenever the tab is in focus? I don't have any extensions installed.

[1] http://instantshare.win/1b0agfj3j7xey.png

> All iPhone cameras support slow-mo video and Burst Mode shots, and all iPhones now include Touch ID fingerprint sensors.

All except one. ;- )

> its never-look-back approach to software compatibility.

You mean no approach to software compatibility? Is walking down the street an approach to eating ice cream?

If down the street there is a new ice cream shop, then yes.

Not a hugely important feature - but Siri can apparently now understand my accent :-)

It's funny to see that they are not even able to implement an Ebook reader mode. Crowd sourced data to selectively enable/disable JavaScript for invasive/resource hungry websites will save a lot of battery too!

The Brave browser on iOS has per-site Javascript control.

How do you like Brave?

It's good, works with most sites, can be configured for private browsing only.

Since it hasn't been mentioned, an awesome part of iOS is the fact that Mobile Safari supports WebAssembly and WebRTC standards now. \o/

This! It still makes me sad that safari is updated as part of the OS like IE instead of out of band like Chrome.

Its pretty ridiculous that despite all these improvements in Safari, the permanent website data bug persists in both iOS and OSX

Would you provide a reference for this? Searching for "Safari permanent website data bug" didn't lead me to any definitive conclusion as to what you mean.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7910096?start=0&tstart=...

Website data is viewable in Settings> Safari> Advanced> Website Data. Some items won't delete even if they appear so, when you check again you'll see them return. This is especially onerous considering Apple's stance on privacy.

This happens even with private browsing on both iOS and OSX

Thanks for the reference. Given the changes Apple highlights in iOS 11, I'm surprised this wasn't addressed.

I'd be interested in reading a more technical, in depth piece on the issue looking at it from both the client and the server side (to determine exactly what is potentially available to an attacker). Browsing through 17 pages of user-submitted forum content isn't something I have a lot of patience for (though I suspect that's a reflection more of how little I am (perhaps naïvely) concerned about it).

Thanks again for following up with the link!

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