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Comment by eyeareque | Hacker News Reader

I really feel like iOS 11 was released 6 months too soon. Apple really messed up with this one. I run into strange bugs daily. Sometimes apps just freeze for 10 or so seconds and then come back. Or apps won’t launch at all. Sometimes the problems go away or I have to reboot. I really hope they can put out some patches quickly to fix this mess.

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iOS 11 was enough to get me to move off Apple products altogether. It turned my iPhone 7 into one of the slowest, most buggy devices I've had. Everything is slow, audio constantly cuts out and stutters (even when predownloaded), there's lag switching between apps, apps reload constantly, it disconnects from Bluetooth devices at the drop of a hat, my keyboard disappears or fails to appear, and battery life is garbage - I'm charging twice a day minimum. And it looks like they removed the download button from Podcasts or moved it where I can't find it. It's not in the menu.

Granted 11.1 fixes some of these issues, but I don't appreciate having my thousand dollar phone gimped for two months, and it's still worse than it was before.

I'm getting a different phone, watch, and TV device. But hey, the industry still has me by the balls as long as I'm buying something every year, right?

It's maddening to read that iOS upgrades are still causing this kind of problem. I had a couple of iOS devices rendered near-useless due to OS upgrades around 2014 and decided to give each device a max of one major OS version upgrade in the future. I use Android more now, really like it overall, and am considering getting an Android tablet instead of my next iPad. Sorry about the trouble with your phone.

I use iOS 6.1.3 on an iPhone 4S, jailbroken and running offline apps, syncing with iTunes 10.6.3 over USB, no iCloud.

It worked great 6 years ago, and it still works now. I'm not persuaded by the "updates" Apple keep trying to tell me to run; I think I'll lose more features and stability and battery life and USB sync, and not gain anything of any practical purpose to me.

If Android had USB sync, I'd consider converting. But swapping one cloud ecosystem for another just doesn't work for me, I want to keep my data offline.

> If Android had USB sync, I'd consider converting. But swapping one cloud ecosystem for another just doesn't work for me, I want to keep my data offline.

Uuuh,it does last time I checked. You can even create backups with debug enabled. Nobody uses it though because plugging the phone to the PC is annoying.

You are also not required to use the Google drive services for file syncing. Setting up an owncloud server gives you pretty much the same benefits and interactions that gdrive provides

Andorid phones (the modern ones anyway) do support the MTP protocol... but it's horrid if you're trying to do something like transfer large files for storage of any type; it's like it was written with the old 4GB file limits in mind.

Iirc «adb backup» is a command these days and it doesn’t rely on MTP.

Google has an adb-sync script that works really well.

https://syncthing.net/

I never think about it. If it's on my phone, it's on my PC.

What do you use to manage your music library? I don't just need a backup option, I need apps that can manage my music/contacts/calendar databases.

OwnCloud / NextCloud includes native support for CalDAV and CardDAV (using SabreDAV internally). You can synchronize your music library too.

If you really need to transfer files to-from your phone just install an ftp server or something on it and remote into it. I do it all the time and it's great.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.icecoldapp...

Aren’t you missing a lot of security updates, though? Or does Apple backport these to previous iOS versions?

E.g. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/broad...

You do miss the security updates. The trade-off is you have a device that isn’t dog slow.

Today I tried using an an old iPad 2 that was upgraded to iOS 7. It was literally unusable.

I was using 4S with 6.x until a year ago too.

I have an up to date 4s, but that means iOS 9.3.5. It works great, only problem is web browsing. Most sites load too much junk and can crash the phone. Brave is the only browser I can use, and it works pretty good for most sites.

On another practical point: isn't your battery completely shot by now?

I've never seen a phone where it isn't obviously somewhat impaired after 2 years, so what is it like on something that's 3 to 6 years old? Or do you get it replaced often?

I had a Nexus 4 from 2013-2016 (so three years) and now have a OnePlus One (for 1.5 years now), and I didn't observe any loss of battery capacity on either.

I would assume replaced often.

But replacing, not getting it replaced. At least on my 5 it is a few screws worth of work to swap.

I tried to buy a replacement battery, but that expanded dangerously until I noticed marks coming from behind the screen, so I popped open the case to have a look and promptly removed it.

I use a Third Rail case, so I can recharge easily. I don't use 3G, and all my apps work offline.

https://www.amazon.com/Third-Rail-Protective-Compatible-Rech...

One of the reasons I still like my phone is because of that case. I wish there was something similar for another phone. The external batteries also have microUSB in and out, so I can charge friends' phones too.

> If Android had USB sync

It has, but last time I tried it (on Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.x), it was completely unusable. Transfers freezed and crashed all the time. I was unable to upload a single music album even after few tries.

I use a 4S with 7, but decided not to upgrade further. There was a performance decrease from 6 to 7, but it's still very usable.

iOS 11 works with no noticeable degradation on my 6S Plus, which is a surprise to me given my crappy iOS 7 and up experience with my 4S. Maybe you had one of the cruft accumulation/wipe-mandating situations.

11.0 sucked on an iPad Mini 2 but was OK on my wife's 6S Plus. 11.1 is smooth on all devices.

iOS 11 on my iPhone6 has completely slowed it down. Apps take forever to open. The camera too. When this phone came out, it was lightning fast. The way they keep bloating the incremental iOS updates is infuriating.

You might want to try some things.

First, make sure you’ve got at least 1GB free space on the device. iOS starts thrashing when free space is low.

Second, tap Settings > Battery to see if any apps are excessively burning the battery (and by extension, the CPU)

Third: Settings > Privacy > Location Services and make sure every app is set to Never, unless giving that app location services has some benefit to you.

Fourth: Settings > Background Refresh. Turn off everything except apps you want to refresh. For example, apps that sync data via iCloud.

Last suggestion: back up via iTunes, restore to factory settings, restore from backup. In my experience, this is iOS’ dirty little secret, sometimes it gets into a state that can only be resolved with a wipe.

To save an episode click the episode, then click the circle with 3 periods inside. In the menu look for it, its named “Save Episode “

Take two steps left, one step right, incant the cthonic rite, twist dial 11-b to optimal firing position, and that’s it, you’ve followed the simple and obvious steps to save an episode.

Honestly the steps posted seem pretty obvious. You open the thing, use the pretty common identifier for a menu button and save is in the menu.

Fine for you and me, maybe, but a decade ago I acquired iPads for my mother and grandfather, as the constant windows support calls were maddening.

Over the last six weeks it’s felt like 2008 again - “no, I don’t know why they did that. Yes, it’s different. No, no reason”.

I’m not averse to change, but they’ve shifted bits of UI that habitual users relied upon, and done things are really inobvious to a neophyte - try getting your non-tech relative to save a pdf from safari on iOS - and as a corollary - power touch has given rise to a slew of blind mystery interaction. It’s just not as thoughtful as it was.

I don't begrudge occasional UI tidy ups, since cruft accumulates (eg Office 2000 menus!) but this seems like a perfect opportunity for adding help to Siri or Google Assistant (plus they've got a head start given their contextual knowledge).

Then it's a matter of encouraging grannies and other tech illiterates to ask the obvious questions to the tool in front of them: "Where did the button to save episodes go?"

Apple's claim to fame was always that "grannies and other tech illiterates" could use their stuff without having to go to any help resource. Apple has lost its advantage there. Good luck getting many of them to talk to their phones.

For example, my wife, my daughter, and my sister are all really smart but not tech savvy. They love Apple, but the "upgrade" to iOS 11 is bothering them quite a bit. (Too bad Android isn't any better.)

My mom is still on Windows. She hates Windows 10 and really misses XP, but she can get by OK without too much help. She's 84. I'm thankful she never went to Apple, frankly. She would never talk to a computer. That is in the ridiculous range for her.

yup, 11 is the thing of nightmares

You cite Office 2000 as an example of bad UI but honestly it's far easier to find stuff in menus if you're not sure where it is the having to hunt through the Ribbon bar for an icon that looks vaguely right to what you want. And sometimes the Ribbon bar just hides stuff completely if the Window isn't wide enough.

The thing with menu driven interfaces is while they're ugly, they do make functions discoverable. You don't need to remember what icon you want nor where it is, you just need to remember it is in the menu.

From a personal perspective, I still find myself hunting for common functions in Office even after years of using the Ribbon bar. I've found that to be the single handed biggest productivity killer to Office

If it helps you, I’ve felt similarly bitten by the Podcasts UI changes and have found solace in Overcast as a great replacement; free with a paid option.

Overcast is a great app. Smart Speed is awesome, syncing between devices works perfectly - something Apple hasn't gotten right in 6 years -, playlists are logical, and it works better with the Bluetooth controls in my car.

I when with Pocketcasts. For one thing, they haven’t explicitly said they don’t want my money, like Marco Arment has said. For another thing, i like the interface better.

I had to do an internet search to find out that the Airplay selection on my phone was now the two squiggles on the upper right of the music icon on the control panel. Not too obvious when you’re trying to redirect YouTube.

3 periods are not intuitive as "menu"

and pray to chtulu

in the same boat here, iOS 11 update for my older ipad has made it slow/buggy and significantly worse for my use case (browsing the web and watching netflix)

For example in IOS 10 to enable night mode was -> "Swipe up, tap" done. In iOS 11 it now requires 2 swipes, a long press then a tap. Also minimizes the app in focus requiring another tap to get back to it. Why?

>> For example in IOS 10 to enable night mode was -> "Swipe up, tap" done. In iOS 11 it now requires 2 swipes, a long press then a tap.

I'm currently on iOS 11 and the flow is still the same for me as before: "Swipe up, tap" done

I'm not seeing this "2 swipes, a long press then a tap"?

On an ipad or iphone?

Actually had to look up how to do it which lead me to http://osxdaily.com/2017/10/01/access-night-shift-control-ce...

So Apple is the new Nokia now? Who is the new Apple then?

Xiaomi, possibly...

Give the app overcast a shot if your sick of the stock podcasts app:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/overcast/id888422857?mt=8

I think the answer is to delay upgrading till you have to. I'm on iOS 10.3 on the phone, Mavericks on the Macbook, both gadgets >3 yrs old and have almost no issues. I may have to upgrade Mavericks in a bit as things are starting to become incompatible but will prob go to 10.11 or 10.12, not 10.13.

(edit - I'm on iPhone 5 which doesn't get iOS 11 which may have saved me)

Two reasons why this is a colossally bad idea:

- Mavericks is old enough that it hasn’t received any security updates in over a year

- You’re falling way behind on emoji support (but maybe you haven’t noticed if you spend all your time on Hacker News, since apparently emojis get stripped out of posts here)

The fact that we have come to a time where anyone would consider it a "colossally bad idea" not to upgrade an OS because of substandard emoji support makes me weep for the future.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and proffer that maybe the comment you've replied to was tongue-in-cheek.

I've somehow managed to avoid most of those issues on a iPhone 7 and iPad Mini 4. However, I am having issues with audio playback and with Bluetooth, as well as WiFi "forgetting" passwords (I get "password incorrect" prompt, re-enter password, it is rejected, Settings -> General -> Reset -> Network Reset, reboot, and it's back to normal for a few days).

With audio, it will occasionally hiccup or skip. With video (especially Netflix), it will skip or become choppy for a few seconds. With Bluetooth, my car stereo will switch from another source to Bluetooth Input whenever I receive a text, then it will not revert to the original source input (CD, terrestrial radio, etc). All of this only started happening after the iOS 11 update, and all of the above issues persist across both devices, so it's not a hardware thing.

Apple completely ruined Podcasts. It wasn’t great in iOS 10, but its terrible in 11. For example, they removed play the next episode automatically. Now it just stops. WTF. Why wouldn’t i want to continue playing the next episode???

Use Overcast.

Oddly enough, iOS (even 11) has worked better for me than any Android version back when I was on Android. My Nexus 5 used to have a Google process spin out of control and kill the battery. An OS update rendered my Nexus 7 and Nexus 5 basically unusable because of performance (which I hear was eventually fixed). When the iPhone 6 came out, I said enough and went back Apple. I'm sure Android has improved since then, but so has iOS.

My point is that in the mobile landscape iOS and associated hardware, at least for me, work better than anything else out there.

MacOS 10.13 is even worse. When I tried to install update, installer crashed in the middle of installation (seems that it's common problem[1]). After I managed to install it, I found out that it's extremelly slow. Time machine causes complete freeze for few seconds when starting each backup. It's literally Vista. Most issues were fixed in 10.13.1 (which installed only from second try too, each taking 2-3 hours), but, for example, Finder still has random line height that clips file icons and randomly chooses display mode for each directory.

And it's supposed to "just work" so there's no way to diagnose problems.

[1] https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/87690

Isn't 10.13 still beta?

Nope, got released 9/25

Nah, went non beta Sept 25th. 10.13.2 is still beta.

It completely locked my drive on a Macbook Pro mid-2014. With no warning or user information, it simply wouldn't accept my password and could not log-in. I had to drop into recovery mode and use the terminal with some obscure commands from a forum post somewhere to unlock it ... talk about user friendly. Apple is really slipping in terms of QA here.

Details: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/80174 (it had something to do with the preboot iirc, note that this wasn't on the beta but the actual release)

I had disk utility telling me that my unlock password both did and did not work, and I didn't want to move forward like that. Disk utility's password prompt would do the 'ya done fucked up' wiggle at the same time the main window below it loaded partition information.

I had constant problems with the entire laptop freezing after waking. Sometimes the freeze would result in black screen that never recovered. Sometimes it would happen a minute after the display woke up. Touchbar and touchpad would be unresponsive.

Also many problems with apps using the Java.Framework, such as JetBrains IDEs having no menus.

Newly installed AudioUnits plugins would not load until after a reboot (which is minor compared to the above).

10.13.2 beta seems to have resolved all these issues. I've not had a single freeze since installing this beta.

I waited for 13.1 to upgrade and login was such a mess I just didn't trust it to not be terrible elsewhere. I had to spend a whole day downgrading back to Sierra and waiting for backups to transfer. Good news, even though Apple pretends old installers don't exist after the new one is out, you can get to them from a direct app store link.

Cold boot login took over a minute on a 2013 MBP that runs Sierra just fine. Something was clearly hanging 60-75% through login and crashing the display server. Function keys wouldn't work until after first login. Can't change screen brightness, keyboard backlight always off, etc.

Only posts on Apple support forums were useless. Yes, I've run a disk check. No, a reboot didn't magically fix it. I've always done a disk check post-upgrade because the updater always seems to misplace >1k blocks in the filesystem after upgrading. The >console user login didn't work at all. Safe Boot looked like a broken powerpoint, is that supposed to happen?

I have no idea what I'm going to do with this update. I'm lucky Time Machine didn't garble my backup sparsebundle, which happens about every six months.

Here’s another to add to the list: Ask your Apple Watch what the weather is. Crashes the watch and restarts it. Confirmed on my Watch S0 running latest version of iOS 11. Found out from https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-watch-bug-causing....

If anyone from Apple is listening, please please please raise this up the flagpole on your teams. I love Apple, and think they’re doing fantastic work overall. I get that there are unique problems with having such massive scale, but iOS 11 has been a mess from the beginning.

Edit: It’s apparently “springboarding”, not restarting. Very similar experience either way.

Apple's advantage has always been writing software to work on limited hardware that they control. They don't have unique problems with massive scale.

I’m not saying unique to Apple. I’m saying unique to companies operating at massive scale.

And also a relatively small product line, which should make quality control easier. Although the product line has grown a bit lately.

I find it interesting to note how the quality of some Apple and Google software products is declining lately. Google Hangouts is a total buggy mess. And Gmail is worse than it was some years ago. It seems that big organizations inevitably get more disordered as they grow and age.

I wonder if this can be avoided or mitigated.

Hasn’t Apple lost many of their top engineers recently? That could definitely contribute.

My feeling is that since Steve went, the engineers have nobody to be absolutely shit-scared of and the quality of software has gone down ever since.

On a related note with the watch, try making a call using the watch as a speakerphone.

I know a lot of people hate this feature, but i use it all the time while driving. It will literally, every time, connect the call then go to "call failed" after 5~ seconds. This is completely reproducible on my parents and roommates S0's even after a pair/unpair(which is to my understanding the closest you can get to a "restore")

I've also gotten this to completely lock up the watch at the 'call failed' screen a few times, too

My favorite issues I've noticed so far:

- Messages scrolls stupidly so I am looking at two exchanges ago and can't see the most recent reply

- Timer alert is delayed ~10-20 seconds if you look at the screen as it hits 0

Thank you! I thought I was going crazy thanks to that Messages "feature."

That was actually an issue with iOS 10 as well but only in the quick view, not the full app. There you’d see messages out of order and sometimes duplicated.

In the full app opening and closing the keyboard fixes it. I can’t believe they haven’t fixed it, and actually actively made it worse.

> Timer alert is delayed ~10-20 seconds if you look at the screen as it hits 0

I wonder if that's something to do with timer coalescing. The visual timer ticks down in some "cheap" way, but to actually change the view and make a noise, it has an event set in the OS scheduler—and that event only goes off at some large granularity, to prevent the scheduler from burning energy.

I agree, and I don't need millisecond precision on this, but I think multiple seconds is absurd.

weirdly, i regularly had or witnessed the messages issue in iOS 9 and 10, but haven't seen it once on 11(on a 5S, 6, and 6S+ both sides). That's been fixed for me since 11.0

I wonder why some of these are so ridiculously inconsistent

So many bugs... Some that irritate me most: lots of text boxes won’t let me copy/paste. Often a delay when changing from portrait to landscape in Safari with jumbled formatting after. What appears to be intentional programmatic latency in several apps (ie calculator but also the share function in Safari)

I’m not so married to my iPhone that I won’t investigate switching to something else.

You might try flattening and reinstalling the iOS cause I have iOS 11 and have experienced none of your issues.

I got an iPhone 8 when it came out and ive seen all the problems listed above.

I thought about that. I really don’t want to lose my text history, but if I have to I will go that route.

My android friends always complain about bugs on their google android phones and I used to just smile. Now I have similar problems.

Make a full backup. (If you use WhatsApp or some other app that has its own backup system, use the app to create the app-specific backup. For WhatsApp it is to back up to iCloud, I think). Reset your phone but don’t restore it from backup. Test it if it still shows the same problems. If not, great, you at least have a working phone again. Then reset and restore from backup, test again. Maybe you get lucky and it shows no problems with the restored data. If it shows problems, you can decide between a working phone without your data and a non-working phone with your data. Not the best choice but it is worth a try to narrow down the problem. Sucks that you have to do it in the first place.

Are you German? I only ask because I've never heard an English native speaker saying "flatten" when they mean to reformat, but I've often heard Germans say "platt machen" when referring to reinstallation.

If you're not German, it's very interesting to me as it highlights my lack of exposure.

I'm a native (British) English speaker who has used "flatten" to mean re-format.

So buggy. and it seems like everyone has a different set of bugs.

The big one we have at work is 6/6s devices freeze or have the phone app crash when you browse recents or try to go to voicemail.

Not having that on my 6S Plus, just tried it. Do they admin a standard baseline at your office?

We do, but configuration doesn’t correlate to issues.

It seems to be very random. Maybe there are radio or baseband variants? It’s very frustrating to our guys who do this stuff as there are really no useful tools to troubleshoot.

While doing a CrossFit workout, we were using the native iOS timer (because our favorite timer app from the app store doesn't work on iOS 11) and saw the time skip ahead by 8 seconds. It was confirmed by my Casio watch that was running in sync with the iPhone's timer.

Really missing the old company motto that Steve Jobs used to bring: "It Just Works." That was how he got away with charging so much money.

No, I don't want to hard-type my letter "I" to be a letter "i." This is why I'm no longer on windows, and why I switched from blackberry to iOS so many years ago.

I want to pay extra money to save time configuring all the BS, so I can get on with my life, and achieve my goals faster.

Resetting settings made a huge difference. Does not delete any data, only the settings across the phone

My upgrade went smoothly and everything works fine. iPhone SE here.

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