iOS 7.1
apple.com
apple.com
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/01/apple-80-percent-of-act...
Anecdotally, Several of my officemates have had this issue.
It would seem like starting their base model at 64GB would be very consumer-friendly, and have a very low cost.
My kids though had about 50Mb free each.
This came too late. For months now - ever since iOS 7 came out, I've had to tell people "iOS 7 is great, but buggy. Don't worry, Apple will release 7.1 soon that will fix a lot of these issues." Time, and time again, I said that. With each beta it became more and more obvious that Apple wasn't releasing a quick fix for the myriad of issues that plagued users.
I think Apple did this wrong. 7.1 contains new features and updated UI elements. Fuck that. I wanted the hundreds of bugs that were impacting users to be fixed back in October. I expected the new iPads to be running 7.1. I think Apple should have focused solely on fixing the bugs present for 7.1, and then released 7.2 that had these features. But since September 18th, (173 days ago!) I've been dealing with a buggy OS and been apologizing for it [0].
To me, that is unacceptable.
[0] I'm a big Apple fan, and develop iOS apps, and a lot of people in my circle come to me with their Apple questions.
* the music player corrupts itself and starts skipping all songs, may or may not be fixed by rebooting the device. May require resynchronising all the music (remove/readd everything)
* it regularly decides to stop opening sync sessions with iTunes and has to be rebooted
Apart from that it's been pretty smooth sailing.
Oh yeah, and every single update re-enables bluetooth, that's annoying.
Then again, I wouldn't say I'm a heavy user. I mainly use it to check on my mail, read some news, etc.
Was it really a restart or just the UI (springboard) restarting?
The cell phone modem is a separate hardware piece in your phone, it has its own operating system. The smartphone OS communicates with the modem over an interface usually using "AT" commands. The iPhone 1-4 had an cell phone modem design by Intel (GSM version, modem manufacturer got bought by Intel).
The iOS UI consists app(s), so it may crash and restart.
Otherwise, I haven't had any issues.
I forget exactly which, but I think I've seen it in Apple apps too. Mail maybe?
When I come back and hit play, most times it'll play out the buffer and then decide it has no internet connection, fixable only with a kill-relaunch. And some times it'll reboot the device altogether.
I also had an issue where around half of my music got corrupted during a sync. It acted like everything was fine, then as soon as I tried to play a broken song it would just skip it. Which was particularly irritating because it made "previous song" via 3-clicks on the inline play/pause button stop working. I'd have dead spots in the middle of playlists that I couldn't rewind past because it would hit them and immediately jump to the next song.
Resyncing seemed to fix the audio, but ran out of space because it left behind 4 gigs of cruft in "Other" that the storage page in settings couldn't account for anywhere. I had to do a restore to get everything working again.
So all in all, my experience with iOS 7 haven't been great.
EDIT: One more complaint in the design department, even though I don't mind the iOS 7 style as a whole. The new Music app is very clearly designed for the iPhone 5 and up with taller screens. The scrubber has gotten a lot harder to use, and if you're not precise enough you'll end up setting the song's rating instead.
I don't think I've ever had an acceptably performant session in the App Store, at any time of day, on any device, from any network. Even direct links to app pages from other web pages have always been slow.
So I'm not one who'd be able to notice new 'lag'. But I haven't had any crashes.
The "Other" space tends to be MMS messages. If you're not manually clearing conversations, those pictures, videos and sound files are just getting filed away forever. They really need a fix for that. If nothing else, offering a setting to automatically trim conversations to only the most recent X weeks.
The Other space ballooning definitely coincided with the music syncing bug. Before that it was a barely noticeable sliver in the space meter.
As far as App Store, that one actually runs well for me. It's only the music store that sucks.
I've found that entering and leaving Airplane mode fixes things, presumably because it causes the phone to notice which cell it's actually connected to now.
In order for this to be effective in the app you have open, though, you have to stay in Airplane mode long enough to time out whatever TCP connections the app is attempting. Tower-switching is a purely physical/routing-layer effect, so you still have the same IP, and TCP connections stay established. If you trigger the carrier renegotiation without staying in Airplane mode for long enough to drop your DHCP lease (usually about three seconds, I think?), the phone will go on waiting for a reply to a TCP SYN that never actually hit the tower, so you'll find, like you said, that you may have to kill-and-restart the running app to get it to work.
Dropping internet connection does occur on WiFi and is not fixed in the iOS 7.1 update.
b) I have itunes rental downloads stuck in a quasi state where I can neither finish the download nor can I delete the download.
1: Apps don't download from the App Store the first time. I need to try 3 or 4 times.
2: Swiping a notification from the lock screen frequently crashes springboard.
3: In fact, switching apps frequently crashes springboard.
4: Music didn't download from iCloud properly.
My friends have different bugs, as well as my iPad, which is interesting. One friend didn't have his reminders work for a while.
As an aside - Xcode 5.0.2 is extremely buggy too. But we know Apple loves it's devs.
Really hoping this was fixed in 7.1, which I'm running now and so far seems smoother (doesn't stutter anymore when switching to the task switcher view, for example).
The other persistently anooying bug I've seen has to do with text fields on some webpages (eg Outlook Web Access and the Amazon Kindle web app) where if you tap to change the cursor position inside the field, you can no longer type characters in it and have to deselect the field (by tapping another on the same page) and then reselecting it again. Makes fields on many pages simply un-editable (the Amazon web app is the worst as you have to leave the store section entirely and it breakd the product Search field). Not sure if it's page or Webkit specific but it'a been around unfixed even on iOS 6 if I remember right. Fingers crossed on that one :)
I hear: "iPhone 4 users will be slightly less screwed over this time". I am updating as fast as I can, because frankly, nothing can be worse than the iOS 7.0 upgrade that I (regrettably) did.
No matter how iOS 7.1 works on my iPhone 4, I will remember how I got screwed by the 7.0 update. In the future I will never upgrade to a major new OS version without waiting several weeks and seeing how other people's devices behave. The trust has been broken.
Its rather annoying that Apple forces you to stay on the current version once you update especially when the newer version slows down your device at the same time.
Would you/anyone recommend to upgrade these days my 4S to iOS 7.x?
How fast is iOS 7.1 on iPad2?
Yet I continue to see people upgrade OS X and iOS on launch day, often with predictably regrettable results.
With respect to OSX I go for a major release straight away and test it for a couple of hours. If it's broken, I'll restore the machine from Time Machine.
All the Apple users I know do roughly the same process. They're quite conservative and pick guinea pigs before they upgrade.
I've always done this, and short of when I used Debian Sid (I think it was), I've never been bitten by it.
If they cut off support they are evil for making old devices obsolete too quickly.
If they don’t cut off support they get poor performance with an OS that takes advantage of all the performance in the newest models.
I mean, sure, there is a balance somewhere in there, but it’s not easy to hit quite right and I don’t think it will make everyone happy.
Making a new version of iOS that doesn't run as well on older devices — that's fine. I understand that iPhone 4 wasn't a priority (but note that in spite of what many people mindlessly repeat, iPhone 4 performance problems were not because of "new animations and effects").
What I have a problem with is:
* pretending that all devices should be upgraded, even though iPhone 4 clearly should not have been included given the abysmal performance,
* disabling downgrades (it's not that they are technically impossible, it's that Apple specifically disabled them after several days),
The goal was to show how unified the iOS ecosystem is: so-and-so-many percent of users upgraded immediately, there is one version to develop for, etc — but I was sacrificed on the way to that goal. That is not OK.
Net result was that for several months my phone was a useless piece of crap, taking forever to do anything, missing taps and swipes, taking screenshots of the lock screen instead of switching on, etc. That is not OK.
In the future, warn me that there are performance problems and that the upgrade is possible, but not advised. And give me the possibility to switch back.
You didn't live through 4.0 with a 3G did you?
EDIT: OK, fair enough. The word "advanced" is very subjective and means different things to different people.
In many ways, iOS is clearly more advanced, for example security, energy consumption, 64-bit.
You can debate the merits of these things, but Apple has a sound basis for their claim.
I was quite impressed. There is no native iPhone equivalent and I find most 3rd party apps that claim to track data/battery are not 100% accurate.
The key, of course, is that the phone was in my pocket for 95% of those 6 hours. Actually using it drains far more battery than all those location tracking apps combined.
If what you meant is "Android allows apps to consume power when iOS wouldn't", then yes, you're right. That's quite a far cry from "Android doesn't manage power consumption adequately".
Android forces the user to do power management where iOS does it for the user. If the user is involved where they don't have to be, that is inadequate.
Nothing you have said contradicts that.
I would restate the grandparent's claim to further argue, but clearly that's an effort in futility.
This simply does not rebut the idea that Android is making the user do the work, whereas iOS is doing it for the user. It just tries to make it sound like a good thing rather than a failing.
When exactly did you last use an Android device?
Android doesn't presume to dictate acceptable feature sets for applications; as a result, sometimes apps will do things that the user did not expect or want (which may still in fact be a valid feature of the app, or may just be a bug), and then it provides tools to allow users to identify and correct the problem if it is unacceptable for their use case. This is the pathological case, though, and not the norm. The general assumption is that the user's preferences trump the OS's, which is a large part of the reason that so many people like Android to begin with.
Android requires the user to do more work because it manages less of the experience itself and offers needless choices.
The reason so many people like Android is because it is cheap, widely available, and can be tailored to the carriers wishes. No serious commentator believes that it's because the majority of people want to manage power consumption manually.
1) Generally much easier rooting/access to bootloader/custom ROM installation than iOS. 2) Install custom keyboards, home launchers, icon sets 3) Change default web browsers, caller, messaging apps to third-party alternatives 4) Full access to filesystem 5) Fully customisable homescreen widgets 6) Full sharing intents system 6) Generally more "computery" interface - downloads displayed in notifications pane for example.
And of course you have the advantage of a choice of a range of devices with much larger screens than an iPhone.
It's just a shame that the Android UX experience is so chaotic. A consequence of Google never really seeming to settle on a single UI vision beyond "different enough from iOS to avoid legal action."
If you don't like iOS, just say so.
6, I like, though; applications providing services to one another is a great idea. But when you combine that with "full access to the filesystem", you don't -need- an intents system for inter app communication, you can just save files and open them in different apps. It's this kind of inconsistency of what Android is actually trying to do - be computerlike, or be a walled garden 'appstore' ecosystem - that contributes to the overall chaos of the UX.
Rooting/installing ROMs is completely optional. It's just there if you want it, and it can be a lot of fun. You did buy a pocket computer after all - don't you want to see what it can do?
I use Swiftkey instead of Google's stock keyboard, and Firefox instead of Chrome. Both are quality apps which look great, have zero malware issues, and seriously enhance the quality of my smartphone experience. The improvement is way beyond what you can get on iOS, simply because Apple won't allow anyone to modify the core experience so deeply. And I haven't explored the offerings in full - I still use the stock caller and messaging client. I'm confident that high-quality alternatives are available.
I use simple stock widgets currently - Gmail and Google Calendar only. They look great, they're simple, and again they seriously improve my phone experience. Again, I haven't really explored widgets yet but I'm sure there are some seriously powerful, high-quality options available.
And the filesystem is only visible if you download an app for it specifically. Out of the box the file management is similar to iOS, just more powerful with the intents system. This isn't an example of Google not being able to make up their mind, they've just decided to allow people to explore that side of the system if they want.
Android is really a great system for people who like computers. All of the things which Apple decided people shouldn't be interested in doing with their pocket computers are available in some way on Android. It's very gratifying for curious people.
It's fair enough to say that all these options come with dangers. But they also come with potential! Great potential.
I just bought a phone, which happens to be a computer. If I really want to get deep into a 'pocket computer' I buy an Arduino or an equivalent and hack it's guts.
As a mobile dev I'm more than happy about the access level that I have with iOS, I can even throw in-line Assembly there.
Cheers.
This guarantee has diminished over the years. Before iOS 4 (which allowed third-party apps certain types of background multitasking) it was pretty much ironclad. Multitasking started to chip away at it, and they've added more and more multitasking modes (which is, overall, a great thing) making for more and more opportunities for apps to eat your battery in the background.
My personal experience is that the ideal still mostly holds, with a big fat exception in the form of VoIP apps like Skype which get to use up way too much power if you leave them logged in.
It's probably to the point where a battery monitor would be useful now, but it's not a particularly great need, and inertia will probably keep it away.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means, what you think it means.
There is another one.
A unix shell is highly customisable and powerful in the hands of a knowledgeable user, but I wouldn't describe it as advanced.
C++ is a very powerful programming language with tons of features, but I wouldn't describe it as advanced.
"Apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
Then again, I probably use a different definition of the word "advanced" than most people here. To me, iOS is the more advanced operating system because it manages to hide its complexity from the user. Adding features is easy. What is not easy is making sure those features are coherent and actually make the device easier to use.
And yes you can enable that by installing custom kernel modules. But I think hacking is out of scope here.
I long for an iPhone. Preferably a 5c or above. I don't have the cash and will only buy SIM free phones these days though. I've had piles of Android handsets and a couple of WinPhone handsets. They all sucked.
Whilst iOS isn't all that pretty, it actually works properly. My wife has precisely no problems with her 5c and the times I've used it, to be fair, I'm envious.
I really couldn't care how the word advanced was applied to the marketing.
Especially when many of them are poorly implemented one-offs on one model on one carrier for a few months before support and updates are cut off permanently. (Why the hell should something like screen sharing be a feature of one particular model?!?)
In terms of actually working, the iPhone is lightyears ahead of huge swaths of the Android ecosystem. Maybe not Google Nexus, but then you're locked into the inferior network coverage of AT&T or T-Mobile.
Samsung (w/ Verizon) install so much bloatware on their new Android phones it is bordering ridiculous. Why would new Galaxy S4 users want an uninstallable NFL app?
The Motorola and LG Nexus android phones are comparable to iOS in terms of actually working.
Don't overstate the rarity of CDMA or the ubiquity of GSM. Yes, GSM is effectively the global standard, but CDMA is way more popular than you say.
Examples of other CDMA networks include China Telecom (40+ million subscribers) and au by KDDI in Japan (20 million subscribers).
A full(ish?) list is available on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CDMA2000_networks
Many of those are specialty providers, legacy networks, etc., but a fair number are regular old cell phone providers.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/Cel...
The Nexus and Motorola phones work fine on GSM. If anything, it's more of a reason to buy them than avoid them like you said.
Edit: And I quote:
>"Maybe not Google Nexus, but then you're locked into the inferior network coverage of AT&T or T-Mobile."
If you'd like to say that your point remains valid, I completely agree. But if you're going to insist that your factually incorrect statement is not wrong, we're going to have a problem.
Also, I did not say anything about reasons for buying different kinds of phones. I only talked about the number of different kinds of networks available throughout the world.
I know what I'm getting when I buy an iPhone. Navigating Android smartphones is a minefield.
here are the responses I received:
you'll now notice that the UK page doesn't contain that false statement: compare http://www.apple.com/uk/osx/ vs. http://www.apple.com/osx/
I'm interested from a technical perspective. From a deep software development point of view, I'm familiar with OSX, FreeBSD, Linux and Windows and know their technical merits well.
I don't think anyone could disagree with that, even the most ardent Apple crusader.
I find this to be some really interesting marketing spin for "Siri doesn't always know when to stop listening, so now you can tell it".
IE
Now your car knows when to slow down
Manually control the speed of your car by pressing the brake pedal
Not that one or the other of us is "right" it's just funny that a short sentence can be read many different ways.
Sure, that's not the same as solving the technical problem of "when to stop listening". But it's solving the user problem of "it doesn't know when to stop listening". And it's not some explicit additional button you have to press to override any default behavior. It's implicit in the new method.
Unless the former UX is still around and this is an additional, optional, pattern. But that seems ... not very Apple-like.
Given that, it is very Apple-like, in that there is an "advanced" way to use it if you have an edge case, but you can continue doing it the old way if you don't care.
If hold-to-Siri is optional for power-users, advertising it like that doesn't feel Apple-like. Having it seems fine; Apple does that plenty. But advertising a power user option? That's new-to-me.
How to reproduce: 1. Go to someone's mobile.twitter.com account, like https://mobile.twitter.com/newsycombinator 2. Scroll down a few pages (for example, scroll down until 5 new pages load from infinite scrolling). 3. Scroll up very-very fast - Safari will fail. This behavior did not change in 7.1, and this is not the only way to reprocude. Sometimes it just fails while opening a single page, without any other tabs opened.
Bit inconvenient but I'd rather it was this way than other vendors' shitty updaters. If it's a major problem doing this, need to buy one with bigger storage next time.
> Getting the update is easy. Go to Settings. Select General. And tap Software Update.
cmon, commas were created for a reason.
Also worth noting it doesn't show the "slide to unlock" for a bit if you have Touch ID enabled, which is nice.
The manufacturer line-up at the bottom is impressive - the major absences are Volkswagen-Audi and FIAT-Chrysler. Renault is also missing, but partner Nissan is in. GM seems to be in, with Chevy and Opel brands showing.
------------------------------------
GM is launching its own in-vehicle app store for 2015 Chevrolet vehicles, featuring apps from GM and third-party developers. Apps from the Chevrolet AppShop can be downloaded into the car and work in the center-stack display.
"This is an evolutionary environment we live in," said Junior Barrett, GM's infotainment strategy manager. "We're investigating all different avenues."
It's available in the iAd platform but manually disabled elsewhere - you can enable it on jailbroken devices though. Infuriating. Also infuriating is Apple's lack of support for WebRTC. I've learned not to expect much from them in terms of mobile web any more.
- Android lacks many decent tablet applications; most of them are blown-up phone versions.
- The Android ecosystem is fragmented. Very few devices (proportionally) are running the latest release, and it can take years for new features to be widespread enough that developers can rely on them and users can benefit from them.
The technological (OTA "delta" updates) and marketing push around major and minor releases appear designed to reinforce the second point.
I'm not endorsing either of these claims, since I don't use Android devices enough to know.
Personally the feature I'm looking forward to is the improved performance on the older devices.
Outline of Buttons
On/Off Indicator
Those two improve the flat design by a lot. Buttons become clearly visible again. They should make it the default setting, going back to normal is jarring.
Edit: My memory may be fuzzy though.
Does anyone think this is a downgrade? Is it optional?
it has crashed at least 7 or 8 times in the few hours I've had the iOS update
thanks a lot, crApple