iOS 7.1

[melling]

And the biggest feature of 7.1 is that within a few weeks 4 out of 5 iOS users will be running 7.1.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/01/apple-80-percent-of-act...

[Ethan_Mick]

I've been running the latest beta for a while, and I'm updating my devices now. Here's my beef:

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.

[sxcurry]

This is interesting - I've been using iOS7 since the day it came out and don't think I've seen a serious bug yet, certainly not hundreds of them. I really am curious - is it the hardware (iPhone 5s here) or different usage patterns? I'm a developer too, and just haven't had this experience. Please let me know a couple of the specific bugs you've seen, as I'd like to try and recreate them before upgrading to 7.1

[smackfu]

I do wonder what happened with this release. Beta 1 came out ages ago on November 18th. My guess is that CarPlay got added to the iOS 7.1 content, and then that had delays, and then had to be properly announced at a big motor show.

[jwr]

> "iPhone 4 users will enjoy improved responsiveness and performance"

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.

[arrrg]

Well, it’s a real damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation for Apple.

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.

[ksk]

Yeah, I got burned with 7 too on my 4S. Luckily my iPad3 is still on 6.

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.

[dpeck]

Felt the same with with iOS 4, whatever it was on the 3G. It was assured to work well, in reality it was completely unusable.

[qq66]

One major question that I have for everyone who upgrades iOS on launch day is, "why?" Nobody upgrades non-Apple operating systems on Day 1. Sometimes people wait for an entire year to upgrade the OS, because the device is functional at the old OS and risks becoming nonfunctional with the new OS.

Yet I continue to see people upgrade OS X and iOS on launch day, often with predictably regrettable results.

[hnewcfo]

I am still on iOS 5.x with my iPhone 4S.

Would you/anyone recommend to upgrade these days my 4S to iOS 7.x?

[yuhong]

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/03/ios-7-1-on-the-iphone-4...

[frik]

I am still on iOS 6.1 on my iPad2. It's fast and looks nice. Beside the design change, v7 and 7.1 are more a minor update.

How fast is iOS 7.1 on iPad2?

[masklinn]

> frankly, nothing can be worse than the iOS 7.0 upgrade

You didn't live through 4.0 with a 3G did you?

[acangiano]

Having recently switched from an iPhone to an Android smartphone, I really question the "most advanced mobile OS" claim. Apple phones are more polished, more logically organized, easier to use, more intuitive... fair enough. But more advanced? Not by a long shot. The amount of features and customizable options on Android is insane. You can argue that this is not necessarily a good thing for the average user, but you can't make the claim that iOS is more advanced. It's simply not.

EDIT: OK, fair enough. The word "advanced" is very subjective and means different things to different people.

[superuser2]

You can't make the claim that a greater number of features makes something more advanced.

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.

[gress]

Customization is not advancement.

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.

[enraged_camel]

I'd argue that more features and customizable options do not necessarily make an OS more advanced, either.

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.

[acqq]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso

"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?"

[bananas]

Lepper here. I have a Windows phone (Lumia 820).

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.

[DannyBee]

"Now Siri knows when to stop listening."

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

[amima]

The most annoying bug of iOS 7 was crashing of Safari. For iPad Air it happened for me all the time, every day 3-10 crashes during regular usage. Using other browser did not help - the problem was deeper, all browsers shared this issue. My biggest hope for 7.1 was this bug being fixed. But no, Safari still fails.

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.

[brown9-2]

This ~200 meg update requires 1.9 gigs of free space to install itself. It would be so much easier to clear space off of my 16 gig iPhone if it was possible to clear the space that Facebook (189mb), Tweetbot (181mb), Instapaper (361mb), Yelp (161mb) etc uses for their caches. Having to micromanage the disk space on an iPhone when this happens is quite the pain.

[joeconway]

A warning for any iOS developers. XCode 5.1 is not on the app store yet so updating to 7.1 means you can't test on your updated device for a while

[alayne]

It's available from the iOS Dev Center.

[kbar13]

Am I the only one who is anal about the excessive use of periods in these marketing pages?

> Getting the update is easy. Go to Settings. Select General. And tap Software Update.

cmon, commas were created for a reason.

[davidcollantes]

It bothers me too, but what bothers me the most is the last sentence: "And tap Software Update." It should be "Tap Software Update."

[Zelphyr]

Commas aren't round and thus not uniform so they aren't as pretty to the Eyes of Ive.

[codr]

Not quite the only one.. but close! =]

[tammer]

Anyone else find the new 'slide to unlock' animation hideous compared to the 7.0 one?

[jpwgarrison]

Just got a facetime call from my wife immediately after the update, the UI - button placement, etc. seemed much easier to use.

[ableal]

The CarPlay page ( http://www.apple.com/ios/carplay/ ) is interesting.

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.

[jscheel]

Oh look, I'm go glad they changed the way I answer phone calls... again. :\

[bhouston]

Does iOS have WebGL yet? (I feel like I should make one of those Yes/No answer websites on this topic.)

[untog]

Does iOS have WebGL? Yes. Does Safari have WebGL? No.

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.

[TruthSHIFT]

I've never seen this much marketing for a minor iOS update. I wonder what prompted the change.

[twoodfin]

When they've discussed Android in the past year or so, Apple execs like Cook and Schiller seem to have focused on two areas where they feel iOS has an advantage over Android:

- 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.

[mitchellh]

I imagine CarPlay.

[Kurtz79]

It's in their best interest that every user updates to the latest version, so sugar-coating the update makes sense.

Personally the feature I'm looking forward to is the improved performance on the older devices.

[RyanZAG]

Probably the latest marketshare numbers.

[smackfu]

Well, it's just the .1 version, but it has been six months since iOS 7 was released. So it may be the only iOS 7 update.

[radley]

iOS was a big release with a lot of fundamental changes. Naturally everyone is curious about Apple reaction and choices to change/improve/fix first.

[pico303]

Great. With only having to tap the screen to answer the phone, how many calls am I going to accidentally answer that I didn't want to by just pulling the phone out of my pocket?

[pinaceae]

Coolest feature for me is a bit hidden in Accessiblity settings:

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.

[benstein]

I wonder if they fixed the iMessage caching-phone-numbers-after-you-switch-to-Android bug that's been so terrible? Really wish they had a FULL changelog, not just marketing spin.

[nosecreek]

Really thankful they added a "new" Month view in the calendar app. The ability to see all the events for a day at a glance was something I was really missing from iOS 6.

[lewispollard]

Anyone know if this includes the minimal-ui meta tag for Safari? Can't see any mention of it in the changelist

[dcaunt]

It does, and the tag works as per the beta.