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Ask Slashdot: Is iOS 7 Slow?
New submitter PopHollywood writes "Is iOS 7 slower than version 6? After upgrading, myself and a few others notice slow, choppy experience when scrolling, changing apps, etc. Is this common?" For those using iOS in general, what's been your experience with the new upgrade?
I work in a field where I see a lot of mobile devices and we've been seeing a lot of issues with iPhone 4/4S/5 units that had iOS 6 and were upgraded to iOS 7. Haven't come across too many 5C/S units yet but the few we have seem to be doing okay (no real issues with the 5S, 5C seems a little stuttery at times but not bad).
Maybe I'm the only one, but my iPhone 4S is actually working faster now. Transitions in and out of apps is much quicker, without the delay I had before.
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I've not noticed excessive stutter on my 4s, but battery life seems to be worse thus far. I've not had iOS 7 installed long enough to be sure, but it looks like even with my typical workday activity the battery is draining noticably faster. Getting two days out of a charge doesn't look possible anymore.
I read the internet for the articles.
Update went well on my iPhone 4 (not S). Still am getting used to some elements. For example, the "ok" to unlock is kind of really unclear, and as such, I have doubts on putting nondescript text as buttons instead of having them shown with a rounded rect button frame.
I had MAJOR slowdowns everytime I was writing some line of text. I mean major MAJOR, like the UI freezing for 10 seconds, then putting all the text I was blindly writing, and then freezing for yet another 10 seconds. Then, Mr. Interwebz found the solution, which is to disable iCloud synchro for documents & settings ... and from that point on, no more battery hug, no more slowdowns, and everything is quite responsive.
So far, like it!
It's definitely slower and I regret upgrading.
There's not enough white space to provide any visual separation on a device so small when there is not even an attempt at drawing lines or separating elements. Almost everything is smaller and harder to read, and it's not obvious what is a "button" and what is just text in a corner somewhere. In fact, many of the improvements are simple knock offs of Android has had for a while. The world will soon be divided into Upswipers and Downswipers.
I was thinking about updating my 4S, but while 7 was a step forward for some usability cases, I'm not sure I want to stick around for whatever is next. I am tired of not having full access to the hardware, and when I heard Ives was going to cut out cruft, I didn't imagine he was going to replace the whole system with the Office 2012 theme. Unfortunately for us, they're both based upon the premise that everyone wants to live in pure white Helvetica purgatory, and I don't think most of us do.
It's probably a consequence of his background in hardware. When you cut elements out of real materials down to their simplest possible form, there is still depth and innate information because it is a physical object. When you remove all delineation and depth from two dimensional representations, new users cannot even guess at your purpose when it looks like a blank sheet of paper with text and small iconography scattered around randomly on top of it. While the elements look much better on larger screens (as found in this informal poll), things like the slot-machine style picker are not very obvious when you're scrolling around. I don't think they did much real world testing with new users on actual devices.
tl:dr; If you're a first year art student, you will absolutely love iOS 7. If you prefer to have some visual cues on what is content and what is part of the interface, you may want to hold off until Apple allows graphic designers capable of using more than one color back on the team.
My (i)phone (4) hung in the middle of the upgrade, so I ended up having to do a clean install.
It took all night, but it feels less laggy than iOS 6 was at the end. Also, some have complained about the useless animations, but if my actions are acknowledged immediately, I don't end up assuming the phone ignored my input, trying again, and taking eleven pictures of the floor in front of me while trying to start the camera.
Protip: Consider doing a clean install.
I'm still using an old version of XCode. Never upgraded XCode past the point where I started using it to develop apps; so never had to drop support for old versions, either iOS or OSX.
The problem -- at least as it seems to me -- is primarily developers jumping on new versions of XCode, and using new, OS-level specific APIs, which in turn make old devices unable to run the code unless you're *very* careful and catch every instance of new API and make an alternate, home-brewed version available to do that job (or disable a feature.) That's possible, but not easy. And most developers don't do it consistently, which again seems to indicate it isn't all that easy (with Objective C, you can actually tell if a particular call is available to you, and of course, you can just pay attention to the OS rev level.) But basically, the more OS levels you concurrently support, the larger your support load is. No matter how you do it.
To a lesser extent, but still problematic, Apple deprecates or breaks older APIs. That can be a real problem. Sometimes they never fix bugs, too; they just leave an older OS behind, bugs and broken features as-shipped, and wander off into the sunset with a new version, as if that was appropriate behavior. It's not: if you advertise X as having Y feature under, or as, Z OS, as far as I'm concerned, you're on the hook to make it work as advertised and you can't get off the hook by saying "oh, we fixed that in the next version (that doesn't work with a lot of your stuff, sucker.)"
I've been able to keep earlier applications up and running and relatively healthy by simply not upgrading XCode. Do I miss some functionality? Yep. But my customers and users can at least count on their apps continuing to work as long as it remains in my power to manage that. And they don't have to upgrade their OS to make it happen, although they can still do so if they choose to without my stuff breaking.
I went through this with Windows, but in the end, Microsoft so radically changed the way Windows worked -- from window metrics to internal operations -- that it became impossible. That's when I abandoned developing for Windows.
Something that has shown considerable promise is Qt. They're still on the "we don't need to fix bugs, we'll just upgrade" train, but as a cross platform development tool, it really has potential. I've got a software defined radio application developed with Qt 4.7 (Qt 5 was very seriously broken last I looked) that makes some pretty serious demands in terms of CPU and a broad swath of APIs, and have been able to keep it running under both OSX and Windows, which I think says a lot for Qt. Again, staying away from the "upgrade" is one of the things that has kept my users in working software.
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