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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?
you're scrolling it wrong.
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).
There seem to be two different kinds of slowdown. The first is due to the new animations for things like going back to the home screen. The second is more intermittent, and happens mostly when task switching. Both of them are annoying. The whole reason I went with iOS over Android was the snappier UI.
The disappearing Safari toolbar also drives me crazy. I wish I had held off on upgrading. Hopefully Apple will have some tweaks and patches out soon.
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I've kept an iPod touch 2G and 4G around for a while—and I can say with some confidence that every single release of iOS has come with a palpable performance penalty. That's how Apple decides when to stop releasing iOS for a given device; the performance gets unacceptably awful.
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Since the iphone 3g, apple has been pushing updates that slow down older phones.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
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.
Dreamers, shapers, singers, makers... Elric, the Techno-Mage
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.
From what I can see there is a *lot* more eye candy (and I'm not talking about the icon changes) - it seems like the decided they needed to animate every single action and control in the OS now. Not to mention transparency, animated blur effects (especially in the camera), etc.
I don't notice any slowdown from it, though - seems like they are using the 3D HW to do it, and the latest devices have pretty decent graphics. In fact, the perception is often that it's faster (which is the point of transition animation) but that's just a subjective observation...
iOS7 should be fine on an iphone 5 or 4s, but there definitely should be a noticeable slowdown on an iphone 4. That hardware is a bit old by now, and iOS7 is designed for the newer hardware. E.g. the iphone 4 still has a single core A4 CPU, while the 4s already has the dual core A5. The newer phones (5 and up) also have twice the RAM. Still, upgrading to iOS7 is a user option, and it's better to have that option than not to have it. Not many 3 year old Android phones still get OS upgrades.
All these new animations drive me batty.
Sure, you see something happen right away in response to an action, so in a sense, you have instant feedback. If that makes you think things are happening faster, lucky you.
Because my iPhone 5, when it was running iOS 6 felt faster to me because any action I took translated to a change of UX paradigm right away where I could take yet another action. Hence, I'm working faster. Now with animations, I have to wait for each animation before I can take my next action. That feels slower to me.
Worst offender is the new lock screen. Why did they decide to make me wait an extra 1/2-1 seconds after hitting the power or home button to turn it on so that can "gracefully" fade in from black before giving me access to the "slide to unlock"? It's maddening.
Asking people to think is like asking them to buy you a new car
I haven't really noticed a slowdown on either my iPhone 4S or iPad 2. It gets a little choppy occasionally on my iPad 2, but that happened with iOS 6 at times as well. The biggest issue I've seen is decreased battery life because of all the background tasks being done. That and the constantly reloading of apps do to more memory being used by iOS 7.
I did have another issue on both devices, where somehow all my music (iTunes Match downloads), somehow got flagged as "Other Data" and couldn't be removed. I fixed this on my iPad 2 by turning off iTunes Match and doing a hard reset. For my iPhone 4S, nothing short of a restore fixed it. Both devices updated from iOS 6.1.3 OTA.
I think you're forgetting how much animation there was in iOS 6 just because you got used to it, whereas the iOS 7 ones are different and are therefore noticeable. Other than the parallax effect and the translucence/blur, which I'd already mentioned, where else are there animations/eye candy where there weren't before? Folders opened with an animation (slide up rather than zoom in), the springboard loaded with an animation (swoop in from the sides rather than fall in from above), views slid from one to the next before just as they do now. And you're forgetting the subtle skeumorphic animations in certain controls that are now gone altogether, like the shine on the metallic volume slider knob that tracked the motion of the phone.
It's not that I don't think ios 7 puts more strain on the hardware - it does, especially with the translucent blur (which is why the blur is disabled on the iPhone 4). I just don't think it qualifies as "more eye candy." Mostly *different* eye candy, the worst of which is disableable if you need to improve performance.
When i started using Linux, it would run just fine on my 486DX33 with 8 MB of RAM. Now when I try to run it on machines with 50x that spec it is slow.
Newsflash: hardware requirements increase with new features. Supporting end of life hardware that hasn't been made for multiple generations in new platforms holds back said platform. Whether it is iOS, WIndows, Linux or whatever.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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!
You have to admire apple for their ingenuity. What better way to force people to ditch that old phone than to update the OS, make it more resource hungry with fancy schmancy animations that can't be turned off by the user? I used to own an iPhone 3 a few years ago, and when they forced an update onto it that basically made it useless, I decided there and then to switch to Android. Never looked back.
If the Apple way is so important to you, then I guess you have to accept it. For me, it was a simple choice.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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.
You have to admire apple for their ingenuity. What better way to force people to ditch that old phone than to update the OS, make it more resource hungry...
That's been going on for as long as there has been a computer industry.
Restricting folders to a 3x3 grid is by far my biggest pet peeve. It's an absurdity on a 10" tablet especially. If you have a dev account I encourage you to file a UI big against it. Maybe if they get enough complaints they'll do something about it (hahahahaha).
Feels a little faster in some areas like web browsing, generally about the same, but I prefer the old UI.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
My iTunes just tells me there's an update for my iPhone and asking if I want to install it, with the option of doing it now, doing it later (which is just "bother me next time I sync"), or never ask me about this again. I'm not sure how that's a forced update.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
I'm not sure how that's a forced update.
Because you can never go back to 6.1.3 now. (officially .. w/o jailbreak, etc). If you have any problem with your phone and you need to reinstall the OS .. you are screwed - you *have* to install iOS 7. Or if you decide to upgrade to 7 just to "see what it was like" and found it slow on your particular hardware, too bad, you cant go back. - This is especially bad for "dated" hardware like the iPhone 4.
I downgraded my iPad back to 6.1.3.... It's perfectly doable.
I'm running iOS 7.0 on my iPad 2 and did not experience any slowdown issues--in fact, Safari in iOS 7.0 renders web pages a lot faster than before.
However, I did see one noticeable issue: the graphical design--especially the text fonts--don't look good on an iPad 2 with its lower-resolution screen. I've seen the final iOS 7.0 on an 4th-generation iPad and thanks to its "Retina Display" resolution touchscreen, it does look really good.
The reason that third party apps are not supported is because XCodedrops those versions. As a developer I'm faced with the Faustian bargain of continuing older versions or supporting new versions. OF course Apple controls XCode too...
I downgraded my iPad back to 6.1.3.... It's perfectly doable.
Its temporary. When new iOS versions are introduced there is generally a brief window of time where Apple's servers approve both versions for installation. After a little while the previous version will be removed from the approved list and only the new version will be approved from that point forward.
If you with reinstall iOS 6 do not delay.
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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