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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 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.
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 downgraded my iPad back to 6.1.3.... It's perfectly doable.
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.