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Ask Slashdot: Is iOS 8 a Pig?
kyjellyfish writes I've been using iOS 8 for several days and aside from a few gimmicks and add-ons that attempt to achieve parity with Android, my experience has been overwhelmingly unsatisfactory. My chief complaint is that the vast majority of my apps are slow to boot and noticeably sluggish in operation. I want to point out that all of these apps have been "upgraded" specifically for iOS 8 compatibility. Previous operating system upgrades have been relatively seamless, so I'm asking whether other slashdotters have experienced this degraded performance.
iOS 8 seems even faster than iOS 7 on my 5S. Haven't seen that happen yet after an update from one major iOS upgrade to the next. Very happy with it.
I don't have an iPad 2 but I do have an iPhone 4S and I've not noticed the battery draining faster. I haven't really noticed any performance degration either and I haven't turned anything off. I'm having a good experience, so I'm not sure what the issue could be. The iPad 2 didn't really match the spec of a 4S though. I'm surprised you can use iOS 8 on an iPad 2 even though the 4S and it are only 6 months apart. The iPad 2 has an inferior processor, that may be the difference. My mother in law still has an iPad 2 and I won't upgrade her.
Wow I love how the OP gets called a troll just for asking if Apple's version of iOS is bloaty and mentioning that he's used Android. Then I look at the comments and everybody who agrees that its slow on older hardware is scored low, and everybody who posts that its just fine are scored up. OP this is your fault for blaspheming.
I haven't had the issues described here, but iOS 8 definitely crippled my wifi across several devices, including an iPhone 6+. I'm not alone: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1781815
The iOS 8 app upgrades are pretty much for things like being able to target new/any screen sizes. If you're on an existing device, that doesn't mean much. I don't think there is anything in the new SDK that would imply a performance decline in apps that adopt it.
The X.0.0 upgrades are pretty well known for including slower/unoptimized drivers and code paths. Apple is usually in a hurry to get the release out the door and they don't do all the optimizations they should. Usually by X.0.1 or X.1 they get things cleaned up. So it doesn't surprise me that 8.0 is a little pokey. 7.0 had basically the same issues.
This is standard practice for Apple. While they will continue to support your phone, they have this habit of making the new major OS rev run slowly right about the time your phone is 2 years old. I struggle to believe it's a coincidence as it has happened with literally every revision they've released.
I put it on my iPad 3 and it's noticeably slower. The big thing I'm seeing now that I never saw before is typing lag. That is annoying. I've also seen extra delay in some cases with the screen realizing it needs to rotate, and a bug in one specific app with keys on the keyboard disappearing entirely. On the performance end it's not that impressive in any way.
That said, having extensions in Safari has been nice, keyboard swapping is handy, and the family sharing feature is really great. So I'm not going to be rushing to roll it back, but I really don't understand how simple things like typing could get so much slower on the same hardware.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I updated my 64 gig 4S on Friday, and it's been stable and crash-free. I especially liked the Health app as it's accessible from the lock screen, assuming emergency responders know that it's there and how to get to it. I have an immune disorder so this is of interest to me, obviously not to everyone. I really like the one motion swipe delete for mail, and the Siri voice dictation in real-time is pretty cool. The funny thing is that I had more trouble upgrading my new iPad Mini Retina than I did my 4S. One other thing that was interesting, and I need to verify this: I was listening to some podcasts yesterday and when I got home, before syncing, they were already marked as played on my iMac. I'm not sure what's up with that as I try to have my phone to only sync music and podcasts via cable.
Issues: first and biggest, battery life. I noticed this yesterday when I got up and last night when I went to bed, I logged that my battery was at 66%. Eight hours later, 54%ish. I already turned off most of the background stuff that eats juice that was posted when iOS 7 came out, so I'm not sure what's up. I'm going to try putting it in airplane mode when I go to bed tonight to see if that stops whatever is eating it. Also, I'm still pissed at the way they screwed up the podcast app when 7 came out last year. I need to get back to studying Objective C/Swift and write my own.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
As a developer it's been a problem developing for Android. It's one of the reasons why at work we charge more to develop android versions of apps usually as we'll only QA test against Nexus devices. If our clients want QA on any additional handsets basically increase the development costs by 50% per device. Usually if clients add any other devices it's will be Samsung, but we charge QA per model on Android devices. So Galaxy S4, S5, Note could double the price we charge for an Android app vs. iOS.
Personally I no longer develop apps for Android. I used to, but Android apps were less than 25% of my revenue and accounted for about 90% of my support requests. In particular "App crashes on startup" and on a handset I've never heard of before. Especially problematic seemed to be the number of prepaid android devices. Their OS's never seem to be kept current or running some tweaks that may cause compatibility issues for whatever reasons.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I have an iPhone 4S since october 2011. I installed iOS8 last week and everything is fine. No slowdowns that I noticed yet. Apparently, it takes 2 more seconds to boot, but I don't really care as I reboot it less than once a week.
Prior to that I had an iPhone 3GS, updated always to the latest versioon. I've never had to complain about Apple's software upgrades, except on one occasion (I don't remember but I think it was iOS4). This was quite horrible in terms of performance and an update came a couple of weeks later and fixed most of it. Another update came two month later and fixed the rest.
YMMV, but all in all, Apple's support for old hardware is miles and light-years ahead of everyone else. Bar none.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
The iPad 2 is 29% of the iPad market share. I expect IOS 8.1 to fix any lingering issues just as IOS 7.1 did.
I have an Ipad Mini Retina. I honestly don't notice any major slow-downs (a wee bit longer to launch an app -- and noticeably longer to boot the device). However, some apps no longer worked (awaiting an update) -- and this is somewhat minor.
The MAJOR issue I have (and it's appearing a lot on the apple forums) is 5ghz wifi. For many users it's pretty much unusable. I had to switch down to 2.4 (my router has up to 4 SSIDs, 2 for each frequency). I don't LIKE 2.4 because it gets a fair amount of interference, but it's a suitable work around. I'm hoping this gets resolved in the next update.
My main complaint is (and I kick myself in the butt over it) *THIS* complaint was registered while IOS8 was in beta by many users. I SAW those complains and figured they were resolved before they released the update. I should have known better. I had enough sense *NOT* to update my phone (iphone 5).
That said, I don't notice much of ANYTHING worthy of real "hoopla". 'Hey siri' is neat, but I'm still unsure if I will find actual utility from it once the novelty wears off. Certainly not enough "new" stuff to warrant it's size and bulk.
The iPad2 has an A5 1GHz vs the iPhone 4S having an A5 at 800MHz. They both have 512MB of RAM. So no, the iPad2 isn't inferior to the iPhone 4S, it is actually faster.
References:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Write boring code, not shiny code!
It would only be "Planned Obsolescence" if the user was forced to install an iOS Upgrade. But they aren't; so it isn't.
*Sortof*. However, there is another effect that I've noticed as a dev, that when the majority of users do upgrade then app developers very quickly abandon support for the older OS, whereas Android devs know they have to keep stuff backward compatible so don't drop those old OS's as quickly. This means that your apps tend to stop getting upgrades if you don't upgrade your OS, and then stop working (most apps being network dependent and therefore killable by the software devs when you version won't talk to their server). So there is a strong pressure to upgrade.
Frankly, as an Android developer since the 1.6 days, I find your numbers highly suspect. I have worked in several small teams with equal Android and iOS resources, and on every one the Android team has a much lower crash rate, no significant difference in bug rates, and has the same development times as iOS. There is absolutely no way it's as expensive as you're quoting to add devices.
Maybe I'm just an amazing developer, but I doubt it. Stick to the documentation and understand the system you're programming for, and you don't have to tweak for every device that exists. It's a pretty consistent platform in my experience.
My 4 year old Galaxy S is running Android KitKat 4.4.4 and it actually runs faster with KitKat than it did with Gingerbread 2.3 and has more features. Of course Samsung didn't upgrade it but at least someone who was willing to tackle it was able to.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K