
iOS 7, thoroughly reviewed - eigenvector
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/ios-7-thoroughly-reviewed/
======
ozataman
So much effort was poured into just redesigning, repackaging basic apps on the
surface. I think some of them look and exhibit functional behavior
straightforwardly worse than before:

\- Smaller fonts and less obvious icons on the weather app

\- Less info on the world clock without the digital time text, which helps
grasp the time at a glance especially when you're looking at several zones.

\- Smaller direction character font on the compass (why would anyone do that?
It's like 40% of what it used to be and is only a single char!)

\- Less contrast across the entire interface with all white text; harder to
discern differences.

... and at best a neutral change across the others. I haven't yet installed it
myself, but the screenshots look disappointing. I am not dismissing the idea
of removing skeumorphisms, but this particular implementation/execution seems
like a step in the direction of less refined for Apple.

I have seen very few screenshots so far that made me say "oh that's so much
better, wow". Several did make me say "Gosh, why would you reduce the font
size there?!?! Why would you make the icon much less obvious?"

Just to note that I am not trying to be negative - I am certain with this much
solid engineering talent, there will be features we'll love.

I hope I'm proven wrong once the OS is officially out and we're hooked in the
following few weeks.

~~~
fredsted
\- Weather app: Some fonts are smaller, some are larger, but you get a great
looking animation that shows the current weather. In my opinion the app is
much prettier than before, and more useful since you can see, for example,
whether you need to bring a raincoat immediately.

\- Clock: Try tapping on the clocks: [http://d.pr/i/yrmI](http://d.pr/i/yrmI)

\- About less contrast: You can turn on bolder fonts in the interface.

I really, really like iOS 7. Especially on the iPhone, somehow on iPad I had
more of a meh reaction, and I installed it there first. But going back to my
iPhone with iOS 6 made me realize how dated that OS looks and feels.

Forgetting the looks, all the little new features and improvements are great,
like all the new Safari stuff, command center and the improved app switcher.
Apple says there are 200 new features and I definitely believe them.

~~~
yapcguy
> But going back to my iPhone with iOS 6 made me realize how dated that OS
> looks and feels.

Isn't this simply emotion - based upon you already knowing that iOS 7 is
newer?

If you showed iOS 6 and 7 to someone who had never seen an iPhone before, how
would they figure out which was the newer design?

~~~
potatolicious
Design doesn't exist in a vacuum, if you showed iOS6 and iOS7 to someone who
had never seen it before, they would surmise age by comparing to other designs
they have seen.

In the same way you would see something that you've never seen before and go
"that's so 80s".

Considering that Apple didn't originate the flat trend, and that the web has
been going flat (or flatter) for a while now, I don't think it would take a
genius to figure out which is which.

~~~
yapcguy
I'm not sure the web is embracing flat, it's more like designers get bored and
feel the urge to do something. They have to justify their paycheck and raison
d'etre.

It's like the fashion industry, what is out of fashion comes back in because
somebody says so and the catwalk is then flooded with retro fashion.

~~~
potatolicious
Oh yay, this again.

People use this tired old argument on us too - "what? Why is IT building the
website again? Don't we already have one? Welp, guess they have to justify
their paychecks somehow...", it's tiresome, reductionist, grossly ignorant,
and textbook HN: everyone is useless except me.

Fashion isn't a simple cause and effect - it isn't designers dictating taste
to an unwilling public. The influence is circular - design influences public
aesthetic influences more design. The fashion industry steals plenty of ideas
right off the streets, it's far, far from a one-way relationship. "Fashion" is
just an endless cycle of the public influencing products and vice versa.
Sometimes it will retread familiar territory, other times it'll do something
new.

And thank god we have it. I for one am glad we're rid of animated GIFs and
fluorescent green text, or do you think that evolution is also bored designers
justifying their paychecks?

But nah, none of the above can be true, everyone's a useless parasite except
the vaunted Hackers, hallowed be their names!

------
yapcguy
I was going to complain about AirDrop being proprietary, but this is very
disappointing. What is wrong with Apple?

> It’s important to note that while AirDrop in iOS 7 and AirDrop in OS X share
> the same name and underlying technology (both work by transmitting files
> over a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection), they aren’t actually compatible with
> one another. You can AirDrop things from iOS to iOS and from OS X to OS X,
> but not from iOS to OS X or vice versa. All the reports I can find say that
> this situation doesn’t change with Mavericks.

~~~
prehkugler
It's important to ask yourself what you would do if you could AirDrop from
your iOS device to an OS X device. Even though under the covers iOS and OS X
work on files, iOS is sandboxed where OS X isn't, i.e. if you can't get to it
via USB, you couldn't get to it via AirDrop anyway.

With that said, it would be useful to have some of the iTunes/iPhoto
functionality for wireless(AirDrop) a la carte file transfer, but most people
will just use iTunes wifi sync to get this effect.

~~~
kalleboo
> It's important to ask yourself what you would do if you could AirDrop from
> your iOS device to an OS X device

Quickly send photos I just took to put in email, IMs or on web forums. I used
to do that constantly before I had an iPhone using Bluetooth, it was super-
handy. Now I have to take a pointless long-cut through the internet with
something like Dropbox. Royal pain when you're somewhere with spotty upstream
internet.

~~~
Terretta
> _Quickly send photos I just took to put in email, IMs or on web forums._

All the photos you just took are available via Photostream on all your other
devices, assuming you have WiFi, which presumably you'd need for Dropbox. If
you don't like firing up iPhoto or Aperture to see your photo stream on the
desktop, there are "apps for that".

If you don't want an app, here's how to put a shortcut to your latest photos
right on your dock:

[http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57555169-285/access-
your...](http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57555169-285/access-your-photo-
stream-without-iphoto-on-os-x/)

~~~
kalleboo
My iCloud account is already at data capacity (with a paid addon at that) with
my iPhone and iPad backups. It's also a huge pain waiting for a million photos
to sync when I want _just this one_. I'm also not happy with the privacy
aspects of Photostream if I've taken private photos.

I mean, it works. But it's not elegant nor efficient. The Dropbox method sucks
too. I often _don 't_ have Wifi (or it's hotel/airport wifi where you're
limited to 1 device), and then I wish I was back on my dumbphone...

~~~
Terretta
> _My iCloud account is already at data capacity..._

Photostream doesn't count against iCloud capacity.

 _" Q. Does Photo Stream use my iCloud storage?"_

 _" A. No. Photos uploaded to My Photo Stream or Shared Photo Streams do not
count against your iCloud storage."_

[http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4486](http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4486)

So the shared photo streams are effectively free photo album storage you can
keep private or share with friends.

It also doesn't wait for a million photos to sync. It syncs the most recent
one(s) you just took. It's hard to imagine more elegant or efficient than "it
just happens without you doing anything".

It sounds like you're not very familiar with how Photostream really works.
That's not unusual, a lot of my people I know complain about things that it
turns out Photostream supports because Apple never really pushed or promoted
it.

> _I often don 't have Wifi (or it's hotel/airport wifi where you're limited
> to 1 device), and then I wish I was back on my dumbphone..._

You're in luck; iOS has a switch to turn off 3G data and become a dumb phone.

If you're in the mood for the dumb phone style manual management instead of an
automatic photo stream , there are several really great apps for popping
single photos over or sharing the clipboard. I personally use a clipboard app
that I can "copy" a photo on the iOS device and on my Mac just "paste" it
somewhere. That one works over ad-hoc WiFi so doesn't need a WiFi base. Others
work over bluetooth.

~~~
kalleboo
I stand corrected on the Photo stream data thing. My experience with it is not
that it syncs the recent ones first. My experience is they pop in randomly,
then it stalls for half an hour for no reason. Maybe it's gotten better
recently.

It's still ridiculous that the answer to "I want to send this thing between
these two devices in front of me" is "I have to send every photo I take to a
server owned by a company somewhere".

Clearly Apple agrees, or they wouldn't have created AirDrop in the first
place!

------
kyro
I'm not a fan of iOS 7 design-wise, but my _biggest_ gripe is the battery.
It's bad. Really, really bad. I think it's a combination of an actual decrease
in battery life and iOS 7's terrible monitoring of it.

It's not uncommon for my phone to shut down after it's hit 8% remaining
battery. Or I'll be watching a video with 45% left, and the next second it'll
cut me down to 25%. There have been a few instances where I've gone from ~25%
to _completely empty_ in a flash, leaving me with a dead phone much earlier
than I'd anticipated. So now I really can't leave my place for more than maybe
4/5 hours without my charger.

~~~
r00fus
So you're running pre-release iOS, and expect it to work flawlessly?

I made the same mistake with iOS5beta and it was a nightmare. Power usage was
the least of my issues. WHen iOS5 finally came out, I noticed most of my
issues had disappeared (the rest got resolved by 5.1).

tl;dr: The use of iOS betas for your daily driver are inadvisable.

~~~
nwh
iOS7 is released, not a beta.

~~~
awj
Yes, and 'kyro' made comments talking about a trend that could have only been
experienced during the beta. Having this many data points on battery life in a
few hours would be a pretty neat trick, and a much more damning situation.

~~~
Macha
However, this review has tested it and found a drastic effect on the iPhone
5's battery life running the released version so it's not limited to betas.

------
untog
_Battery life is down across the board compared to iOS 6._

This worries me. If it's because of the background downloading then at least
it has a benefit (and is disable-able), but if it's the extra GPU cycles for
the UI then that's a real shame.

~~~
ceejayoz
Anecdotally, my phone's been ending the day at 30-40% on iOS7 when I usually
ended at 10-20% on iOS6. I'm guessing I had a particular app that Apple's now
handling differently.

~~~
stevenleeg
I've had a similar experience with my iPhone 5 as well. It was significantly
worse during the beginning of the beta builds, however now it seems to be
better than iOS6 (for me).

I'm guessing it's something similar to you – a wonky app draining my battery
that is handled better on 7.

------
nickconfer
I like iOS 7, but I'm a little worried about how app designers will do with
the new look.

When you compare the apps currently out that have been updated, you can see a
lot of companies are struggling with flat design. Something that seems simple,
is actually very complex to pull off, but when done right, can be fantastic.

I think it will be a while before the ecosystem fully recovers and most of the
best apps around have figured out how to execute flat design well.

~~~
malandrew
In case you didn't see it, this thread links to a site that did a side by side
comparison of how a lot of apps moved to the new aesthetics.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6400834](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6400834)

------
jamra
iOS versions have generally had a massively forward adoption rate. I read that
80% of iPhones were on the most modern OS. It looks to me like the lack of
support for the 3GS will create a split in adoption of the OS, which will
trickle down and create an even larger gap in the purchasing of new iOS
devices. I think this split will occur due to the stability of the 3G iPhones.
This is concerning to me due to my company having iOS releases for the
enterprise. This means that our customers are purchasing iOS devices just for
our app. This also means that we have to be backwards compatible with yet
another version of the OS. In code, this is where Macros come in.

I am reminded of the days of Microsoft vs Apple where Microsoft had better
backwards compatibility. I think that the use of these devices in the business
world will echo the days past and the cheaper device, Android, will be the go
to business device.

~~~
pretz
Why is lack of support for the 3GS any different than iOS 6's lack of support
for the 3G? The 3GS came out in _2009_. I'm surprised it supports iOS 6; the
3G can't even run iOS 5.

~~~
kalleboo
The 3GS was still for sale new in box last year

------
hcarvalhoalves
I can see a lot of effort went into interactions and some screens. Then I'm
left with the impression they just winged it on the rest [1].

The redesign of the messages app limited itself to removing the graphics. The
app _still_ shows messages as bubbles, it's just bland now. I can think on a
couple better design solutions for chat threads by looking at other apps and
Adium themes.

The Newsstand is another example of redesign-WTF. It still has bad usability
and small thumbnails, it just replaced the background with some random grey
background.

Noteworthy are also those icons on the home screen. There's no consistency
between them, as pointed by multiple designers already [1][2]. I can't believe
Apple is pushing these as final.

Overall, it looks like a rushed job, not something I would expect from Apple.
I see no compelling reason to update.

[1] [http://tristanedwards.me/what-ios7-should-look-
like](http://tristanedwards.me/what-ios7-should-look-like) [2]
[http://ianstormtaylor.com/whats-wrong-with-the-
ios-7-icons/](http://ianstormtaylor.com/whats-wrong-with-the-ios-7-icons/)

------
EpicEng
I... don't like it. So far anyway. I'm trying to keep an open mind since I
don't have much of a choice anyway.

I don't like that buttons turned into labels. I don't like that my screens now
look more cluttered without clear delineations between UI elements. It looks a
bit like a toy now as well. It also feels a bit more sluggish on my 4s.

I don't know, maybe it will grow on me.

------
diogocal
Looks pretty and useless. I've been using iOS since iPhones came out, I'm
seriously thinking about moving to android. Google has a good deal on Nexus 4.

~~~
Macha
Had. By now the Nexus 4 is sold out in most countries and Google has no plans
to restock as the N5 is coming out in early October.

The N5 is also far more likely to match the N4's launch price than it's final
price.

------
xntrk
iOS7 seems really slow. hitting the home button to wake the screen up takes
way too long.

------
zmmmmm
I really dislike rendering active buttons as pure text. Moving away from
skeumorphism does not mean removing every visual cue that differentiates
active from inactive items. All the more so on mobile devices where "hover"
cues are not accessible. Google is also guilty of this.

------
Knacktus
I like the cleaner UI design and new fontset a lot. However, the background
blur is distracting and counterproductive for the overall clean look. Maybe
they just tried to much to top / set themselves apart from the Metro UI
somehow?

------
joe5150
The new alert banner is enormous! It clearly seems to have been designed with
the iPhone 5+ in mind. At least the new ringtones and chimes are sort of
lovely and not corny like the "Classic" ones.

------
asabjorn
And now we are starting to see Apple fall behind its competitors on central
features, like e.g wi-fi calling. This feature is essential for the phones
primary function, calling, in low-coverage areas. All competing mobile OSs
already support wi-fi calling so this is disappointing.

------
glasz
i click that link, see the image above the article showing an iphone running
ios7 and i immediately have to vomit.

(nb: i love apple. used an iphone for 4 years. use only macs.)

------
YeahKIA
Fascinating how so many screenshots resemble the appearance of Windows Phone.
Any case a welcome change as the old UI looked very toyish and dated.

------
puma1
I find this funny. IOS 7 is the same as IOS 6 except for a few re-arrangements
of features and a new look. I feel like Mugato from Zoolander.. Am I taking
crazy pills? Their all the same! Ios 6, 7.. iphone c.. s.. it's really the
same thing with tiny changes. And everyone is reviewing them like they are new
phones or new OS.

~~~
potatolicious
> _" I find this funny. IOS 7 is the same as IOS 6 except for a few re-
> arrangements of features and a new look."_

As someone who's spent the last 2 months porting code from iOS6 to iOS7, I
disagree. The API changes (documented or otherwise...) are large enough that
this really was more of a port than it was a simple update.

It may look like simple rearrangement (I disagree with that assessment, but
whatever), but under the hood a great deal has changed.

~~~
puma1
If so that's great. But to the user who is looking at this OS, what do they
know about this?

~~~
potatolicious
There are a number of things:

\- You wouldn't expect Apple to change core apps like Phone dramatically. It's
a very mature feature that isn't going anywhere and is practically identical
on every smartphone. You get a numpad, you get your contacts list, your
voicemail, etc. All of which has been given a new coat of paint, but
fundamentally hasn't changed much.

\- You see deeper changes in the built-in apps that aren't quite as
mature/core. There is for example a large change in UX in iOS to move away
from hard, distracting transitions towards more subtle transitions that imply
information hierarchy. For example if you tap on a date in a calendar, instead
of hard-wiping you to another piece of UI altogether to show you appointments,
it dynamically expands the day-view _from_ the date itself. If you tap on an
album in Photos it will dynamically expand that album to fill the screen with
additional photos. All of this goes towards better educating the user on
information hierarchy and is much, much less jarring than before. As a third
party dev that's been working with Apple on iOS7 prep, I know for a fact that
they're pushing this new UX hard - you will see more 3rd party apps go towards
this model in the coming months. You see some uses of this in first-party
apps, but users will notice most when 3rd parties start adopting this.

\- Many of the most substantial changes are under the hood and aren't being
(visibly or ostentatiously) used in the stock apps, mostly because there
really isn't a place for them. They will, however, power a new generation of
apps in the coming months - things like a new backgrounding model will let
apps do more while not in use, and also in some types of apps greatly reduce
the loading/refresh time when you return to them. Or even more subtle things
like dynamics, which will make scrolling feel very different in apps.

In short, users will feel some of these changes immediately, but ultimately
the deep changes in iOS won't be felt until third party dev adoption is there.

