The Verge

Software

There’s much to be said about the latest version of iOS present in the new iPhone (and present in the old iPhone, and the iPad) — and we’ve actually got a full review of the software itself. Still, I have some personal thoughts on the older pieces of the stack, as well as new additions Apple has added to the mix.

The new iOS is everything you would expect. Clean, simple, fast, and easy to understand. It is the very best that iOS has ever been.

But it’s crucial to point out that the gulf between iOS 5 and iOS 6 is extremely narrow for most users. True to form, Apple is making nips and tucks, tweaks, stylistic edits — not reinventing what the OS does or how it does it. There are some wonderful new flourishes in the operation system — the kinds of things Apple is known for, such as reflections on your music controls that change when you tilt the phone, or the mutating pull-to-refresh animation now present in the Mail app. The company has added some really great little touches, like reply with text when you refuse a call (present in other phone OSes, but nice to see here), and Do Not Disturb, which lets you set a time window when only the most important people can get through to you. Ah, silence.

Overall, though, this is still the same iOS you know, and all the steps you took to get things done in the last OS, or in iOS 4, or iOS 3 even — well those are pretty much the same too.

And some of those steps are maddening, or poorly thought out. In particular, Apple’s implementation of “unobtrusive” notifications while you’re using the phone stands out as one the weaker components of the system. Originally I saw Notification Center as a welcome relief from Apple’s pop-up messages and alerts, but the way the company handles these beacons can now be nearly as annoying as the previous version. As I mentioned, instead of utilizing that new, taller screen to give you notifications removed from areas of the phone you regularly need to access (you know, like menus in apps), the notifications continue to pop down over the upper portion of the screen. The result is that you feel trapped, waiting for the message to disappear before you can access buttons you need to get to, or forced to swipe to the left on the message — a hidden function which scurries the dropdown away.

Elsewhere, Apple is still making users jump through hoops to perform simple tasks, like switching to a private browsing window or clearing the cache in Safari. It takes no less than six button presses and home key taps to make that happen while browsing. Settings in general are a mess — wonderful when you first set up the phone (“hey! everything is in one place!”) but frustrating later when you have dozens of apps (“hey… everything is in one place”). Multitasking remains a black box, not representing app states and forcing what should be “always on” applications like IM clients into a constant state of shutdown warnings. Twitter won’t update in the background (nor will clients like Tweetbot), meaning that you’re always playing catchup with “realtime” services. (Mind you, on Android the Twitter app will load updates in the background, meaning that even if you’re disconnected you’ll likely have new content to view.) It sounds minor, but when taken as a whole and spread across multiple applications, it makes the OS feel claustrophobic, mysterious, and downright unhelpful at times.

There are also missed opportunities. Apple has opened social sharing options up to Twitter and Facebook, which is wonderful, but everyone else is out in the cold. Want to save a file to a Dropbox folder? Read an article later using Pocket? Post a picture to Tumblr right from the browser? Sorry, that’s not possible. There may be some hacky bookmarklet to accomplish the task, but I can’t imagine anyone believes that a kludgy line of JavaScript is the most elegant way to accomplish those tasks. And by the way, these are things I do every day on my phone, and things that I know lots of other people do. They may be fringe to Apple’s target user, but they are a real part of the market at large. They are the part of the market pushing what smartphones are capable of and what they mean to users.

Apple also leaves developers empty-handed on widgets. It provides the minimally useful weather and stock widgets for the notification drawer, but isn’t opening up that space to anyone else. And I must mention this — the fact that the weather icon continues to read 73 degrees and sunny when it is clearly possible to have icons update with at least some information (see the calendar icon) is now laughable at best, and sad at worst.

And what about actionable notifications? Notifications in Jelly Bean can be acted on without having to jump into an app, which is a fantastic addition to Android. I use them all the time. I would have loved to see Apple innovate in this area — especially considering the fact that iOS multitasking still doesn’t represent an “always on” experience.

Don’t get me wrong, iOS is a beautiful and well-structured mobile operating system — but it’s begun to show its age. It feels less useful to me today than it did a couple of years ago, especially in the face of increasingly sophisticated competition. I always have this sense now in iOS of not knowing where I am, what my status is — constantly having to load things and reload them. It feels tiring.

Maybe you’ll call me an Android fanboy for saying this, or maybe it’s because much of my business utilizes Google apps and its communication tools, but it didn’t take me very long with the iPhone 5 to start thinking about getting back to the Galaxy Nexus and Jelly Bean (Android 4.1). For what I do, I think it’s a more effective, more elegant, and more powerful OS right now. What it may lack in polish and consistency, it makes up for in power and flexibility.