ios7: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I’ve been using io7 since it was released last week, and it definitely has a lot of potential. However, it may not be ready for prime time just yet. For those of you who have held off on updating, my advice is: continue to wait. Many common bugs and annoyances should be fixed in future releases. If you are eager to get your hands on ios7, keep in mind you may encounter some issues.

Io7 is attractive, streamlined, and clean. Apple got rid of the cheesy use of skeuomorphism (making things look like their real world counterparts, eg Notes resembling a paper legal pad). The result is impressive, and if anything the new look resembles some versions of Android, Apple’s primary rival (no coincidence, I’m sure).

There are a few new tricks, for example swiping up from the bottom of the screen brings up an easy to use dashboard with common tasks such as turning on/off wifi, Bluetooth, adjusting volume, etc. The dashboard also provides quick access to the calculator, camera, and a built-in flashlight app (finally!).

In ios7, swiping down from the top of the icon menu will bring up searchlight, and swiping down from the top of the screen brings up a quick view of your calendar and app notifications. There is some skill involved, as you have to start swiping from the correct part of the screen or you may inadvertently open the wrong menu.

The Good:

The look of ios7 is clean and uncluttered, but some apps look out of place if they haven’t been updated. Speaking of which, some ios6 apps just don’t (yet) work that well on ios7. I found adjusting to ios7 to be very intuitive, so I don’t anticipate you will have much of a learning curve. If you are an expert iphone user, you will have no problem learning ios7.

One of my pet peeves of ios6 was an issue where callers had trouble hearing me when I was connected to wifi. Thankfully, this seems to be fixed in ios7. (yay!)

The Bad:

Some apps aren’t yet updated for io7. At  worst, it means they may not function as intended, at best they may just not “look” right with the new color scheme.

Every app (and I mean every single one) gives me an error that I must “connect to iTunes to use Push Notifications”. I tried this, and it didn’t work. That means in the meantime, app alerts/push notifications just don’t work for me.

Also, ios7 is such a major update, be prepared to enter passwords for ALL of your email accounts, social networking sites and apps, nearly as many steps as setting up the phone for the first time. Because of this and the download/install time, you should set aside at least a couple of hours to upgrade.

Siri has been unreliable since upgrading, possibly because of server loads (I am guessing here). Hopefully she will become more reliable and responsive as loads balance out.

The Ugly:

Imessage is completely broken and useless. I mean totally. This is because the activation servers are so bogged down that I haven’t been able to activate imessage since upgrading. This is bad. Text messages sent from my phone will get replies only on my macbook, and vice versa. It is completely unacceptable and unusable. A call to Applecare was not helpful as they reiterated the obvious e.g. “our servers are overloaded, keep trying back”. If you use imessage regularly, you may want to wait on upgrading. I’ve disabled imessage on the phone and macbook for the time being, but I still have a sneaking suspicion that my messages are disappearing into the ether.

I am using ios7 on an iphone 5 without a fingerprint scanner. However there have been reports that the iphone 5s fingerprint scanned can be easily bypassed, among other security concerns. If you store highly confidential/sensitive information on your iphone, you may want to wait on upgrading.

For those of you who have taken the leap, what do you think? Share your feedback in the comments below.