Haven't bothered going through all the pages to see what has been posted about already, but here are a few new things I've found in beta 2:
1. Much smoother/snappier than beta 1. For example, accessing control center isn't slow or choppy. Spotlight search is much quicker than it was as well.
2. Animations in general are snappier, even when compared side by side to iOS 9 on an identical device. Can be particularly noticed when using the app switcher to activate an app that is tucked away in a folder and pressing the home button when that folder isn't currently open. At first I thought the animation was slower, but when compared side by side to iOS 9, its actually noticeably quicker.
3. Siri now uses its context awareness in messages to auto activate relevant screen effects. For example: I sent a "congratulations" text to someone and it automatically used the confetti screen effect. Got me curious, so I sent a "happy birthday" text and it automatically used the balloons screen effect. Was this in beta 1? Thought it was pretty neat. I thought "happy 4th of july" might have auto activated the fireworks screen effect, but no dice.
4. Battery life, early on, does NOT seem to be improved much, if it at all, over beta 1 (iphone 6). Will need some more time to know for sure.
5. Much more stable now and a bunch of bugs have been squashed. For now, I have not experienced any crashes or freezes. One huge annoyance for me using beta 1 was the phone freezing when using the app switcher. That seems to have been resolved.
6. BIG ONE for me: Spotlight finally seems to search beyond just the loaded/most recent messages in any given conversation. Doesn't seem to be perfect yet and results only give back a single instance the word/phrase was used in a conversation, but this already a huge improvement over the way spotlight search used to work for me.
Just to address one thing that annoys me about online forums: Voices of complaints are always louder than voices of satisfaction/indifference. One thing many of you don't seem to realize is that aesthetic appeal is often subjective, so just because YOU find the visual changes ugly (Music app as an example) doesn't mean everyone is on board with your sentiment. To prove this point, I find the music app's design hands down much nicer than it was before. It kind of reminds me of the Zune/Windows phone UI design, which is beautiful imo. With that said, on the browse tab, they can certainly scale down the size of graphics/text just a tad to allow all 4 options "new music", "curated playlists", "top charts", and "genres" to fit on the screen without needing to scroll. Otherwise, the larger font sizes, the use of bold, and the colors look great in my opinion.
Ahhh I kid, hopefully some nice bugs squashed in this update!
