Something that still really bugs me in iOS 7 that I think will tick off a lot of users is the Weather in Notification Center. It's a huge downgrade from the previous version. You have to read a sentence of text to get the weather instead of glancingand beyond that, it often doesn't even show you the current temperature. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't. It's up the the phone to randomly decide! I hope that is fixed for Gold Master. I'd also like to know how someone could go about creating animated wallpapers. There are only two included in the OS. Hopefully they at least add more options.
I'm still not much of a fan of the thinner icons used in apps like Safari. At first glance they all look the same on the bottomessentially three boxes with slight variation. Even after months on iOS 7 I still sometimes get confused and tap the wrong thing if I'm going too fast. I also find myself not using tabs too often as it just keeps making new tabs. It eventually gets to 25 and then keeps reloading into the same tab. It's usually around then that I just close all my tabs by swiping one at a time.
Apps updating in the background is welcome, but I wish the App Store actually notified me rather than just showing up as an alert in notification center with no banner, no lock screen, no sound. It can be jarring when you're going into a folder to tap an icon and it's goneor rather the icon has changed unexpectedly. I fear older people might have trouble with this.
Even though it has improved during the beta process, I still think the unified URL/search bar is more difficult to use because of the cramped keyboard. I often hit the period while typing a search query because I have dictation and the international keyboard (globe key) turned on for Emoji. I'm thinking about ditching Emoji to make the keyboard less cramped. I miss the simplicity of having a separate keyboard for search and URL. The URL keyboard had a .com button, as well as period and slash.
Control center needs customization options. I hardly ever use airplane modebut I often use personal hotspot. Not sure why I can't swap out those toggles instead.
Overall iOS 7 is a very nice improvement. It just needs a little additional work. I had to use my wife's iPhone on iOS 6 the other day and it looked extremely dated. It almost seemed like an older iPhone to me, even though it's the same iPhone 5. The gloss is extremely distracting, and the icons look dull and boring. Trust me when I say you get used to the look and feel. I kept trying to swipe back in Safari, and tried to use control center to quickly flick on the flashlight and later to connect to airplay. It's crazy how much I've acclimated to the new features and would have a hard time living without them. The only icons that really bug me are the more solid colored white ones, like Reminders, Notes, Voice Memos, Calendar. They all look fairly similar. I wish Calendar had kept the red across the top and the font still seems thin to me. Camera and Facetime seem uninspired. Funny enough, I've kind of grown to like the Safari icon. It's a frequently used app and it pops more now. I just wish the icons were a little more consistent as a group.
But anyway, you won't miss the silly visual metaphors after using iOS 7 for a month or two. It really opened up my eyes to why some Android users would make fun of us: the OS really looked 2007, which was ahead of it's time back then, but still. It's something that you can't be told if you use it all the time. Pull out one of your old devices in a few months and you'll get what I mean. Another thing iOS 6 UI has over iOS 7, even still this late in the beta, is that it's still a bit snappier with the animations. Even on my 4th gen development iPod Touch at work running iOS 6, certain things about the OS seem snappier than my iPhone 5 on iOS 7. I think they need to speed up the keyframing for certain animations. The iPhone 5 feels smooth, but it just seems to take longer to click through folders and such or open up an app and wait a split longer for it to zoom into the screen. I think this can be easily fixed.
iOS 7 is a bit different beast than iOS 6 and I think Apple is smart to train up extra employees. Saying that it's mostly similar isn't exactly truthful, because many icons, colors, buttons, etc have changed. And those are things that people like my parents and grandparents latch onto and remember. I worry I'll be fielding quite a few calls come mid-September from the family.
