What you are talking about is a nice theory, but not something that works practically with endless combinations of what sort of data and whatnot people can have on their devices. It's pretty much as opposite as it gets from being basic--only the idea of it is basic.I disagree 100% with this statement. If restoring from a backup causes issues, that means that iOS has bugs causing it to improperly handle data/settings from older versions. If old settings or data are incompatible, then iOS needs to recognize this and update/reset them as appropriate. And even if data is corrupted, iOS should recognize that and handle it appropriately.
This is really basic stuff - Error Handling 101. Always check for bad input data and handle it gracefully. The fact that Upgrade installs or restores from backup sometimes cause issues means that Apple has done a poor job of this. I would not want to use a product from any "developer" who does not understand this (I'm guessing that many/most at Apple understand it, but they are under enormous time pressure to get something out the door; it also may be that they just don't care, handling cases covering 80-90% of users and screwing the rest).
FWIW, I did a clean install of 8.0 GM, restored my backup (7.0.4), and then did a Reset All Settings. No major issues here (a few minor), and certainly nothing that could be blamed on old data. I kind of expected to go back to iOS 7 after verifying that my app works in 8 (yes, I'm a developer), but so far I've seen no reason to do so.
Even so, I would love to do a true clean install (setup as new), except for one database that I don't want to lose: text messages / iMessages. Every other piece of application data on my phone exists somewhere else and can be easily restored separately (mail, photos, account stuff, etc). But the text message database can only be restored from a full iOS backup, and Apple doesn't let you restore individual pieces of the backup. Very annoying.
Those of you suggesting that upgraders should only setup as new are basically telling people to lose that data (and possibly other data), which is ridiculous.
Umm.....no, they aren't contradictory...my statement is completely correct. With brightness, it is supremely obvious that I was talking about settings. After all, I said "brightness setting".The wrong app can most assuredly cause battery life issues. For example, poorly written podcasts apps have caused enormous battery life issues due to inefficient background update code, background downloading, etc. and there are thousands of other apps with similar problems, ie. pinging servers with fetch requests far too often in the background. The fact that you cannot recognize this is your problem.The highlighted sentences are contradictory. You should not be a developer if you cannot distinguish between OS and an APP.
While I agree with at least some of what you are saying about various issues people run into here and there, Apple almost never makes changes between GM and final release (the very meaning of GM is directly related to final release, there's nothing beta about it).
Background updates, brightness settings, pinging servers is the VERY definition of OS problems.
Ohh boy!! I will not argue with you any more.
The functionality is already there as GM refers detected to the version they are loading onto the new phones. They generally do not make any changes at all, and have only done that on one occasion where they actually issued a new GM with whatever they had to change.
So aside from one or two rare occurances like the GameCenter one, when else has the GM been different than the final version? When were additional wallpapers added between GM and final? Just curious at this point.
With goldmasters, Apple still does work on the iOS and they do make changes from GM To public release. You are partly correct though, they will not make changes that effect apps, so that apps developed under the GM have no issues in public release. That is the point of the GM after all. But they usually remove debugging code, with iOS 7 they added new wallpapers in the public release, and in iOS 4 they removed GC from the 3GS. The changes they do make are usually low impact bug fixes that will not effect third party apps in any way. But they do make changes, that is for sure.