Personally I wouldn't use an Android even if I was lying in a pool of my own blood, but that's just me.
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iOS6 is probably the most underwhelming release of iOS to date
- Thread starter Calidude
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Personally I wouldn't use an Android even if I was lying in a pool of my own blood, but that's just me.
I'm not sure how you arrived at this conclusion. I've poured over the release notes and API differences. I couldn't find any of the significant changes in the SDK that you people are talking about. Like I said before except passkit there is nothing new or major. Maybe I'm missing something here, there is still no Android like intents for apps to work together, no access to notification center, no widgets, no true background, I could go on and on. Any one who has a dev account can go check these two documents, come back and tell me what changes they find so significant in ios 6 sdk. Most of it is regular incremental updates.
https://developer.apple.com/library...General/WhatsNewIniPhoneOS/Articles/iOS6.html
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/#releasenotes/General/iOS60APIDiffs/index.html
Personally I wouldn't use an Android even if I was lying in a pool of my own blood, but that's just me.
What does this even mean?
You don't need to add a new API to make the things much better. Taking the APIs already released and improving them in reliability, performance and sometimes scope means you can better take advantage of them. This has been done both in the API's and in the OS in general it's just more polished.
I get your point that the OS is not filled with new APIs but it does not need to be to count as a major OS update. Remember every major release of OS X is technically a point release & every major release of iOS is an entire version bump.
Anyway I stick to my assertion that this OS update will be a boon to users and will help developers make better apps as it is always easier to push the boundaries and do great stuff when you are working with a more polished and mature OS and API set. As OS6 has been a major effort on the polishing I think that will knock on in many small ways into both the standard apps but also for developers.
Here are a few public things Apple have mentioned publicly that are really useful for developers to make better apps for customers. Here are a few I can recall off the top of my head.
1. Transport apps can hook into the new Maps application, if I worked on transport apps that is huge deal and will allow you to make a much better app.
2. Passbook will be a huge boon for developers who have digital tickets, loyalty cards etc.
3. Siri integration APIs,
4. Facebook APIs,
5. iCloud documentation syncing improvements in APIs,
6. GameCenter is Mac/iOS compatible,
7. Bluetooth MAP support
8. In App Bluetooth pairing
9. Face detection API
10. Web Audio API
11. Inter-app audio
12. Better State preservation
13. Read and write image metadata
14. Multi-route audio
15. Support for way more languages meaning more potential markets.
Most are additions to already present APIs but they all assist the developer to make even more compelling apps. I actually surprised with how long the list I created is without even reading the APIs.
Edwin
When there are incremental/reliability updates, it's usually called a point release. Everything you listed would qualify as minor updates. If you compare the sdk changes in Jellybean to ios6, Jellybean has far more changes to their SDK. They are all incremental, and hence it is 4.1
I agree with you, OSX is always a point release. They also have minor point releases 10.x.x. My beef was with people, who were calling ios 6 huge upgrade. I'm sure Apple would have done things underneath, that would have optimized the OS. From a developer and user point of view, this is not a major upgrade. It's not just me, every one in my team who evaluated the SDK, feels the same, and look at polls in macrumors. I'm surprised so many people feel the same in an Apple fan site. Of course there are some trolls, but there are lot of users who think it's underwhelming upgrade. I hope once apple releases the new phone, there'll be new hardware features (like NFC tied to passkit) that we can take advantage of in apps.
I think broadly we are on similar paths here.
I don't think it is the biggest leap forward (aka huge upgrade) however I think people calling it underwelming in this forum usually don't know what they want added they just want to say it's "underwelming" I wanted "wow".
Apple don't add features for the sake of it, they seem to do the big features OS releases and big polish releases. This OS is more polish than features.
This thread is littered with "Apple did not add feature X that I think is huge", "Apple added feature Y from Android it means the entire OS is playing catch up", "This OS update is missing so much" then not being able to list even one item.
Sure it's not as big a leap as some but I think the impact will be bigger than the nay sayers expect. Lots of small little things often add up to be greater than the sum of their parts. I think iOS6 will be like that, on the surface perhaps underwelming but when you start using it is more solid and impressive than you first thought.
It's not that I am a massive "Apple is always right" kinda person, I just find the banging on with sayings like the "most underwelming to date" etc etc are complete hyperbole and far from the objective truth. A lot of people are just disappointed that they did not get a new iPhone with some shiny new UI.
It reminds me of the "3GS disappointment" or the "iPhone 4 disappointment" or the "4S disappointment" or the "iPad disappointment" all of them got bagged on launch then went on to sell millions.
The iOS6 beta is buggy comments (which takes up lots of this thread) are another source, it seems no matter what Apple do people will rag on them, it's as if every new OS needs to be bug free and come with a pink pony every time. This can also be aimed at any tech company when the trolls and fans boys come out.
I just think people need to zoom out and get some perspective. Nobody can change the entire industry outlook every 12 months and we should stop expecting it!
Edwin
Edwin
Google Now is a data mining service. I don't want Apple collecting data about me under the guise of "helping me out". Apple does widgets on OS X ...they don't do them on iOS. Toggles are silly. Serious multitasking (what does this mean???)
iOS 6 has a lot of customization features but they are centered on developers customizing "within" their respective apps.
Vanilla you really just don't know what's in iOS 6 and are somewhat blowing in the wind here.
what do you mean by "toggles are silly"?
Toggles are useful shortcuts that apple should add to the notification bar.
People often forget that Apple doesn't just make iOS.
They have OS X to deliver as well as development tools. I'm hearing good things about Xcode 4.4 being more stable.
The work Chris Lattner has done with LLVM has been nothing short of amazing. We've gone from going from GCC compilation & debugging with poor analysis to LLVM.
iCloud has not unified much more of the two OS and in the case of eddeduck who makes games having Game Kit/GL Kit across both OS means that it should be easier ...much easier to deploy games across both platforms.
Now regarding 5.2 or whatever. I've done support before. Consumer rarely know and care about what OS they have. I've had so many friend tell me they have Lion and they can't get their phones to sync over to have them check and find out they have Snow Leopard.
Regardless of whether you think the changes are small ..the fact is there are a lot of them and that will have an impact on the feature-set of a given app after developers start writing.
iOS 5 won't do Auto Layout, iCloud is limited, Bluetooth features won't be there.
Could Apple call it iOS 5? Sure but that confusion would remain. I mean how confused are some of you about the differences between Firefox 12 and Firefox 13? See my point?
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Most people want to Toggle Bluetooth or Wifi off. The primary reason for doing so it because they think they will save battery life. This behavior largely comes from Android users who are used to micro managing their phones to eek out more battery life.
Apple will simply refuse to enable technology like LTE until it is ready to put in a device that can still last 7 hours or more without resorting to adding a huge battery.
Toggles will not come to iOS because they make no sense. Location Services are very important to Apple. What this means is this.
There are 3 ways to derive location. Each with a "cost" involved and this cost is power.
If Apple were to put Toggle in for turning off Cellular, Bluetooth, Wifi it would severely limit the efficacy of location service. It could also provide a situation where consumers are told that turning off Wifi, Bluetooth and maybe even celluar would save battery life only to force the phone to use the most power expensive component (GPS) for location.
It's not going to happen. Companies like Broadcom and Qualcomm and shrinking the process geometry and saving a lot of power consumption in their newest SoC. Power saving modes are also constantly being improved.
As always it's best to let the computing device manage these features especially with regard to power management.
They have OS X to deliver as well as development tools. I'm hearing good things about Xcode 4.4 being more stable.
The work Chris Lattner has done with LLVM has been nothing short of amazing. We've gone from going from GCC compilation & debugging with poor analysis to LLVM.
iCloud has not unified much more of the two OS and in the case of eddeduck who makes games having Game Kit/GL Kit across both OS means that it should be easier ...much easier to deploy games across both platforms.
Now regarding 5.2 or whatever. I've done support before. Consumer rarely know and care about what OS they have. I've had so many friend tell me they have Lion and they can't get their phones to sync over to have them check and find out they have Snow Leopard.
Regardless of whether you think the changes are small ..the fact is there are a lot of them and that will have an impact on the feature-set of a given app after developers start writing.
iOS 5 won't do Auto Layout, iCloud is limited, Bluetooth features won't be there.
Could Apple call it iOS 5? Sure but that confusion would remain. I mean how confused are some of you about the differences between Firefox 12 and Firefox 13? See my point?
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Most people want to Toggle Bluetooth or Wifi off. The primary reason for doing so it because they think they will save battery life. This behavior largely comes from Android users who are used to micro managing their phones to eek out more battery life.
Apple will simply refuse to enable technology like LTE until it is ready to put in a device that can still last 7 hours or more without resorting to adding a huge battery.
Toggles will not come to iOS because they make no sense. Location Services are very important to Apple. What this means is this.
There are 3 ways to derive location. Each with a "cost" involved and this cost is power.
- Cellular positioning is the cheapest in power but least accurate.
- Wifi is the next cheapest technology for deriving location. It is more accurate than cellular but it's power usage is a bit more as well.
- GPS (GNSS, GLONASS)- is by far the most accurate method for deriving location but it's the most expensive in power costs. Run GPS on your phone and it warms up nicely.
If Apple were to put Toggle in for turning off Cellular, Bluetooth, Wifi it would severely limit the efficacy of location service. It could also provide a situation where consumers are told that turning off Wifi, Bluetooth and maybe even celluar would save battery life only to force the phone to use the most power expensive component (GPS) for location.
It's not going to happen. Companies like Broadcom and Qualcomm and shrinking the process geometry and saving a lot of power consumption in their newest SoC. Power saving modes are also constantly being improved.
As always it's best to let the computing device manage these features especially with regard to power management.
I'll back up my opinions. iOS vs Android. iOS is cluttered. You swipe left or you swipe right to access all your apps. There is NO app drawer to keep some apps hidden from your home screen. NO Widgets and NO toggles for fast on and off access. Android has ALL those things. You can customize Android how ever YOU want. It's an open platform that's made to fit your liking. As far as Multitasking. Ill give you a good example that really bugs me about iOS is not having the ability to download an app or multiple apps while let's say watching a youtube video at the same time. The downloading pauses it's self. With Android you can download lets say 5 apps at the same time while watching YouTube videos with no problem. I just wish Apple will copy Android in some areas. You won't ever hear me complain about that.
For the love of god people. Please know that I like iOS and Android. I use them both. Yes I believe Android has better options but I still prefer my iPhone over my Nexus. I'm patiently waiting for Apple to change the game again like they did in 2007. I don't know what it is about iOS that I love but that's just me.
Apple seems to be doing what they always, do have a large release of either hardware or software and then refine for one or two "new" releases and then provide a larger refresh later. They are a company of patterns. Lion to mountain lion. iPhone 4 to 4s. They provide something big then refine it and then go big again.
+1. Nice and reasonable, wish there were more comments like that around here. Too much fanboy drama from both sides. I agree totally on the phones. It's the reason I still have an iPhone. I haven't seen an Android phone that I liked as much as an iPhone (well, that and the whole fragmentation thing), but I do like some of the options they have better than what iOS has... I just wish you didn't have to blindly follow one or the other. Isn't there a place for people that just like it all?
There are some great new APIs in iOS6 (this is all open anyway to anybody with a free dev account - see the WWDC 2012 videos)
- UICollectionView
- AutoLayout
- UIActivityViewController - share data between apps much more easily (and, dare I say it, Android-like from a user perspective)
- You can subclass UINavigationBar now
- Styled text with attributed strings
- Expanded UIAppearance protocol (now includes UIBarButtonItem, UISwitch, etc)
- Pull-to-refresh directly in the SDK
- Easier-to-manage user interface rotations
- You can now access EXIF and IPTC metadata for pictures
- System-wide reminders to integrate with (EventKit)
- Peripheral-mode for Bluetooth for inter-iOS device communication
...which is quite a decent list. It gives a lot of things developers have been asking for, and should really make developing apps that much easier.
As far as user features go, yeah it was quite disappointing. iOS has a far, far superior platform to Android, and subsequently much better apps. Android has a better OS outside of the apps and APIs (the non-app, but still user-facing stuff).
It's very apparent on the iPad - where Apple's notification system barely makes sense. They already take a strip of the screen for the status bar - why not show some useful status information there from notifications?
The only other thing obviously missing in iOS is a way out of the data sandbox. Seriously - this whole "app manages the data" thing is fine, but occasionally you want to work with the same data from multiple apps with changes made in one app being taken up by the others. iOS right now has absolutely no answer to that situation. Just make copies of everything in every app, and figure out somehow which is the right one.
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iOS multitasking APIs allow what you're talking about (background downloads), but the background process is time-limited and may be killed by the system before the download is actually done. In fact, any background process may be killed and brought back by the system whenever it likes, depending on system resources rather than whether the background process has finished or not.
If that's your expectation of UIActivityViewController, you'll be seriously disappointed. It's very limited in functionality. There is no way for apps to declare system wide custom services (like they do for routing apps), you have to send the same content to all services (eg. you have to send 140 char to both email and message!). There are workarounds to make it work a little better, but no way compared to "intents" in android. It's a small step in the right direction. It's not android like, even from user perspective.
In viewing the video I didn't see anything that explicitly delivered anything like Contracts or Actions. I'm thinking that this functionality is still being worked on and may require an HFS+ replacement on OS X first. There is some hope. Inter-app Audio was listed on the slide but it was not mentioned at all and doesn't appear to exist as a feature in the current iOS 6 b2. I'm curious about how Apple plans to send and route audio through to different apps and if that method can be used for more data types.
At this point I don't think it's a big deal but I think it could easily be a headlining feature of iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 (complete with HFS+ successor)
What do you mean? I can remove EVERY single app from my iPhone home page by moving them all to another screen. It doesn't get less cluttered than that.
And what's the difference between a drawer or the next screen sideways on iOS? These things, like folders are just metaphors for grouping, showing and hiding apps. Beyond what iOS already does, they're all variations on a theme not extra features. This is how iOS does it, if you prefer the way Android does it, get an Android phone, don't try and turn iOS into Android.
What does this even mean?
I'm assuming he means if he was in a pool of his own blood; dying, and there was an Android phone on the floor nearby, he wouldn't use it to call for an Ambulance.
How would a HFS+ replacement in OS X change this? I'm just curious. Also do you think files system in ios, is the reason for these limitations?
I think they are just starting to pay attention to inter-app stuff. We'll see more of it in future releases.
Sorry, but Apple's version of Maps looked WAY better than any other implementation I've seen in terms of speed, simplicity, and effectiveness. Can't compare other peoples crappy maps to Apples. My friend's Droid Maps was constantly leading him on unnecessary 20+ mile detours on simple destinations. Even from just the brief demo, I can't see Apple's implementation doing that. I thought the new Phone enhancements were awesome too.
In the end, yes, sometimes Apple is slow to add features to the iOS, however, the way that they implement those features and how effective those features are sets Apple apart from the competition, so it's not a fair test to just compare feature for feature between companies, especially when those features don't work as well on other companies.
Case in point, I'm still SHOCKED that my dad's brand new, super fast samsung smartphone (which has faster internals than my i4) cannot scroll smoothly like any iOS device can (regardless of which device, I've used them all). If Android can't even scroll/swipe homescreen pages smoothly, that's only the beginning of what I consider a shotty OS.
Android has always been known to lag and no one can argue about that. Shoot, my Galaxy Nexus would lag from time to time and it would bug the crap out of me. Thats part of why I used my 4s over my Nexus. But with new Jelly Bean 4.1 and googles new "Project Butter" Android finally fixed whats been its #1 problem and the whole "Lag" argument is finally going to be over.
Aaron From Phone Dog Project Butter Review
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=afNRAOg5jUk
John from Techno Buffalo Siri vs Googles voice assistance Review
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kDsOtdRtG0Q
Even iOS betas lag less than Android os. Regardless of how pretty I can make the screen look, it lags...just thought I'd add that.
I may be off here but could Extended Attributes be a precursor to better metadata handling in a future filesystem? Even if its not I think having some corruption, de-dupe and versioning/snapshot features in the OS would be nice.
As long as they don't patch the crap out of my ability to jailbreak, they can update at their own pace for all I care.
There's more going on behind the scenes
First of all, all these so called "cloud updates" are not purely in the cloud, as there needs to be UI and code on the client end to recieve this new type of data (i.e. sports scores).
As a developer, I see iOS6 as having many improvements, that both make the end user experience better as well as the developer experience (making us develop better apps for you).
Facebook integration isn't just a button they slapped on, it's something they've added systemwide. Admittedly, yes, they should've added this a few releases ago.
Maps is a very large feature, because all of that data is now from Apple, not Google. And personally 3D cities looks pretty cool to me.
Also Passbook is no small feature, because that is the base that will eventually hold more important things, like your credit card. And with new hardware coming out this fall, I can imagine NFC showing up.
No iOS6 isn't a huge update, but what is there left to be desired? iOS5 included better notifications (which everyone wanted). iOS4 included multitasking and homescreen wallpaper (which everyone wanted). And I won't even begin on the numerous feature wanted before iOS3 was released.
Realize iOS6, while not the biggest update, added much to the user and the developer, and is still an appreciated update.
First of all, all these so called "cloud updates" are not purely in the cloud, as there needs to be UI and code on the client end to recieve this new type of data (i.e. sports scores).
As a developer, I see iOS6 as having many improvements, that both make the end user experience better as well as the developer experience (making us develop better apps for you).
Facebook integration isn't just a button they slapped on, it's something they've added systemwide. Admittedly, yes, they should've added this a few releases ago.
Maps is a very large feature, because all of that data is now from Apple, not Google. And personally 3D cities looks pretty cool to me.
Also Passbook is no small feature, because that is the base that will eventually hold more important things, like your credit card. And with new hardware coming out this fall, I can imagine NFC showing up.
No iOS6 isn't a huge update, but what is there left to be desired? iOS5 included better notifications (which everyone wanted). iOS4 included multitasking and homescreen wallpaper (which everyone wanted). And I won't even begin on the numerous feature wanted before iOS3 was released.
Realize iOS6, while not the biggest update, added much to the user and the developer, and is still an appreciated update.
Agreed. I personally can't wait to get my hands on the new iPhone running iOS 6! I just wish Apple went ALL out with the new update.... Shoot, instead of throwing Google in court, Apple should copy Android and polish it up with iOS