I'd say 1 out of 15 times I plug the adapter in and press play, I get no sound, like the DAC didn't turn on. Takes me a second to realize it's not working or that my podcast isn't buffering, and is indeed playing. Then I unplug/plug back in and I missed a few lines in the podcast.
The adapter needs to be as reliable as analog at the least.
Been 3 or 4 times I had to actively stop listening to something to charge my phone for 30 minutes or so. It's not that I was listening for 10 hours straight and should "give my ears a rest" as many proponents of losing the jack suggest. It's just that my phone was almost dead when I went to listen and I didn't realize. Happens to me on days I take a lot of phone calls. Calls just kill my battery, especially on the iphone7 which seems to have the weakest cell antenna of any iPhone I've ever owned (3G, 3GS, 4, 5, 5S, 6, 7). I drop 1 out of 4 calls. I lose service on roads I've travelled for years. I lose service in my local grocery store, Target, and Wal-Mart. Go into a big building and no service. Same on my wife's iphone7. As a food photographer, I spend a lot of time in these stores shopping for ingredients, then a lot of time in headphones as I cook/photograph. Not like I live in the middle of nowhere, I can see Walt Disney World's fireworks from my porch. I'd think it was network congestion if it got better at any time in the night. Same on my wife's 7.
To be honest, looking back, I kind of feel like an idiot having upgraded from the 6 to the 7. Only meaningful change was the extra speaker. But my signal sucks and I have no headphone jack.
Frustrations with the jack are definitely short and infrequent, but they're more often than the no frustrations when there was a jack. The change could've been handled better by Apple. Not enough reason to have done it on this specific form factor, seeing as the phone is the same size as it was. They could've used a visually obvious reason to lose the jack (phone is too thin) or major leaps from the use of the Lightning jack...A bigger adapter with a high quality / high resolution DAC inside that obviously couldn't fit in the phone. Even the better DAC option was available on older iPhones, as the headphone jack was never limiting the use of Lightning or especially Bluetooth... I just expected Apple to spin the loss of the jack with a greater focus on audio quality overall. Instead, they only focused on the ease of use of Bluetooth with the AirPods... a product that works the same on older iPhones. They missed a real opportunity to convince people that the Lightning port was the only way to get high resolution audio... even though that's not true at all (3.5mm can push super high res audio just fine), I would've embraced a push into better sound quality and at least got SOMEthing out of the loss of the jack. I was convinced it would happen and with a rollout of a toggle to switch to lossless in Apple Music.