As a developer, I’ve been using iPhone’s since they first came out. I have to test my apps on every version!
iOS 6 is the first version of iOS “post Steve Jobs”. But it’s terrible – it seems to be a 2nd-rate product rushed out by a small team of startup programmers, working from their garage.
As a developer … I’m dismayed. Consumers are famously slow to change (en masse) – but they are neither stupid nor indifferent. Their tolerance is high, but not infinite. The iOS 6 experience is going to force a lot of people away from iPhones. Looks like we’ll be doing a lot more Android development in 2013 than I was expecting …
1. It will DELETE your photos
Yes, really. You can recover them (from what I’ve seen so far: all of them) if you use backup recovery tools. But seriously: WTF?
Many google hits for this, plenty on Apple’s own support forums, with no response from Apple.
Or … it will randomly delete half your photos (happened to a phone I saw).
Or … it will REDUCE the quality of all your photos until they become tiny pixellated blobs.
AND … photos taken after you upgrade iOS 6? Forget it – they’ll be inaccessible too.
Deleting people’s photos is – commercially – unforgivable. I was amazed the first time I saw this happen.
2. It crashes. A LOT.
Until iOS 6, Apple’s OS was getting better and better with each release. I don’t *try* to crash phones, but it happens accidentally when you use the phone a lot. But iOS 6 is a total disaster.
- iOS 2: took me 3 days to crash it
- iOS 3: took me 3 weeks to crash it
- iOS 4: took me 3 months to crash it
- iOS 5: …never managed to crash it…
- iOS 6: took me 3 seconds to crash it
To be clear: this is through normal usage, nothing special, nothing “developer-y”.
The iOS 6 crash was 100% reproducible, triggered by simply moving an icon on Springboard to a differnt screen, and then hitting the home button. Wow.
3. It removes GPS and Maps from your phone
Apple’s “Maps” app simply Does. Not. Work.
iOS 6 REMOVES Google Maps, and there is NO WAY to get it back.
So, now … unless you buy an additional “mapping app” (and there are none that are as good as Google Maps, unless you spend a huge amount of money), then … that GPS chip in your phone, that’s part of the cost of the phone? For most people it’s now a hunk of useless metal.
In the last 10 years, very little in mobile phones has changed the way people live their lives quite so much as the instant availability of detailed, accurate, maps with GPS no matter where you are on the planet.
4. You cannot return to iOS 5
iOS 5 worked. It was stable. It had a GPS! and Maps!
…but Apple forbids you from running it if you ever install iOS 6.
As a developer, this has been a recurring nightmare: we had to make sure no-one ever upgraded a phone – even by accident. (as a developer: you test your app on every old version of iOS that you can. Not just on a simulator, but on each physical phone)
Now consumers get to find out quite how (unnecessarily and unfairly) painful that process is…