The Apple iOS 9 Review
by Brandon Chester on September 16, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- Tablets
- iOS 9
2015 has been a pretty big year for Apple as a company. Product launches this year included the Apple Watch, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, the iPad Mini 4, the iPad Pro, and the new Apple TV. This month is a big month for their software launches, with today marking the release of iOS 9 as well as watchOS 2, and OS X El Capitan launching at the very end of the month. In time I hope to do some sort of review of the new features in watchOS 2, but today's article focuses strictly on iOS 9 and everything new that Apple is bringing to their biggest operating system for both users and developers.
What's interesting about iOS 9 is how Apple has involved their community of users in the development process by creating a public beta program. OS X Yosemite famously was the first version of OS X to have a public beta (with the exception of the OS X 10.1 Kodiak beta 15 years ago), but Apple had never done anything like it for their mobile devices until now. However, many users found ways to install the developer betas of iOS on their devices by bypassing the activation or having a service register their UDID for beta installation. With more and more features being added to iOS, and more and more users adopting devices that run it, it appears that Apple felt that expanding their beta user base beyond developers would be a good way to collect information on bugs and stability, as well as general feedback about what does and doesn't work well.
Opening up iOS 9 with a public beta also plays into the focus of the new release. iOS 7 was an enormous release that redesigned the entire operating system, and iOS 8 added features like continuity and extensibility to improve how apps communicated on iOS, and how iOS devices and Macs communicate with each other. With all those changes there has been concern that there hasn't been enough attention to polish and eliminating bugs in iOS. While it's not something explicitly stated, it's clear that iOS 9 does go back to basics in some ways, and focuses on improving performance and stability. There are still new features, and some of them are very integral to keeping iOS competitive as a mobile platform, but the key focus is on solidifying the existing foundations.
The polish and improvements that will be most obvious to the end user are those that involve visual or functional changes to the apps they use on a daily basis. With that in mind, it makes most sense to start off the review by taking a look at some of the general changes made to the UI and the system in iOS 9, so let's dive in.
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R. Hunt - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
And with each new update, the initial tablet UI it shipped with becomes a faded memory.Deelron - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
His problem is with both, one of the supposed benefits of Android is different hardware choice/options, but if the only choice to get reliable updates is to go with a Nexus device (and of course it depends if the user cares about getting OS updates), then the hardware choice factor is notably damaged.Brandon Chester - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
Samsung's implementation is not better in almost any respect. Performance has always been an issue with the SoCs Samsung ships in their tablets, and this applies even more so when you're using multiple applications at once. The interface is also implemented in a very slow and non-obvious manner. Having to touch, hold, and drag apps in order to start multitasking is much slower than any swipe and tap interaction, and there are several options that are accessed by tapping the dot in the middle of the slider between two apps. There's no affordance to tell the user that there's anything hidden there, and it's not something so obvious that there doesn't need to be one.I still give Samsung a lot of credit for working within the constraints they are by adding something that Google should have added at the OS level long ago, but that doesn't change how it's a pretty clunky implementation.
Chaser - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
"Performance has always been an issue with the SoCs Samsung ships in their tablets" Since when?Brandon Chester - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
For a long time now. Anything released after the iPad 4 was not competitive with whatever Apple's latest iPad was, and that gap kept growing as Samsung put n-1 SoCs in their tablets. It's the same even now, with the Tab S2 shipping with Exynos 5433 running in AArch32 mode while their best phones get Exynos 7420.ama3654 - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
With the new touchwiz, there's no tap hold. Just tap recent and multitask away. They have improved it significantly. I think you should have still mentioned Samsung in the article regarding multi-tasking/split screen as they made it popular in the mobile space. Or otherwise it has been prohibited by Apple.catinthefurnace - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
ama3654,That's like saying that no article should be written by Tesla without mentioning the GM EV-1.
catinthefurnace - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
"by Tesla" should have been "about Tesla". No edit button :)edgarbob - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
"but the unfortunate truth is that the Windows tablet market is almost non-existent at this point outside of the Surface lineup"How is that different from Apple? The iOS tablet market *is* non-existent outside of the iPad lineup.
bobjones32 - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
Yeah, the Windows tablet market is almost non-existent outside of the Surface lineup....but good thing the Surface lineup is a massive billion-dollar business and appears to be growing significantly, and all this before Windows 10 was even released. So who knows how many sales were discouraged because of Windows 8 being on there instead.