Well, as I had indicated in my earlier posts, Apple is releasing buggy and untested stuff all over the place. The iOS 8 final build is the same as the GM released to developers earlier. No surprises, it remains bug riddled at least in my brief tests.
Apple has already pulled Health Kit related apps as they “discovered” serious issues there. I probably have some ideas on one of the bugs since I ran into it with no additional, related, apps. I entered some data in iOS 8 beta 5 in the health app and the entire data was destroyed when the device was updated to the iOS 8 GM. Although I had emailed a backup of the health data from the app, there is no way to restore it in the GM version. There was another issue that I could not change units to suit my taste, it seemed to be fixed/hard-coded.
There have been quite a few occasions where the phone froze on the lock screen when a message or call came in. Although the frequency of this bug is lower in the GM build, it made beta 5 useless excepting for app testing purposes.
A simple Google for “iOS 8 and iPhone 4s” will turn up quite a few articles advising against updating for the 4s. Apparently, besides serious performance issues, the UI has been designed for larger screens making some apps like mail virtually unusable on the smaller 4s screen.
To add my viewpoint to the observations for the UI on the 4s, I would say it also applies to the slightly larger 5 display, unless, you turn off the “predictive text” bar. Not a bad idea anyway since I found it to be practically useless. At least you get one more line of display back in messages, mail and similar apps.
As if all this was not enough, it seems that yet another bug from Apple made 1Password free for download.
Apple Maps remain the disaster they were, even though some people would like to think and say otherwise. In my case, the so called maps from Apple show the opposite areas across the street where I live. The area across the street is labelled where I live and my area is labelled across the street. Very nice…try finding or reaching someplace and you would land up elsewhere. The improvement since iOS 7 is that there are a few labels here and there, just for the sake of having something to show. The other issue with Apple Maps remain as it was…Find My Phone and Friends are practically useless since the “maps” do not quite exist for most places. This also makes all location based apps useless if they use Apple Maps. Thankfully, Google maps continue to get better in almost all aspects.
The UI/UX remains as in iOS 7, inconsistent at best. Perhaps worse, since the “design” is now extended for larger screens by default, completely ignoring the current users and devices. The worst part is that the still available iPhone 4 does not get the iOS 8 update even though the iPad 2 does.
Yosemite seems to be following the same path, although, some major bugs from Mavericks seem to be fixed. Mavericks itself, retains all those bugs so far. Perhaps the response from the Yosemite public beta was good enough to get the major bugs fixed. I still have over 50 bugs that I had not submitted since nothing from my earlier 20 odd was fixed in beta 2. Since beta 3 fixed at least 2 of the 20 odd, I feel encouraged to spend the time to submit some more and see if any of those might get fixed.
I discovered yet another iTunes 11.4 bug. If you started off iTunes after the iOS 8 release and started to get your app updates, the updated license agreement will pop up and will not go away even after agreeing to it and will keep downloading the first app in the update list over and over again every time you agree to the updated license. The only way out is to quit iTunes and re-start it.
The disconnect within Apple shows up even more this time around as they have not been able to release a completely usable iOS 8. No, I am not referring to the iOS 8 bugs, I am referring to features already released in iOS 8, but, cannot be used till Yosemite is released. The same applies to some features in the Apple TV update. For developers…Xcode 6.0.1 has also been formally released to the App Store. I still don’t see it on my Mac App Store, but, I see the update here, only, does not allow downloading anything for now.
It seems 1Password has followed the same path and have just released version 5 as a freemium app, but, would require Yosemite as well as iOS 8 for normal functionality.
Pathetic? Right? But, where is the competition? So far, none!
Anyway, now that iOS 8 is formally released, I will spend more time on it as a user and see what happens. So far, my primary phone still runs iOS 7 and will continue till I can justify updating to iOS 8 on my primary device. It would be nice to be able to use some of the newer features in iOS 8, provided they are practically usable on existing devices…
Nitin Chandra's Blog 