In "A Guide To What's Great In iOS 8" I tried to break down just some of the new power and flexibility that Apple has delivered to its mobile OS in 2014. There's much to like and even some things to love. Unfortunately, with Apple's great ambition to not only deliver a new mobile OS, but also roll out Apple Pay and bigger screen iPhones, not everything that could be done does get done. To that end, I'm going to highlight eight things that are either still decidedly lousy in iOS or had their rollouts compromised by the sheer volume of things going on at Apple.
1) Updating can be way too hard
Apple has been selling 16GB iPhones for way too long and apparently seems hell bent on continuing to do that. It doesn't seem like a problem if you only have a half dozen apps, don't store music on your phone and are a light user, right? Well, then it's time for your OS upgrade and suddenly your iPhone wants multiple gigabytes of free space (some reports had people needing up to 7GB of space!) to perform the upgrade. There are workaround like deleting a bunch of apps and downloading them later. You can resort to iTunes, make a backup and just install fresh. That leads to all your apps downloading again, which can be excruciating this time of year.
Fix this: First, Apple should stop selling current phones with 16GB. It's absurd when the cost of flash memory is below 30 cents per GB at wholesale. Second, Apple should make the upgrade go smoother. It's Apple that has sold hundreds of millions of 16GB iPhones that will still be around for iOS 10. Figure out a way to make the upgrade process automatic and seamless by backing up the contents of people's phones to iCloud, even if temporarily.
2) iCloud Drive's rollout is a disaster... happening
Apple's Dropbox competitor seems to work fine, but please don't use it. Why? Because unless you have Yosemite on your Mac (and you likely don't), it will break functionality with your existing iCloud document files. Those are the Pages, Keynote, and Numbers file you likely have in iCloud, which will suddenly become unusable on your Mac. Ugh! Apple hasn't announced a date for OS X Yosemite to even roll out yet, so while this will be fixed, you can't even know when. In the meantime, just don't activate iCloud Drive. Why Apple allowed people to when it has wisely delayed the rollout of several other features is totally unclear.
Fix this: Read the above three times if it's not too late already. For a short-term fix to moving basic files around, just sign up for Dropbox or Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. If you're looking longer term, I have a comparison of all the services.
3) Apple's calendar is still awful
Last year, I wrote in "7 Misses in iOS 7":
While Safari got some great updates, Siri is much improved and the basic phone functions took a huge leap, the calendar app is just not good. Get Sunrise, Fantastical or one of the many excellent iOS calendar apps out there. It’s embarrassing that at this point you can’t enter “Lunch Tuesday 1pm at The Creamery San Francisco” into the calendar app and have it not only create the appointment but also know where it’s happening. Sunrise has no such problem.
Sadly, that paragraph is still applicable a year later.
Fix this: Buy a great calendar app and integrate it like it's your own. Apple has taken some of the best bits of the Mailbox app and cloned them into its own Mail app. So it clearly knows how to be a "fast follower." But Calendar gets no love so maybe it's time to just buy one.
4) The keyboard functionality isn't ready for prime time
I'm running third-party keyboards and sometimes I get no keyboard to show up at all. I run Apple's keyboard and the suggestion bar disappears (you can swipe gently on it to get it back). Speaking of which, Apple still seems to think that blank screen real estate is more important than a permanent run of numbers on the keyboard. That means far more shifting to get special characters and numbers, which encourages lousy password behavior. It also means the hashtag character (#) is buried two shifts deep. Fortunately, Twitter itself moves it up, but really, Apple?
Fix this: Right now SwiftKey and Swype feel like they are in beta to me. When I lose the keyboard, I can eventually finagle things to make it reappear. But this is a pretty clear "polish" problem that suggests multiple updates may be needed to clean it all up.
5) Just make TouchID work already
I'm testing apps that supposedly have it enabled. And even where it "works," it's still not as seamless as that Apple Pay demo video. A year into the availability of fingerprint scanning, why is that? Yes, yes, third-party access is new. But Apple seems to have gotten relatively few developers on board for launch. The password is a lousy security system. Typing in good ones on the iPhone is painful. Third-party password management -- as I discussed in "A Guide To What's Great in iOS 8" -- is a lot better than nothing. But you know what would be great? Touching that big round button and being done with it.
Fix this: Every app should let you log in with TouchID. Apple needs to make a super easy-to-use API so that developers can add the functionality with a one-time authorization and encourage the heck out of this practice. Sure, there'll still be a password underlying your credentials for laptop use. But eventually that could go away too -- if TouchID use becomes ubiquitous.
6) Basic iCloud Storage can't be a profit center
Those 16GB iPhones are the second-most embarrassing memory allocation Apple offers regularly. The worst is the 5GB basic iCloud account everyone gets, no matter what sized device you buy or how many. Yes, $12 a year to go to 20GB is pocket change. But then, it's pocket change for Apple too. So why isn't that free? It would solve the iCloud backup problems for most people and also allow a nice amount of photo storage. Apple might convince a lot of people to pay the very small sum it's asking, but it's collecting so little for this, you have to wonder why. If it gives away that storage, it only incurs costs for the people that actually use it and it doesn't pay credit card billing fees every month on tiny purchases.
Fix this: Keep the $3.99/month price for the upgraded storage. Bundle it with Beats Music for $10.99, too. Offer it with ad-free iTunes Radio for $4.99. Figure it out.
7) HealthKit and Continuity might as well not exist yet
Apple had to pull apps that report to Health, it's monitoring app that looks over your well being. They say a fix is coming by month's end. It also doesn't offer the magical handoff feature that will allow you to stop work on your iPad and restart in the exact same place on your Mac until Yosemite ships, presumably in October. None of this is tragic in the long run. Delays happen. But expectations were built around these features and they aren't there. As John Gruber put it over at DaringFireball: "These iOS releases are usually rough, because the software release dates are set in stone by the iPhone hardware release dates."
Fix this: It's OK to have functionality arrive in iOS 8.1 or 8.2. It's less OK to build up the expectation it's coming in 8.0. Apple certainly knew that Continuity and iCloud Drive on the Mac wouldn't exist until Yosemite. And they knew early in summer that Yosemite wouldn't exist until after iOS 8. Tell everyone else next time.
8) Safari's "magic box" still can't match Chrome's
Every few months I try to switch to Safari from Chrome. It's not about any particular dislike for Google, but rather the obnoxious memory footprint of Chrome on my laptop (true of both Windows and Mac for me). Every time I fail for one key reason: On Chrome, I type 2-3 letters and Google has completed the URL of the site I want to go or has it readily accessible to click on. In Safari, too often the "right answer" is either not there or buried deep down enough I might as well keep typing. Both use Google search data and both, presumably, keep a robust history of sites I've visited. Only one is pure magic.
Fix this!
There are other small things like the strange 9-items-per-folder limit (unless you page over) carrying over from last year, and a bunch of other things being delayed (the iCloud Photo Library functionality is in beta, the ability to send regular SMS-based texts to your Mac won't be out till October, h/t Zac Hall on Twitter). None are critical, but they fall into two broad areas: Things overdue for a fix, and things Apple promised that are just overdue. That doesn't change the fact iOS 8 is mostly a big winner; but rather points out the work that still remains.
