September 18, 2013: iOS 7 launches with a radical redesign that divides the tech world.
The biggest overhaul Apple’s mobile operating system has seen in years, iOS 7 ditches the skeuomorphic objects, dials and textures of previous iterations. Instead, it boasts stark patches of white space, simpler icons and more abstract controls for settings. The Jony Ive era of software design is truly underway.
If you’re still rocking an older iPhone running iOS 7, you’re going to need to upgrade if you want to continue using WhatsApp.
The world’s biggest messaging service will soon stop working on iOS 7 devices. Other aging operating systems are going to get left out in the cold, too.
WhatsApp has confirmed plans to drop support for iOS 7.
The hugely popular messaging service, owned by Facebook, will continue to work for a little while yet. However, WhatsApp warns that it is no longer actively developing for iOS 7, and certain features could stop working at any time.
A class-action lawsuit claims that Apple intentionally broke its FaceTime service on iOS 6 in order to get users to upgrade to iOS 7 — thereby making older iPhones run slowly.
The reason was allegedly driven by Apple’s desire not to have to continue paying high data costs to the company Akamai, which ran third-party servers used for handling FaceTime data.
When Apple first released iOS 8 to the general public, more than a few people with older devices such as the iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and iPad mini noticed that it slowed their devices down to a crawl.
When Apple released iOS 8.1.1, they promised that the update would fix some of the speed issues that iOS 8 had on older devices.
So how’d it work out? iOS 8.1.1 is sometimes an improvement. Sometimes, but not always. And even then, it’s not a huge leap.
If you hate iOS 8 -— whether because it runs like crap on your device, you miss your jailbreak, or because it’s significantly more buggy — you’ve previously had the option to downgrade back to iOS 7.1.2 if you wanted to.
But bad news. That ship has sailed. Apple has stopped signing iOS 7.1.2, making iOS 8 the only version of iOS that can be installed on any device capable of supporting it.
Apple is still supporting the iPhone 4s when it comes to new software, despite the fact that it is now outdated by several generations. But while iOS 8 is technically usable by iPhone 4s owners, just how fast can it run compared to iOS 7?
Finding the answer to this question is the basis of a new video by YouTube user kabriolett, who staged a speed comparison between an iPhone 4s running iOS 7.1.2 and one running iOS 8.0.2.
The results are surprising.
Nearly half of iPhone and iPad users have already upgraded to iOS 8 in the first week, but if you’re looking for stability, you might want to stay for a few weeks more.
Crash analytics data from Crittercism found that iOS 8’s crash rate is 78 percent higher than that seen on iOS 7, with an average crash rate of 3.56% across all devices.
iOS 8 was released just 24 hours ago in what Apple is calling the biggest iOS release ever, but if early adoption numbers are any indication, customers might not feel the same way.
Users are upgrading to iOS 8 at a much slower rate than iOS 7, according to Tapjoy’s data from its app network of 200 million unique iOS users. Not only is iOS 8 lagging behind iOS 7, it’s being adopted even slower than iOS 6 was.
With Apple set to unveil the eagerly-anticipated iPhone 6 later today, that can only mean one thing: that the public launch of iOS 8 isn’t far away. And chances are that OS X Yosemite’s not too far behind it, either.
As both of Apple’s operating systems are set for a refresh, Chitika Insights has run the numbers to examine iOS and OS X version distributions at this exciting juncture for Apple: sampling tens of millions of U.S. and Canadian online ad impressions running through the Chitika Ad Network.
The numbers, catalogued between August 25 and 31, show that a massive 90 percent of North American iOS Web traffic comes from devices running iOS 7, largely thanks to Apple’s update strategy of directly prompting eligible users to upgrade.
