IOS 5 problems.

[acropolite]

My iPad one has issues since the IOS 5 update, so much so I'm thinking of rolling back to 4.x. My battery life has been reduced to half it's pre update capacity and Safari crashes often, it's taken me 2 attempts to type this post. A google search reveals these 2 bugs are common. As well the interface stutters, often typing will stop momentarily then continue a second or so later.

The iPad is a great tool hampered by a lacklustre and buggy OS, bugs that have been there are not fixed in subsequent releases, rather Apple simply adds some additional bugs to annoy. Bring on the opposition, the Asus pad with integrated Kbd is looking an increasingly attractive proposition.

[michaellxv]

I updated my iPod touch and have noticed similar problems, but put it down to maybe not really up to spec for iOS5. Glad I left my wife's iPad alone, i'll wait for a few releases or maybe not at all.

I had wondered if maybe some apps needed an update to work properly with iOS5?

[tempestwizz]

Not an expert, but I believe Apple acknowledged this weakness with first release and have since fixed problem through updates. I have not noticed current issues with my iPhone 4, or iPad2, wires 3GS or iTouch.

[iceman]

Yeh iOS is at 5.01 now, and apparently fixed a battery drain issue. Might be worth installing the new patch Phil.

[acropolite]

Mine is IOS 5.01 interestingly it may not be possible to revert to an older OS, apple have specifically designed the OS and iTunes to prevent that.

[Omaroo]

Looks like a good percentage of users are still experiencing battery drain issues Phil - and some even worse than before.

Try a few tips here: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/iphoneios-5-battery-saver-tips/15712?tag=content;siu-container

I believe that Apple are working pretty feverishly to track down the circumstances differentiating some users from others. If you take a snapshot of the number of people out there with various models and a plethora of different apps loaded and settings applied - it'd be a very difficult job to find a common cause.

I think that a little patience will reward you. Apple are not known to let customers swing if they can help it. It's a software issue, so it most likely won't take long to fix. I'm not in agreeance with the notion that iOS is any "buggier" than the others - I've been in both camps for a long while now at developmental level and I know what my preference still is. A change might be as good as a holiday... until you get your bar bill. ;)

Give it time - they'll sort it, and with the pressure they're under it'll be soon. I couldn't imagine how much of a backwards step a keyboarded device would be after pure multitouch on a device designed for quick consumption. You may as well go back to a laptop! :shrug:

In reference to going back to iOS 4: I presume that because pretty-well everyone has gone with iOS 5, (a prominent upgrade that entails many many off-device changes (iCloud, etc)), that Apple knows how complex the "whole picture" is now, and is actively preventing people from completely screwing up their own data and apps. Remember - many apps that you've updated recently now won't work under iOS 4 because they're now iOS 5 specific. It's those that get angry about this that really don't try to understand it before blowing a popper valve - and because the iOS/OSX experience is usually so fluid, hiccoughs are oh-so less tolerated by your average user.

[stephenb]

I have employed most of the suggestions on the web about increasing the battery life between charges on my iPhone 4 and it seemed to work for me. Most of my issues were Location Services, iCloud and email pushing. I don't think Apple "simply adds some additional bugs to annoy." I appreciate that in most part they get it right, and when they don't, they fix it reasonably quick. It's now the end of the world for me at least.

Regards,
Stephen

[rogerg]

I wish I didn't update my iPad to iOS 5. I have had the 5.0.1 update since it came out too. A few reasons:

- Email and Safari crash more often
- Music is harder to use, particularly shuffling songs of an artist, and music crashes often.
- Generally the iPad (a v1) is noticeably slower running iOS5
- I find I need to fully shut down and start up the iPad a few times a week, where as I used not shut it down for weeks on end.

Overall quite disappointed in iOS 5.

[kustard]

I must be one of the lucky one, my iPad1, iPhone3GS and iPhone4S have none of the battery problems or crashes that other are having.

[Omaroo]

I'm (probably predictably) the same Simon. I have no issues either on my iPad 1 64/3G or iPhone 4. I keep apps closed if I can (irrespective of any statements stating that leaving them open is benign). I'm interested to hear about the root cause in the case of those that do have problems.

[gbeal]

Heck, that makes three of us then, I've been on IOS5 (5.01 actually now) since it hit the masses, and nary an issue, this in the iPhone and the iPad (1).
I'm not complaining though.
Gary

[danielsun]

One thing that I have definitely noticed since upgrading to IOS5 is that when I type on the IPad it quite often stalls, so it takes a second or two for the letters typed to respond
and Safari also crashes often.

[acropolite]

They are the most comonly reported problems Daniel, I also get a lot of server not responding errors apparently they're related to prefetch issues, in my case they've been there for at least the past couple of releases.

[gbeal]

What is the name or description for what Daniel describes in his post (where the typed letters etc are slow to "appear")? I ask not because my iPad does it (it doesn't) but my new desktop PC does. Little things like when I click on a radio button or drop down menu or similar in a capture program, sometimes it will take a second or two to show.
It would be nice to know what causes this and how to rectify it.
Gary

[bartman]

Hi Gary, it might be a Key logger......We had one at work. I noticed the same behaviour one of our PC's ( that staff use for FB etc - yes... not allowed) and had a scan done and it was found.
Dont know the name of etc as it was hush hush????????
grrrr
Bartman

[Fox]

I agree, iOS5 has been fine on my iPhone 4, but not so good on my iPad 1.

The good points are the new window/swipe gestures, and the ability for window tabs in Safari.

The bad points are a) its been buggy and crash prone b) it certainly feels more sluggish overall and c) the Music app (for the iPad) is completely broken - especially when it comes to Podcasts. There's a lot of dissent on the Apple Support forums about the Music app, with reviews regarding it as some of the poorest software Apple has ever produced. I should have waited before upgrading, and I hope Apple do something positive about it ! Fox

[skysurfer]

That an iPad runs slow is sometimes due that apps cannot be closed easily.
Double click the home button and then hold a finger on the icons on the bottom until they start wiggling. Click on the red cross on the icon and the app is closed. A weird way to close an app,

I have an iPad 2 with 4.3.3 and am happy with it. I jailbreaked it as well but performance is never lagging or sluggish. But I close regularly the apps, like I do on Android or Mac OSX. And I never use iTunes.

I consider the iCloud as useless as you get more dependant on an internet connection. Local storage media are cheap and fast.

[Steffen]

Apps are closed when you press the home button. No need for finger acrobatics. More information in this recent informative blog post:

http://speirs.org/blog/2012/1/2/misconceptions-about-ios-multitasking.html

Cheers
Steffen.

[skysurfer]

That is absolutely untrue.

It is easy to check with a jailbroken iPad. A command called 'top' (familiar to linux / Unix users) shows that the apps which are in the 'task bar' are loaded in memory (but not running). Here a screenshot of an SSH terminal session to the iPad with top running.
A non-JB iPad cannot check this because Apple does not allow apps which intervene with the system.

See the attached images regarding 'Wordfeud' and 'AppStore'.
These apps do consume memory and thus slow down performance. As you see the 'dormant' Appstore consumes 38MB and Wordfeud 186MB. This is under most OSes particuarly Android and iOS. Windows, Linux and Mac OSX have swap space on the harddisk where such apps are swapped out of 'live' memory.
Moreover unlike these three and Android, iOS does not really multitask: many apps suspend when moved to the background. This is not a limitation of iOS but a design choice of Apple to prevent too much battery usage, like the closed nature of iOS is.

So the real misconception is:

[Steffen]

Sorry, but your conclusions do not follow from your observations. The mere presence in memory of suspended apps does not mean they will not be purged if memory is required by other apps. That this will happen is in fact the gist of the quote you labelled "misconception". Have you tried launching a memory-intensive app and watched what happens to the suspended ones? Go ahead, try it.

Also, the amount of memory consumed has no impact on performance (iOS has no swap space), short of the penalty of having to reclaim memory from suspended apps if required.

There is no need to manually memory-manage in iOS.

BTW, you do not need to jailbreak your phone to get a process listing, apps like iStat will give you that.

Cheers
Steffen.

[btschumy]

It is indeed the case that apps in the background will get terminated by iOS if it needs the memory. I see this happen all the time with SkySafari (which consumes a lot of memory). There really should be no reason to manually close apps.

That said, I occasionally do go through and close a bunch apps just because I'm feeling fastidious.

[Steffen]

I do in fact manually remove my online banking apps after use, to lessen the odds that sensitive information might hang around in memory for a long time. But that's just paranoid me.

Cheers
Steffen.

[goober]

Sorry to hear about your iOS 5 problems. I think the new OS is marvellous - some nice features there. The notification centre, and 4 finger swipe gestures are lovely improvements. I rarely grope for the the home button now.

[Jules76]

From someone who's been jailbreaking my iPhone 3GS since iOS 3.1.3, it's good to see Apple continuing the tradition in iOS 5 of borrowing features from the cydia developer community and calling them "new". :rofl:

[acropolite]

I'm happy to report that all of my problems seem to have gone with the latest ios update 5.1. Safari has yet to crash after several days of use, battery life is back to what I had prior to the last update and the dreaded browser hang (I believe it was a prefetch issue) seems to be a thing of the past.:thumbsup:

[Octane]

Great to hear, Phil!

My new shiny iPad 3 arrives next week. Can't wait!

H

[Omaroo]

Ditto :D The iPad 1 goes into dedicated music production as a MIDI controller.

[Poita]

Which software are you running for that?

[danielsun]

That's great Phil.:thumbsup: My IPad has been crashing quite a bit on Safari and in in general use with apps and games. I will now update all our I devices.:thumbsup:

[Omaroo]

Currently a choice of (all installed):

StepPolyArp (sequencer/arpeggiator)
Lemur (MIDI surface designer)
Genome MIDI (sequencer)
iSequence (sequencer)
MidiMonitor (MIDI CC message tracking and analysis)
FunkBox (drum machine)
littlemidi (sequencer)
touchAble (MIDI surface for Ableton Live)
Mixtiki (sequencer)
TouchOSC (MIDI surface designer)
Phaedra (sequencer)
SweetMIDI (MIDI player)
Audio MIDI (MIDI routing control)
MidiBridge (MIDI routing control)
Performer (crazy MIDI touch surface)
SoundPrism (cascading sequencer)
iKaossilator (Drum machine)
ThumbJam (touch surface)
SampleTank (MIDI controller/sample player)
LoopyHD (sequencer)
iDrum (MIDI Drum machine)
iVoxel (voice sampler/vox)
iMaschine (MIDI Drum machine)
BassLine (bass player/sequencer)
MoDrum (drum machine/sequencer)
Cascadr (MIDI cascader/sequencer)

This doesn't include any of the 40 iOS coreMIDI-ready synthesisers...

[tlgerdes]

Ha, ha, my wifes IP3 arrived today.:P:P:P.......... pity she cant have it till her birthday next weekend.

[acropolite]

Just an update on the latest release, I have had a couple of lockups with Safari and one crash, far better than before. Some apps are very slow to load, probably to be expected considering the evolution of the OS.