iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite bugginess

Do you get the impression Apple is running ahead of its traditional attention to detail with OS X and the iOS these days?

I’ve been reading reports about iOS 8 and 8.1 bugginess and slow performance on older (but officially supported) devices since the new version was released, which has dissuaded me from upgrading my A5 powered iPad 2 from iOS 7.1.2, which is very stable and reasonably lively on that machine. Persistent reports of dropped WiFi connections in OS X Yosemite have likewise deterred me from upgrading either my mid-2013 Haswell MacBook Air or my late-2008 MacBook to Yosemite until the all-clear on that issue is sounded.

However, I’m now experiencing iOS 8.1 on my new iPad Air 2 and finding first hand that the bug reports are not being exaggerated. iOS 8.1 is definitely the buggiest and most ragged-feeling version of Apple’s mobile OS I’ve yet encountered. Some of this is presumably due to app developers not having yet optimized their programs for iOS 8, but there are plenty of hiccups that have nothing to do with third-party software.

The worst bug is that four times in five days I’ve returned to the Air 2 only to be greeted with a dead black screen when I push the Home or power buttons, obliging me to hold both buttons down for what seems an interminable length of time before the white Apple logo finally appears to indicate that the machine is rebooting. Not cool. In going-on four years of intensive use, the iPad 2 has never manifested that sort of instability, or indeed any instability at all to speak of. It’s been a rock.

I’m finding the much ballyhooed TouchID feature to be randomly erratic, working sometimes but more often not, despite my having so far set up and reset my thumbprint three times. Not cool.

Text selection is also even more tedious and finicky in iOS 8 than previous versions. Not cool.

As for third party software bugs, iWrite (one of my favorite iOS text editors) insists on reverting to portrait mode whenever sent to the background by the app switcher, which is annoying, and another “slower-downer” when going back and forth between other apps and iWrite, which has been a solid performer in iOS 7.

And it’s not just me.

The folks at OS X Daily say they’re finding iOS 8 and iOS 8.1 “really buggy”, noting: “My iPhone 6 Plus completely crashes and reboots at random. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, it can be anything from making a phone call, being in the middle of a phone call and then trying to do something else on the phone, or, with some regularity, opening the multitasking app switcher (where you quit apps). Boom, a black screen with an Apple logo. It’s kind of a regular thing, usually happening a few times a week, granted I use my iPhone a lot so the average person may not experience this.”

Well, I haven’t used my iPad Air 2 a lot yet, and I’m experiencing similar behavior.

A reader forum commentator affirms that concerns about iOS 8 performance on older A5 hardware are significantly warranted, reporting that when he upgraded his 64G iPad 2 via iTunes, he found himself obliged to wait about three hours while the old iPad rebooted continuously until, finally, he got the startup Screen and was able to set the machine up. Things were still sluggish, so he bravely rebooted, and was rewarded with another two hours of reboot cycling. When he finally got the iPad settled down, he says performance has remained noticeably lazy.

Forbes contributor Gordon Kelly observes that, “iPhone 4S owners (the 4S uses the same A5 SoC as the iPad 2 and original iPad mini) have complained about greatly reduced performance, and on a scale suggesting that “Apple will need to release a software patch to address it in the near future.”

The International Business Times’s Vinod Yalburgi says iPhone 4S owners (and by extension iPad 2s and mini 1s) are, “… in for a bitter surprise, as the resource-hungry iOS 8 software reportedly slows down the ageing handset by two times or more.” He cites test metrics from tech portal ArsTechnica, which reports that iOS 8 will slow down your handset noticeably with two times slower launching of stock apps, almost three seconds longer boot times, and taking nearly twice the time to open some stock apps such as Safari on iOS 8 compared to the latest iOS 7.1.2 software. The sluggish performance is attributed to the A5 units’ now relatively puny computing power and mediocre 512 MB RAM capacity, and its incompatibility issues with certain hardware-dependent iOS 8 features such as Handoff, AirDrop, the OpenGL ES 3.0 and Metal graphics run-time and more.

Apple has not exactly been quick out of the blocks in issuing successful bugfixes. The iOS 8.0.1 update issued September 24, 2014, was a disaster, crippling iPhone 6 devices by disabling Touch ID and cell service, causing Apple to pull the plug on it after just two hours. On September 25 Apple released iOS 8.0.2, which contained all the fixes included with iOS 8.0.1 and also purportedly fixed the problems iOS 8.0.1 introduced, but many still complained of unsquashed bugs. iOS 8.1, released October 20, added support for Apple Pay and fixed another tranche of bugs, but as my spotty experiences so far with my new iPad Air 2 attest, it’s still falling well short of being as smooth and graceful a performer as earlier versions of the mobile OS were in the context of their times and supporting hardware.

Ars Technica’s Andrew Cunningham reported this week that users of Apple idevices with A5 processsor silicon running iOS 8 are due for a speed increase. Cunningham notes that on Tuesday Apple released the first beta build of iOS 8.1.1 to developers, said to include the customary bugfixes, but he deduces from the preliminary release notes that the update promises to improve performance on the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, two of the oldest devices that support iOS 8.

He says Ars Technica testing of iOS 8 has found performance significantly slower on these older devices than iOS 7 was, with apps taking longer to launch, and the user interface often jerky and inconsistent in ways that it wasn’t before. Here’s hoping iOS 8.1.1 will fix those issues.

However, these iOS 8 glitches, combined with the OS X Yosemite bugs, incline me to suspect that Apple has been spreading itself too thin with constant features revision in OS updates, and would be better advised to dial things back a bit and get the feature set that’s already in place “just working” in the manner we’ve come to expect with Apple operating system software performance.