Six hours with iOS 11

Today is release day for iOS 11, Apple’s newest ver­sion of the oper­at­ing sys­tem for iPhones and iPads. This is not news. As of about 1pm East­ern time, the update is avail­able for down­load and instal­la­tion on sup­port­ed devices. Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look sac­ri­ficed an iPhone¹My iPad is stuck at iOS 9. for the glo­ry of being your guinea pig.²No ani­mals were harmed in the mak­ing of this blog post.

The update was per­formed on an iPhone 6, a mod­el which is almost three years old. Some fea­tures will not be avail­able for this device even after the update. This ought to pro­vide a guess at how the OS upgrade affects per­for­mance on old­er devices.³I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks that three years is too soon for obso­les­cence. It took almost an hour to down­load, which isn’t sur­pris­ing. A zil­lion oth­er peo­ple tried to install it at the same time. After that, the install ran for about 15 minutes.

Mostly looks the same in regular use

There are no major inter­face changes for the ways we’ve been doing things for ten years. The icons for built-in apps have got­ten a lit­tle bold­er, with thick­er lines and sim­pler iconog­ra­phy. The type of app names now scales with the length of the app’s name, which means the whole name is vis­i­ble, but also means that for some apps the title isn’t legible.

No new pay feature (for anyone)

Did you hear about how Apple was going to make it pos­si­ble to send mon­ey by text mes­sage or use Siri to send pay­ments? Well, they pulled that out of the beta. I’m OK with that. I would­n’t have been excit­ed to try using it, but I don’t want to knock it either.

Of all the fea­tures Apple should avoid launch­ing if not ready, the one where the phone auto­mat­i­cal­ly drains your bank account should be at the top of the list.⁴Espe­cial­ly if your friends know about the Dol­phi­nAt­tack

More NFC features. Someday.

The iPhone has had near-field com­mu­ni­ca­tion sup­port for a cou­ple of years now but with­out the capa­bil­i­ty for any third-par­ty prod­ucts to take advan­tage of it. With iOS 11 this has changed. How­ev­er, the iPhone still won’t talk to a Yubikey so I’m unclear what the point is.⁵I’m sure there are lots of great things that can be done with NFC on iPhone. But pass­word secu­ri­ty is the thing I’m inter­est­ed in

Um, because security. Or something.

Start­ing with iOS 11, apps can no longer read MAC address­es of oth­er machines on the net­work. This is an obsta­cle for net­work util­i­ties like IP Net­work Scan­ner and Fing. It must be the result of some secu­ri­ty con­cern. Per­haps peo­ple were writ­ing apps that report­ed every­one’s MAC address­es back to the app authors. Shame on them, but these util­i­ties are so handy for trou­bleshoot­ing net­work prob­lems (or prob­lems with machines on the net­work) that I’d real­ly hope that the authors find a way to work some­thing out with Apple.

Unless of course they were the ones col­lect­ing peo­ple’s net­work data.

Goodbye 32-bit apps

There’s been a series of app updates in recent weeks promis­ing iOS 11 com­pat­i­bil­i­ty and seem­ing­ly no oth­er fea­tures. This is because iOS 11 removes sup­port for 32-bit apps. If an app isn’t 64-bit, it won’t run any more.

Going through the apps that were already on the phone showed that most apps on my own phone con­tin­ue to work. How­ev­er, there were some excep­tions. When those apps are run, a mes­sage pops up inform­ing us that «the devel­op­er of this app needs to update it to work with iOS 11». Among the apps which no longer work:

• Hel­veti­ca vs Ari­al a fun game for typog­ra­phy geeks. How fast can you dis­cern Hel­veti­ca from Arial?
• Social Mon­keys client for the pump.io microblog­ging platform.
• Brain­Hack plays bin­au­r­al tones at a low vol­ume, pur­port­ed­ly to change mood and state of mind.
• Cham­bers 200 Words You Should­n’t Trust The folks at Cham­bers Dic­tio­nary made a list of words that are used in mis­lead­ing ways.
• Alame­da Free Library I don’t live in Alame­da any more, but it’s too bad to see that the Alame­da Free Library’s app will stop working.
• Quick­Elem inter­ac­tive peri­od­ic table of elements.
• PhotoForge2 Photo­Forge is a real­ly good pho­to edi­tor that has been unsup­port­ed since Yahoo hired its dev team and killed the app but still worked until today.
• Open­VBX app inter­faced with the Open­VBX web appli­ca­tion to make phone calls and send text mes­sages using one’s own web­serv­er (and Twilio).
• Mho A darn shame to see this go. Mho is a game made by Adafruit to get prac­tice iden­ti­fy­ing resis­tor col­or codes.
• iSSH This is prob­a­bly the biggest dis­ap­point­ment. I’ll have to decide on anoth­er ssh client to use. iSSH saved the day once when a serv­er crashed while I was on vaca­tion in Ten­nessee. Is typ­ing shell com­mands on a phone fun? No. Did it do the job? Yes.

QR code reading built in to the camera app

Now this reminds me of the Apple that just gets things right — an Apple we don’t see enough of any more — and it’s a fea­ture they aren’t even hyp­ing. There are a ton of QR code read­er apps out there, some with a lot of fea­tures. Apple built the QR code read­er right into the phone app.

Point the cam­era at a QR code, and a pop­up noti­fies you of the con­tents of the code. If it’s a link, it offers to open the web page. Oth­er­wise, the con­tents of the code can be copied to the clip­board. There’s no sep­a­rate app to open, no spe­cial con­fig­u­ra­tion to enable it, it’s just there being handy.

What else?

A lot has already been writ­ten about the revamp of the Con­trol Cen­ter. The new arrange­ment is ele­gant, but it’s still an incre­men­tal improve­ment. There are more func­tions avail­able tak­ing up the whole screen instead of being divid­ed into mul­ti­ple «pages» to swipe between. The biggest dif­fer­ence is quite wel­come, though: a long tap of one of the wid­gets will make the wid­get grow and (usu­al­ly) pro­vide more infor­ma­tion. The music play­er wid­get, for exam­ple, will expand to pro­vide a more com­plete con­troller for the music play­er. The flash­light, which used to just turn on or off, can be adjust­ed in brightness.

The per­for­mance of this one device does­n’t seem to have degrad­ed, and it’s too soon to tell whether the bat­tery life has been effect­ed. I don’t have any­thing to offer along those lines at this point. I haven’t expe­ri­enced any crash­es or oth­er prob­lems, but that does­n’t mean much.

This is not meant to be a com­plete review; I’ll leave that to the peo­ple who have been using the beta and release can­di­date for more than the few hours I’ve been look­ing at the phone. Those review­ers will also have the ben­e­fit of access to iPads, where I under­stand a lot of changes have been made in the split-screen modes and the ways in which iOS multitasks.

• 1
  My iPad is stuck at iOS 9.
• 2
  No ani­mals were harmed in the mak­ing of this blog post.
• 3
  I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks that three years is too soon for obsolescence.
• 4
  Espe­cial­ly if your friends know about the Dol­phi­nAt­tack
• 5
  I’m sure there are lots of great things that can be done with NFC on iPhone. But pass­word secu­ri­ty is the thing I’m inter­est­ed in