Author
Cody Sharp
Having used iOS 5 for the last month, I have some thoughts about what it means as a new operating system, how it helps Apple, how it hurts Apple and how it affects the jailbreak community. Instead of being lazy and only writing a quick article that summarizes all of those things, I’ll break them up over the next week. Before I dive into all of those topics, I’ll write about one thing you may or may not have heard – iOS 5 has tons of bugs! In fact, I can’t remember being on a beta of any other software or operating system with as many bugs as iOS has.
To qualify that last statement, I have worked on beta versions of all Microsoft OS’s and in some cases, alpha builds in the last 10 years. I have also beta tested many software packages for the PC and even a few for Mac. The only real comparison to an entire operating system though, is running all of the Windows builds back in the day.
Some of these issues make it seem like they had no internal testing of the iOS at all before releasing it to the developers. For example, I will be on a website and scroll down. Suddenly there is nothing on my screen. If I scroll up I now having nothing there as well. The only way to fix this – restart the application entirely. Another example is that any video you watch within Safari doesn’t have the ability to be fast forwarded, paused or even quit. Those’s right, if you currently watch a video in the iOS 5 Safari browser, you are stuck there unless you hit the home button, close out Safari, then re-open it and quickly switch to another page before the video loads back up. Safari is entirely busted in iOS 5.
The camera is really buggy as well and instead of noticing the speed of which the camera loads up (a touted new feature), I find myself noticing the speed in which the app crashes. Throughout the entire system, there are lots of these types of things. Having never been part of the beta process for an Apple OS before, I’m not sure if this is how they usually go or if the level of issues they are having is something new. What I do know is that it is hard to use as a main OS at this time.
In the end, I have no doubt these bugs will be cleaned up before the public release. I did want to let all of you who think they are missing something by not having access to iOS 5, that you are not. Well, you are missing a lot of bugs. I’ll try to keep you updated as new builds come out and during the next week, look for more posts about iOS 5.