iOS 5: Everything you’ve always needed, finally here
[For context, read the feature list first].
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very impressed with iOS5, and it’s a huge step forward. But I have to say with a lot of these features I was thinking finally.
I’m especially referring here to the whole ‘No PC’ option. iTunes has always been the weakest link with iOS – the need to tether your device to back it up, to update the OS, and to download apps & music with any sort of reliability.
This affected me as a developer in two ways. One is that people didn’t back up often (sometimes going months between backups), simply because they didn’t sync often. I developed geospike’s sync feature to help with this (and many other things). It also meant they didn’t update their OS often. To combat this, I support old OSs, in fact the latest version of GPS Log still supports iOS 3.0! Both of these were more exacerbated in one of my target audiences: travellers, since they are often away from their tethered computer.
Another thing I saw lots were people with basically “broken” iTunes setups. Perhaps it was on their old computer? Perhaps they are trying to shift. Unless you go from one mac to another with the migration assistant (which rocks), lets face it – this is a challenge.
Being able to sync wireless to iTunes is also awesome. Takes the effort out of syncing, so long as your device is plugged in and both are turned on, it will sync. That is really, really cool!
That Apps will now update automatically is gold. Actually people are *very* good at updating quickly already, it seems a great many people who update, update every week. So this will just make a good situation better. yey!
That you can download your entire backcatelogue of purchased items is another feature, I regard as a finally. I bought and paid for stuff. I can re-download them for free. Why should I have to go looking?
As for notification, Apple itself acknowledged this was pretty broken, and it’s nice to see them adopt the status bar notification log feature from Android, which reminds even the hardest-core Apple fan why it’s a good thing to have competition (remember: IE6!). I’m a huge fan of Android for precisely this reason (oh, and thanks for Wifi hotspots in iOS 4.3!).
Hope I don’t come across as negative here – how can I say… I love it so much that I expect a lot too.
The other new features are pretty impressive. Keeping everything magically in sync is a great idea, and yeah that’s definitely not something that should have been expected in the past.
One fun thing about iOS releases is seeing which features Apple has implemented that I had recently hacked in myself. I implemented a search bar in iOS 2.x just week before they were cool (and part of the standard basic UITableViewController). I implemented meta-data for saved photos, then iOS 4.2 came out. I guess with iCloud, a great many app developers will be able to sync their data without creating their own solution like I did. There are so many advantages for my customers of having this data go through geospike.com that I don’t really feel sad about that one. I wonder how ‘The Daily’ feels now that there is (what appears to be) a pretty kick-ass ‘newsstand’ feature. Hell with a feature like that, maybe Apple’s 30% cut is worth it for pubs! I’m actually thinking to check out a few subscriptions this way. I wonder if I should switch my paper Newsweek subscription to digital?
There’s certainly a lot of great stuff in iOS5! Some really great stuff. I’m just pointing out that being able to download all your purchases and sync without are thankfully with us at last ;-)
Tell you what it’s going to be nice to start dropping support for iOS < 4.2, and phase out support for old app versions too.
