iOS 10 reviewed: There’s no reason not to update

Apple puts together a comprehensive update with some smart app redesigns.

Read the whole story

 

[efbrazil]

Combining force touch and long hold touch like you suggest is probably the single best thing apple could do for usability. In PC terms, tap is left click, force touch / hold touch are both right click. Do we need 2 right clicks that do arbitrarily different things?

 

[torp]

All Home settings, including the stuff in the Control Center, gets synced between all iOS 10 devices signed into your iCloud account.

Hmm so if my iphone is private, but the iPads are shared... I'll spam everyone else using the tablet with my home screen stuff?

 

[dtabb]

Please keep this article archived, Ars. It is by far the best yet for sheer completeness.

 

[DaMiTrOn]

One thing I've noticed is that all the lyrics from my songs in the music app are gone. They still exist on itunes but are nowhere to be found on my phone.

 

[MatchedLuggage]

So, my iOS 10 Music app looks different from the one reviewed. I don't have Library/For You/Browse/Radio/Search as my tabs, I have Library/Connect/Radio/Search.

Could you be reviewing a Beta version?

 

[Maury Markowitz]

ackmondual[/url]":1srv472a]
I don't doubt your statement, but you're only one use case.

Did you actually read the article? iOS 10 works just fine on many older phones - that's not my opinion, that's measured objective fact as reported right here on this page.

ackmondual[/url]":1srv472a] I am being serious when I ask now how my arguments are considered half baked.

You see objective facts that clearly demonstrate you're wrong, chose to ignore them, and then base your entire reply on "well that's what I think". That's pretty much the definition of half-baked right there.

ackmondual[/url]":1srv472a]
Why risk it? The 2 devices are solely gaming devices. I don't do anything else on there.

And speaking of a single use-case...

Whatever, don't upgrade if you don't want to, but don't try to imply that its based on anything that applies to anyone else.

 

[MatchedLuggage]

Mistake: " If you tap on the little arrow next to the date in Album view..."

You mean, tap the little arrow in Photos view, there is no arrow in Album view.

 

[Jordan Orlando]

I don't like the visual layout of the new SMS/iMessage app. The new buttons to the left of the text window and the vertically stacked round-icon-and-name identifier at the top of the screen needlessly encroach on the space allocated for, you know, texting. I do a lot of texting so this is going to annoy me for a while. (It can't be changed back.)

Also, I don't like having to touch the home button and then press it to get back to what I was doing. I haven't gone and researched if I can change the setting that controls this, but as a loyal Ars commenter I felt I owed it to the community to immediately come here and bitch about it, first, before attempting to find anything out.

EDIT: Also, I was really hoping they'd add "Personal Hotspot" to those buttons you get when you swipe up from the bottom (since, when I'm travelling, I'm constantly turning it on and off.) But no.

Also, the notifications are now harder to see since they're no longer reversed to white-on-black text.

EDIT 2: My second paragraph is moot because you can switch the home button back to its previous functionality in the "Accessibility" settings.

 

[ackmondual]

Maury Markowitz[/url]":3dsfx24y]

ackmondual[/url]":3dsfx24y]
I don't doubt your statement, but you're only one use case.

Did you actually read the article? iOS 10 works just fine on many older phones - that's not my opinion, that's measured objective fact as reported right here on this page.

ackmondual[/url]":3dsfx24y] I am being serious when I ask now how my arguments are considered half baked.

You see objective facts that clearly demonstrate you're wrong, chose to ignore them, and then base your entire reply on "well that's what I think". That's pretty much the definition of half-baked right there.

ackmondual[/url]":3dsfx24y]
Why risk it? The 2 devices are solely gaming devices. I don't do anything else on there.

And speaking of a single use-case...

Whatever, don't upgrade if you don't want to, but don't try to imply that its based on anything that applies to anyone else.

I read the article. I know Apple stated that ios9 is officially supported on IpT5 and Ipad Air. Am I to ignore experiences reported by others on the internet and from my tech minded acquaintances about performance issues?

We also have facts that those who are upset by the iPhone 7's lack of headphone jack can still use them since there are workarounds like the dongle. I'm not going to say those who still prefer a headphone jack are wrong, as they have their reasons.

 

[primetime]

It would have been nice if the article included a section on the features removed from ios-10. I have an iphone 6s plus and I have confirmed with Apple support that the world clock landscape mode feature was removed. I wonder what other features were removed?

 

[gwguy]

A couple of reasons I've found to not upgrade, seeing as the author wasn't able to come up with any:

1) Slide to unlock removed. Now if you don't have touchID you must type your pin code in every time.

and

2) Audio control removed from the slide up menu and replaced with night shift.

I'm sure there's more but those are both pains for me.

 

[Jiraiya]

sunflower[/url]":3mb96dlj]Overall ok. I'm not crazy about volume controls moving to a second page on control panel. I certainly change the volume more often than the one time I set up night mode. Now an extra swipe every time.

I also dislike the handling of people in a group chat. You now have to click on the members, where before it was a quick glance. We usually have multiple groups going at once, so this is many extra keystrokes a day.

Edit- even worse, once you click on group members in group chat to instack the thumbnail pics, you have to scroll to see all the members if there is more than about 3.

Not an extra swipe every time. If you leave the Music card up when you exit Control Center, it will return to that the next time you start Control Center. It persists across lock and unlock cycles of the phone.

 

[Leaf]

Is there any actual reason in terms of hardware that the iPhone 6 can't do raise-to-wake or voicemail transcriptions?

 

[gwold]

gwguy[/url]":1nsaf1mm]A couple of reasons I've found to not upgrade, seeing as the author wasn't able to come up with any:

1) Slide to unlock removed. Now if you don't have touchID you must type your pin code in every time.

and

2) Audio control removed from the slide up menu and replaced with night shift.

I'm sure there's more but those are both pains for me.

Both of these have been discussed, either in the article or in the comments.

1) Slide to Unlock was replaced with a second tap of the Home button. If your lock timer hasn't expired yet, you don't have to re-enter your pin; if it has, well, you'd have had to re-enter your pin in iOS 9 as well.

2) Audio controls were moved from the "first," left panel, but you can get them by sliding to the right panel. And if that's where you last closed the panels, next time you go to them you'll see it first.

Replacing Slide with another tap is a muscle memory issue for me, but otherwise it's not bad. I bet in a week it won't matter to me at all.

 

[woodelf]

So, do these "rich content" Messages plug-ins mean it could finally become a multi-protocol chat client, and replace something like BeeJive? If Facebook, Slack, et al., wanted to do it, could they create a "Message app" that lets Messages speak Facebook, Slack, etc.?

 

[adespoton]

woodelf[/url]":lyp5azxj]So, do these "rich content" Messages plug-ins mean it could finally become a multi-protocol chat client, and replace something like BeeJive? If Facebook, Slack, et al., wanted to do it, could they create a "Message app" that lets Messages speak Facebook, Slack, etc.?

Yes and no. Technically, it is possible, as the iTranslate plugin shows (it sends your text to a third party site which translates it and sends it back to you -- essentially you're communicating with some other site via Messages), but it's highly unlikely Apple would approve a FB Messenger/SnapChat/Hangouts/etc. plugin in its Messages Store.

That said, I'd really like an encryption plugin that works like Signal.

 

[heavyboots]

For whatever reason, if you don't want universal clipboard to work, you can head into the settings app and disable Handoff. As best as we can tell, there's no way to keep Handoff but not the universal clipboard.

The lack of separation seems like it could be a bit of a gotcha at some point or other. I am frequently known to have code in my clipboard while programming. Get a text message, get distracted, mess with the phone for a while and come back to your Mac and try and paste the code back in to discover it's been replaced with an emoji or URL or something. Commence the spittle on the monitor.

But on the other hand, I do quite like the ability to bounce a web page from my phone to my Mac to continue browsing there…

 

[duanewilliams]

I have never been able to get turn by turn navigation to work in Apple Maps; so I always use Google Maps.

 

[Shannara]

(page 9) The clock is on a "dark mode" AKA "damage eyes mode" on, with no way to turn it off...

Hopefully they will fix that bug in the next minor release. Until then, I can see other clock applications getting a huge user boost by folks who don't want to damage their eyes.

 

[Marlor_AU]

Shannara[/url]":2g535fo2](page 9) The clock is on a "dark mode" AKA "damage eyes mode" on, with no way to turn it off...

Hopefully they will fix that bug in the next minor release. Until then, I can see other clock applications getting a huge user boost by folks who don't want to damage their eyes.

How does dark mode damage eyes? All evidence suggests that blue light is the component of display output that causes eye damage (increasing the risk of macular degeneration) and upsets circadian rhythms.

Avoiding blue light (including the use of lower colour temperatures and avoidance of white backgrounds in general) is currently considered best practice in terms of reducing harm from electronic displays.

 

[harmless]

MatchedLuggage[/url]":2sd7a5aa]So, my iOS 10 Music app looks different from the one reviewed. I don't have Library/For You/Browse/Radio/Search as my tabs, I have Library/Connect/Radio/Search.

Could you be reviewing a Beta version?

No. You just disabled "Show Apple Music" in the Music app's settings.

 

[punchsuckr]

dsparil[/url]":wn89wrnq]I seem to be in the minority, but I really do not like the design of the new Music app. Everything is just way too big in general. I can understand if people found certain elements too small before, but they've gone way too far in the other direction.

On the other hand, album art in the Now Playing screen has gotten smaller for seemingly no reason. There's almost enough space for square cover art to go edge to edge even with the increased size of the other elements if you let the little top v overlap with the art.

Then there's the loss of listed artists in compilations after finally having that added in iOS 9. That one small loss has made compilations more difficult than necessary to browse again. I'm hoping that's just an oversight.

I was thinking along the same lines when i updated... then i downgraded to 9 but then started missing all the speed and features. Since then I have reinstalled 10 and in the process of warming up to the new music app. It actually gets things done in fewer interactions.

I still though havent figured out how to clear up next or how to play later (this has something to do with the items already in the queue).

 

[therealeffingaeiouy]

Nice review. I have been saying 10.0 is probably my favorite iOS update in a long time. No big flashy reasons but the improved usability of the device is significant. I can't think of a major iOS update I appreciated this much in a long time and i have been through them all.

 

[stormbeta]

efbrazil[/url]":1ryzhw7p]Combining force touch and long hold touch like you suggest is probably the single best thing apple could do for usability. In PC terms, tap is left click, force touch / hold touch are both right click. Do we need 2 right clicks that do arbitrarily different things?

This kind of thing is one of my biggest issues with iOS. They seem to have completely lost their way when it comes to UI design lately, and it feels more and more like an inconsistent mess.

 

[Sydde]

jhodge[/url]":f7ur441a]... I really want OS-level handwriting recognition. My Newton 130 managed that well enough!
...

It will cost you $10us, but I find it rather nice. If you buy an app called WritePad Pro, the app itself has a pretty-ok rich-ish text editor that offers write anywhere, handwriting keyboard and normal keyboard (which you need for some characters, like em-dash or degrees) modes. The handwriting keyboard can be included in your keyboard set (I used it to write this post) and it works fairly well – has the advantage of not displaying those annoying predictive boxes.

Also, I notice that WritePad can be included in the unlock widgets screen, so that is handy if you use it a lot.

 

[computertheque]

stormbeta[/url]":y4w2qpps]

efbrazil[/url]":y4w2qpps]Combining force touch and long hold touch like you suggest is probably the single best thing apple could do for usability. In PC terms, tap is left click, force touch / hold touch are both right click. Do we need 2 right clicks that do arbitrarily different things?

This kind of thing is one of my biggest issues with iOS. They seem to have completely lost their way when it comes to UI design lately, and it feels more and more like an inconsistent mess.

The fact that a hold press essentially does nothing throughout most of iOS (outside of placing a text cursor) is a real shame. Especially when you consider that the SE is now the only sold model that does not support force touch, they can't even really use 3D touch hardware as a selling point excuse. It would benefit them in the long term to train all iOS 10 users how 3D touch would work, even in a limited manner (is, only shallow press options, not deep press options. no peek/pop).

 

[graylshaped]

cpragman[/url]":246hhfes]Updated OTA.
Bricked (stupid early adopter).
Restored via iTunes.
Updated via iTunes.
All is good.

Failed update /= bricked.

Bricks don't come back. Failed updates are really annoying. Bricking is something much worse.

/pedantry off

 

[graylshaped]

I greatly appreciate the changes to the music app. Played around with the new iMessage cutesy stuff--sent a kissy-face thing to my wife, noticed it was a lipsticky thing, and we both thought "that's kind of weird."

Stopped at the grocery store on the way home and as I was Applepaying, noticed Maps had sent me a nice note telling me it had marked where I had parked the car. Let's hope it does so next time I use the remote lot at LAX!

Playing with the Home app. It found the Hue bridge, but not all the lights, oddly. Noticed and applied an update for the bridge, and now Home can't find the bridge. I'll play with it tomorrow.

edit: I had apparently paired it to Siri previously, but never finished the set-up. Unpaired, re-started the bridge, paired to Siri, and Home saw the bridge. Two minutes to put the lights in the rooms I wanted, and it's working like a boss. Doesn't seem to interfere with the part that will be important to my wife, which is "Alexa: All lights off."

 

[nbs2]

kutija[/url]":3ubjr00d]Still no serious changes. For example, I just got a PDF file over LinkedIn and guess what - I cannot open it in, let say, Adobe Acrobat, but in some damn filebrowser view. Why? Why are they miss to address such important issues?

Also am I the only one having a problem with a new design of notifications? Missing grouping that was available in iOS 9? I woke up this morning with 76 notifications listed in one long, ugly scroll and I had no idea which is which. At least in iOS 9 there were groups, now we have this damn mess.

And they are ugly as hell, just as "new" widget design. For me this is a big step back, but god bless that we have stupid iMessage animations and backgrounds to send with new stickers.

You've got several points here, and I'm not sure which folks are overwhelmingly downvoting, but I'd like to echo the second. Losing "manual sort", which grouped notifications by app is disappointing. I have important (email, messages) and less important (sports updates) notifications and the volume of the latter will now end up hiding the former. I could stop getting score and inning by inning updates, but it's almost October...

 

[rickh59954]

"The rest of the Photos app, including all the image editing options, are pretty much the same as they are in iOS 9."

Facial recognition? I know that has been a feature on the OSX pictures app - but this was the first time I saw it working in iOS directly.

 

[tgjb]

The ugly new notifications are one good reason.

 

[photovirus]

Great article.

However, I came across a much more thorough review by Federico Viticci from Macstories. I genuinely recommend it to everyone who wants to know all about new iOS features and how they work.
That's a very long read, but it's hard to surprise Ars veterans with that.

 

[woodelf]

heavyboots[/url]":11vvs3tu]

For whatever reason, if you don't want universal clipboard to work, you can head into the settings app and disable Handoff. As best as we can tell, there's no way to keep Handoff but not the universal clipboard.

The lack of separation seems like it could be a bit of a gotcha at some point or other. I am frequently known to have code in my clipboard while programming. Get a text message, get distracted, mess with the phone for a while and come back to your Mac and try and paste the code back in to discover it's been replaced with an emoji or URL or something. Commence the spittle on the monitor.

But on the other hand, I do quite like the ability to bounce a web page from my phone to my Mac to continue browsing there…

Apple likes to entangle things that in some sense go together, intending to make things simple for most users. But it sometimes turns into a gotcha for more complex users. Case in point: MacOS has had automagic curly quotes for ages (maybe even predating OS X?—I forget). This is very helpful, because typing them manually is a pain, and not at all intuitive. Somewhere along the line (Mavericks?), it added automagic smart dashes. This is probably helpful for many people, but it drives me absolutely batty. I know when to use a hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash. The OS X engine is slightly smarter than the MSWord engine, so it makes fewer errors, but it also makes it a pain in the butt if you want to do anything nonstandard (like use a double-dash in a context where you can't use bullets, say). And the alternate dashes are ridiculously easy to type on OS X (and have been, all the way back to at least System 7), so I don't even see the need for this feature.* However, there's just one setting: "smart quotes and dashes".

(This is a solveable problem, but I wish I didn't have to solve it. I have discovered that you can separately turn those features on and off via a contextual menu, but it's either application-specific or maybe even text-box-specific, and there appears to a bug where it reverts to the system setting on a random basis. So I'm forever turning off smart dashes. And you can put in a text substitution shortcut that turns "--" into "--", and that also overrules the smart dashes thing—except that there is a default substitution to turn "--" into "—" that keeps reappearing in my list, no matter how many times I delete it.)

So I'm not surprised that all of the sharing-data things are under one big setting, and you either get all or none. Just disappointed.

* IMHO, smart dashes is like smart copy-n-paste: it causes problems more often than it solves them.

 

[JerkyChew]

There's a huge reason not to upgrade: No more song ratings. My entire library is built around the idea of 5-star ratings, and now it's moot. Thanks Apple.

 

[woodelf]

dsparil[/url]":14i4fs3j]I seem to be in the minority, but I really do not like the design of the new Music app. Everything is just way too big in general. I can understand if people found certain elements too small before, but they've gone way too far in the other direction.

On the other hand, album art in the Now Playing screen has gotten smaller for seemingly no reason. There's almost enough space for square cover art to go edge to edge even with the increased size of the other elements if you let the little top v overlap with the art.

Then there's the loss of listed artists in compilations after finally having that added in iOS 9. That one small loss has made compilations more difficult than necessary to browse again. I'm hoping that's just an oversight.

Music app is mostly improved, IMHO. I really wish I could turn off the eye-searing red, however. It's uncomfortable enough to look at that I spend less time searching for things than I might otherwise, instead just grabbing the first song that catches my eye and then closing the app and letting it go from there. And the new, bolder text just compounds the problem.

Putting your local music in as a sub-menu of your not-local music, instead of either a toggle (like in iOS 9) or giving them equal footing so that I could just default to the music on my device is definitely a step back. Though maybe I'll get used to it--it's not my whole library (because I don't subscribe to Match or Apple Music), but a modest % was purchased through iTunes and shows up. I have unlimited data for a reason, and maybe being able to easily grab anything I've purchased and download it to listen to is worth the annoyance of having to dig one more layer to get at the local music.

Also, the eye-searing color choice for the Music app's interface is really off-putting. It's bad enough that it's worth mentioning twice. If they must do the warm end of the spectrum, how about a rich dark brick red or maroon to show off the impressive color fidelity of the screens? Or burnt orange or rust?

Finally, where are my star ratings?! I normally buy a new album, put it on my phone and listen to it on loop for a few days, rating the songs as they come around. And those ratings then sync back to iTunes, so that my many smart playlists can act on them.

 

[noluv4]

I really hope they add an option to shrink the top header bar in Messages soon. I think it takes up way too much (not very useful) space. Additionally, if the contact you're messaging has no photo assigned to them - and most of mine don't - you get a nice ugly gray square with a white letter in the center. At least they could assign a different color to each contact, or let you pick your own, so it looks a little nicer in addition to taking up all that extra precious text-viewing space .

 

[computertheque]

noluv4[/url]":1c5nsdxc]I really hope they add an option to shrink the top header bar in Messages soon. I think it takes up way too much (not very useful) space. Additionally, if the contact you're messaging has no photo assigned to them - and most of mine don't - you get a nice ugly gray square with a white letter in the center. At least they could assign a different color to each contact, or let you pick your own, so it looks a little nicer in addition to taking up all that extra precious text-viewing space .

Yes, the header paired with the now cramped keyboard area has resulted in Messages feeling like the overall viewing area is bordering on nonexistent these days.

 

[ackmondual]

JerkyChew[/url]":30gzilfi]There's a huge reason not to upgrade: No more song ratings. My entire library is built around the idea of 5-star ratings, and now it's moot. Thanks Apple.

Careful... saying you're not into upgrading your mobile OS is frowned upon here on Ars Technica, even though you've stated your reasons

 

[woodelf]

Am I overlooking a setting? Is it possible to have the pull-down sheet remember its last status (notifications or widgets)? Or set it to default to the widgets page instead of the notifications page? I basically never use the notifications (in fact, I just this week took the time to go through and turn off the vast majority of notifications, because I was never looking at them). I use several widgets all the time, so if I'm pulling that sheet down, it's probably to activate Camera+ or create a new Evernote note or check my Things list, not to look at/for a notification.

 

[Digger]

So, we have iPhones at work, A 5s I think. Hate the thing, but that's neither here nor there.
It gets updated to iOS 10 and swiping to unlock goes away. I found out accidentally you now press the home button twice to get the lock screen number pad.

Stupid apple, real stupid. But the worst thing is what they've done to the "Messages" program. How they fuck do I disable all that juvenile drawing and shit and just go back to basic text messaging?

Seriously apple, there are professionals who use your products for work, not 14 year old kids with too much time on their hands.

It feels like change for change sake (a lot like Win10 come to think of it)