iOS 9, thoroughly reviewed

Apple gives the iPad a lot of love as iOS goes back into spit-and-polish mode.

Read the whole story

 

[gettersetter]

I think Apple maps has reached feature parity with Google Maps, and almost let me ditch my standalone GPS. I even prefer the 3D satellite view over street view to quickly tell me if I'm exactly where I need to be. There are two caveats, however.

When routing for navigation, Google Maps lets me quickly hit an option to "Avoid Highways." As a local truck driver sometimes you just want to keep it on the streets. If I jump on a highway, then G Maps gets the hint and goes with it. Apple maps, even in iOS 9, has no such feature I can see.

And for crying out loud, when typing a hyphenated address in Queens, NY, like 37-26 108 street or something, Apple maps doesn't offer any usable suggestions, whereas G Maps can and does. Apple requires a postal correct address *without* a hyphen such as 3726 108th. Sure it will generally figure it out and route you even with the hyphen in there but it would sure be nice to get a live suggestion closer than Turkey. Seriously. I've tried several times a day for a year and the hyphen chokes the suggestion process.

I know Queens is just an outer borough of NYC but we use the hyphen here *all the time.* What the hell, there's only 2.3 million people that live here, and only two major international airports.

The weirdest part: if you drop a purple pin on a house in *Queens* by long pressing (not in Manhattan or any other borough) the address is returned hyphenated! Like 108-02 or 46-100. It's just the live suggestions that are broken. So clearly someone over at Apple knows how things are done in this neck of the woods. Probably was all the bug reports I filed

 

[gettersetter]

HotelQuebec[/url]":2b51gb4j]Feature fragmentation on iOS is horrible.

Compared to what? Older devices are lucky to even have support! There were no guarantees. But if they can't have 100% feature parity it is "horrible fragmentation?" I don't think that means what you think it does.

 

[gettersetter]

evan_s[/url]":2awn74fe]

InlineRanger[/url]":2awn74fe]
Maybe I don't know how multitasking works? Apple never deigned to teach me the intricacies of their software design. My experience is that apps tend to accumulate in the multitasking window over the course of a day, certainly more than the 3-5 most recents I'd actually want to switch between. I haven't sat there to check, but maybe Apple kills suspended apps after a period of time. My experience is that they aren't killed after an hour of suspension, a period of time long after an app would be justified as being "recent" to me.

So tell me, what is the Apple-sanctioned way to use an iPhone? Because the "it just works" way isn't working very well for me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

See that's the thing. There really is no multi tasking in iOS. Apps can not run in the background at all. (ignoring the recent iOS 9 split screen etc). When an app isn't the active app on your screen it is immediately suspended and will be purged from memory as needed. For things like chat programs, music players there are special functions to build a component that handles just the background function but it has very strict requirements and limits. The main app is suspended immediately. If you try switching to one of those really old apps you'll see that it's really just launching again and returning to where you were because it had long been purged out of memory completely. As SraCet it's basically a screenshot of the app the last time it was open and that's all that's left of it in memory.

Add up all those "special functions" and you simply can't assert that apps are not able to run in the background. Of course they can. Nav, music, push email, pebble alerts, chat apps and many more and not just native apps either. It's the rare app that cannot continue to function in some way unless many apps are launched in the interim, forcing nonessential functions to purged. But even in that case, by nav always works, my chats and emails always arrive, news and weather, and so on, even without launching the app at all in many cases. I see the updated widgets.