iOS 9, thoroughly reviewed

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

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[Daniel Smith]

TBoneT[/url]":3m5ixl91]

deckeda[/url]":3m5ixl91]After the dustup this summer about Home Sharing disappearing I didn't see it mentioned in the "thorough" review.

It is back. It is tricky to find, though. In the Music app, it's in with the sorting options. When I started the Videos app, the first thing it asked was which library to use. As far as I can tell, everything works the way it used to.

Yeah, tricky to find (in the drop-down menu with "Albums", "Artists", etc.), and very hard to detect -- once you're sharing a library, there are almost no UI cues that you're looking at a shared library rather than a local one. (Most reliable way to find the answer is tap-tap back to the "Home Sharing" menu and see where the check box is.)

I have a moderately-large library (7500 tracks), and I'm happy that Home Sharing actually works now -- attempts to connect in previous versions, since iOS 5 or so, time out. But connecting is still tediously slow, taking minutes. I don't understand how both iTunes and Apple TV can offer basically the same functionality while loading in a few seconds. Sure hope the new Apple TV won't be sharing the iOS code...

 

[Daniel Smith]

I have a moderately-large library (7500 tracks), and I'm happy that Home Sharing actually works now -- attempts to connect in previous versions, since iOS 5 or so, time out. But connecting is still tediously slow, taking minutes. I don't understand how both iTunes and Apple TV can offer basically the same functionality while loading in a few seconds. Sure hope the new Apple TV won't be sharing the iOS code...

... and I take it back. After updating iTunes (don't know if this is relevant or not), my latest attempts at Home Sharing today are all getting stuck and refusing to load. Maybe I just got lucky when it tested it. Ultimately, no, years later, after multiple major OS releases and updates to the Music app, after dropping the feature and then putting in the engineering effort to bring it back, Home Sharing still doesn't work.

Really getting tired of this crap.

(An Apple discussion thread for anyone who's curious: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5334240 )