MY first impressions of iOS 8, Apple’s latest update to the software that powers its iPhones and iPads, were overwhelmingly positive.
I’m still enjoying the software and remain largely impressed with its new features. But iOS 8 isn’t perfect.
The new software is still missing some key capabilities offered by Google’s Android and even Microsoft’s Windows Phone software. One of its newer features has a couple of troublesome flaws. And some of the cool new features of iOS 8 aren’t yet available.
The biggest change in iOS 8 is Apple’s embrace of openness. With the update, iPhone and iPad owners can swap out their default keyboards and designate new apps through which to share or edit pictures inside the Photos app.
By including such features, Apple is following in the path of Android, which has long offered users more opportunities to customize their devices than has iOS.
But Apple’s openness goes only so far; some important and popular Android features still aren’t available to iPhone and iPad users.
One thing iOS users still lack is control over the default applications on their devices. Unlike Android users, iPhone and iPad owners have no ability to swap out or delete the applications that ship with the iPhone and iPad. That’s too bad, because many users would probably jump at the chance to replace Apple Maps with Google Maps or Safari with Chrome as their default applications for mapping or accessing Web pages.
In addition, iOS users have no control over which applications work with Siri, Apple’s intelligent assistant. The feature can’t do anything more than what Apple has programmed it to do, because Apple has generally not opened it up to outside developers and hasn’t allowed users to designate which programs they might want to use with it.
So, while Siri can look up stock quotes or sports scores from Yahoo, you can’t get it to use The Wall Street Journal or ESPN instead. And you can’t use it to check your fitness app to find out how far you’ve walked.
Apple’s stance is in contrast to those of Google and Microsoft, both of which have started to open up access to their own intelligent assistants—Google Now and Cortana—to outside developers.
Another missing feature—one that’s particularly noticeable on the iPad—is support for viewing multiple applications at the same time. On Windows tablets and some Android ones, users can display two to four apps on their screens at once, allowing them to more easily copy information from one to another or, say, view a Web page while writing a paper.
But, perhaps, the most important missing feature in iOS 8 is support for multiple user accounts.
Unlike with Android or Windows Phone, iOS users can’t create a guest or child account on their iPhones or iPads that limits access to particular features or data. Instead, iOS supports “restrictions,” but those have to be turned on manually each time a user wants them in place and can’t be configured for individual users.
Lack of support for multiple accounts helps undermine one of iOS 8’s important new features—the ability to use its Touch ID fingerprint sensor to log into third-party apps, such as those from Amazon and e-Trade. That feature is a great convenience because it decreases the number of times you might have to manually type in passwords. But it comes with a big potential downside.
Because iOS 8 doesn’t recognize different user profiles, any fingerprint recognized by the sensor is assumed to be from the same person, and can be used into log on any app that utilizes Touch ID. So, if a year ago, you set up Touch ID to recognize your kids’ fingerprints to unlock your phone so they could play “Minecraft,” you may now, with iOS 8, have inadvertently given them the ability to access your bank account or make purchases on Amazon.
The new Touch ID feature has another flaw: Apple hasn’t given iOS users some way to centrally manage it.
There’s no place in iOS where you will find a list of all the apps that have access to Touch ID. If you later want to turn off access to Touch ID in a particular app after you’ve turned it on, you’ll have to return to that app—assuming you can remember it.
The other disappointing thing about iOS is that some of its most exciting new features weren’t available at launch.
One of these, dubbed Continuity, is supposed to allow iPhones and iPads to work more seamlessly with Mac computers.
The feature will allow users to start an e-mail message on their Mac and continue it on an iPad; answer a call coming into their phone on their Mac; or view on SMS sent to their phone on their computer.
It all sounds great, but most Apple device owners won’t be able to use Continuity until Apple releases the next version of its Mac operating system probably in October.
Apple similarly has a feature called iCloud Photo Library that promises to back up to iCloud and make easily accessible all the pictures stored on users’ devices. Apple has delayed the launch of the new feature until October, and even then, it will be designated as a beta feature, not a full release.
(Since the release of OS X Yosemite for desktops a couple of weeks ago, alleged problems related to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, SMS forwarding and iCloud Drive have made the rounds of the tech media.—Ed.)
It was too much to expect that iOS 8 would fix everything that was lacking in the Apple’s mobile operating system.
But taking a look at what’s still missing has me already looking forward to the next release.
Troy Wolverton / San Jose Mercury News