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iOS can’t get the easy stuff right

Published by marco on

This is a laundry list of issues I’ve had with iOS over the last half-year or so. Some things get fixed; others break. This operation system is in its 12th version and is 10 years old. It’s made by the richest company on the planet. It’s frustrating to watch the magical engine of capitalism and privatization be seemingly unable to get even the easy stuff right.

How is it that I’m the only one to whom this happens? iOS is supremely unreliable. I have an iPhone 6s with iOS 12.01 and a battery with 94% health.

Location services
They’ve TWICE NOW been mysteriously back on. System upgrade? Stop touching my stuff, Apple.
Messages
  • Messages are duplicated
  • Messages don’t go out, but aren’t marked as undelivered
  • Some conversations suddenly turn green (SMS-only)
Power Draining

iOS still doesn’t have anything to prevent apps from misbehaving

  • Clock has sucked away 60% of my battery, driving it into the ground
  • So has Garmin Connect, with background activity

 Clock: 10 minutes on-screen Clock: 60% of battery Garmin Connect: 59% of battery in background

  • I can’t block background activity; I have to kill the app.
  • iOS doesn’t allow you to set a power-usage limit for apps.
  • Power-save mode must be approved: it can’t just turn on automatically under a certain level
  • So, at work, my phone just happily drives itself into the ground, making sure there’s no battery left when I need it
Bluetooth
It won’t stay off. If you’re in airplane mode, it shows up as “off” (disabled), but it’s really enabled and temporarily disabled. Once you’re out of airplane mode, it comes back
Camera
My camera has also crapped out so badly that restarting doesn’t help. I had to reboot.
Personal Hotspot
The Personal Hotspot comes on every time I plug my phone in to charge. I can only turn it off by putting the phone in flight mode. When I turn it off in the settings, it seems to turn off, removing the blue bar at the top, but … when I go back to the settings, it’s back on again
Mail

The “cellular data” toggle in the Mail settings has the same issue: you can toggle it off, but it’s still on when you go back into the settings. The only way to actual toggle off data for Mail is to do it from the cellular-data settings. The toggle in the Mail app is just decoration: it looks like you can change the setting, but the toggle is actually read-only.

Mail has had such power-draining background activity (no logs or indication why, of course), that I’ve turned it off entirely.

Bonus: MacOS ICloud

I finally cracked and turned on a trickle of data (PhotoStream) in iCloud.

I was unable to log in at first because I was presented with a model dialog with no fields or buttons.

 iCloud Login

For those hoping for help, I honestly can no longer remember how I got around this. Probably restarted the app or disable iCloud and re-enabled it.