Tech —

iOS 8, thoroughly reviewed

A big, developer-centric update completes the overhaul started in iOS 7.

Performance and battery life

With every iOS update there's a group of people who will swear that it and it alone tanked their device's performance or their battery life. They may actually be correct in some cases—Apple can't test for every possible combination of apps, settings, and usage, and there are billions of different combinations out there. All we can try to do is run our standard benchmarks and tests, looking for signs that CPU, GPU, and battery performance remains the same across both OSes performing the same tasks on the same hardware.

Let's begin with performance. In all Apple A5 and Apple A6-based devices, we found no difference in our Geekbench or GFXBench CPU and graphics benchmarks between iOS 7 and iOS 8 (that list includes the iPhone 4S, 5, and 5C and all but the newest iPads). That's not a surprise; these are mature SoCs and there's probably not much software- or driver-based optimization left to be done at this point. CPU scores from the Apple A7 are likewise identical.

What's changed are GPU scores from the A7, which are consistently up in OpenGL ES-based benchmarks by a small but consistent amount. We observed this on both an iPhone 5S and a Retina iPad Mini; our results are below.

These aren't big gains, but they're better than nothing. Chalk it up to optimized drivers for what is still a relatively new GPU, and remember that these are OpenGL ES 2.0 (T-Rex) and 3.0 (Manhattan) tests—they don't reflect the further performance gains you can wring out of the A7 if you switch to the Metal API.

Apple also uses new iOS releases as an opportunity to improve Safari's JavaScript performance, and iOS 8 is generally an improvement. Scores for the lightweight Sunspider test are slower across the board on all devices, but they're up by quite a bit in the heavier Google Octane and Kraken 1.1 tests (Apple A5 chips have trouble completing version 2.0 of the Octane test, so those results are excluded here).

All of these benchmarks are useful, but they don't capture one big performance-related thing that anyone with an iPhone 4S, iPad 2, first-generation iPad Mini, or iPod Touch is going to experience: iOS 8 struggles on the Apple A5. Ars Culture Editor Casey Johnston and myself will both go into more detail in our pieces about iOS 8 on the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2, but suffice it to say that animations and activities that were once fairly smooth are much less so in iOS 8. The devices drop frames all over the place, and the bigger the animations, the more you'll notice. The situation isn't as bad as it was with iOS 7 and the iPhone 4, but we're hoping Apple can do more to optimize performance on these devices in a future update.

And finally, the metric you really care about: battery life. Last year we tracked a small, generally downward trend in our Wi-Fi browsing test moving from iOS 6 to iOS 7, so we paid special attention to our iOS 8 battery scores. The test's consistency has improved since then, thanks to Spyder colorimeters that allow us to set the screen to the same 200 nit brightness every time we test. We ran each test four times on every device, twice in iOS 7 and twice in iOS 8. The results below are an average of those tests.

The iPhone 4S and 5C and both iPad Minis have new or only lightly-used batteries. The iPhone 5 and 5S, iPod Touch, and the iPad 4 all have used batteries that may have lost some capacity. These numbers are intended to compare iOS 7 to iOS 8 on the same hardware, not to compare battery life numbers for different hardware.
The iPhone 4S and 5C and both iPad Minis have new or only lightly-used batteries. The iPhone 5 and 5S, iPod Touch, and the iPad 4 all have used batteries that may have lost some capacity. These numbers are intended to compare iOS 7 to iOS 8 on the same hardware, not to compare battery life numbers for different hardware.

In the vast majority of cases, battery life under iOS 8 remains essentially identical to iOS 7, at least when the devices are performing the same tasks—we'll have to keep a careful eye on how this trends as we load our devices down with new widgets and other extensions. In a few cases the tests have improved by a few minutes, but the original iPad Mini is the only one that posts an improvement that we'd consider significant. If you were happy with (or upset with) battery life under iOS 7, though, iOS 8 probably won't change your opinion either way.

The battery usage screen, which can show power usage figures from the last 24 hours or last 7 days to help you track down badly behaved apps.
Enlarge / The battery usage screen, which can show power usage figures from the last 24 hours or last 7 days to help you track down badly behaved apps.
Andrew Cunningham

If you do have problems with your battery life under iOS 8, Apple has added one final feature to make your life a little easier: in the Usage panel in the Settings, there's now a Battery Usage screen that lists out every single app you've been using on your phone, and how much battery power they have consumed over the last 24 hours or the last 7 days. This list includes not just third-party applications, but also system services like the Home screen, the iCloud backup service, and the Flashlight. It's a version of a feature that some other platforms have had for a while now, and it should eliminate at least some of the guesswork when you're trying to track down an energy-sucking application.

Conclusions: Finishing the job

iOS 8.
Enlarge / iOS 8.
Andrew Cunningham

iOS 7 and iOS 8 feel like two halves of the same update, two equally necessary steps in the journey from Old iOS to Modern iOS. iOS 7 was a facelift, a new release that added some nice user- and developer- facing features but was overwhelmingly focused on changing the way existing parts of the system looked. iOS 8 freshens up the underpinnings of the operating system, opening an unprecedented number of things up to third parties without sacrificing the things that define iOS. iOS 7 was transformative on an aesthetic level; iOS 8 is transformative on a functional level.

It's surprising how much Apple has left in the hands of third-party developers here, even though the App Store has been a fixture of iOS since version 2.0 hit back in 2008. Apple's built-in apps see only minor, incremental improvements, and the company trusts developers to use the scaffolding it built to improve the operating system in more obvious ways. This starts with extensions and Continuity, the most user-visible of the new developer features, but it extends to iCloud Drive and Family Sharing, HealthKit and HomeKit, and Apple Pay. The new OS is all about adding flexibility, and it's no longer a given that all iPhones and iPads will have to look and work exactly the same way.

iOS 8 is ambitious enough that some of the features promised at WWDC didn't actually make it in time for the shipping product—neither SMS forwarding nor iCloud Photo Library are available in finished form here. The emphasis on OS X and iOS inter-communication during that keynote also makes the lag between new iOS and OS X releases that much more awkward. We're also sure that people will find more bugs than we encountered as they begin to use the OS, as is the case for every x.0 software release that has ever seen the light of day. But those are all very small gripes considered in the face of all the stuff that iOS 8 does well.

With this release, Apple is trying to make additions that developers and power users want without upsetting people who come to iOS specifically because of its consistency and simplicity. It's telling that just about every major iOS 8 feature can be disabled or ignored, and that big transformative features like third-party extensions are hidden from view by default. A surface-level glance at iOS 8 suggests an operating system that isn't all that different from iOS 7. Look just a little deeper, though, and you'll see just how different it is.

The Good

  • Extensions let you customize your phone and tablet to a degree previously disallowed in (non-jailbroken) iOS.
  • Nice improvements to some built-in apps, particularly Safari, Mail, and Messages.
  • Camera and Photos apps are better at taking, sorting, and editing photos.
  • iCloud Drive is a big improvement to the service, though you might not want to turn it on before Yosemite is here.
  • Handoff and Continuity are also waiting for Yosemite, but the functionality that's there today is promising.
  • Family Sharing is a solid common-sense solution to problems in multi-user, multi-device homes (though multi-user, single-device usage is still not optimal).
  • HealthKit and HomeKit are promising frameworks that could bring order to fractured markets.
  • No major battery life or benchmark regressions, and even a couple of improvements.
  • Further tweaks and refines the design introduced in iOS 7.
  • Runs great on A6- and A7-class hardware.
  • It might go without saying, but this update is available to every supported iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch today, regardless of device type or mobile operator. Take that, other ecosystems.

The Bad

  • Still no public transit directions in Maps.
  • Eats up more storage space, a problem especially for 8GB and 16GB iOS devices.
  • iPhone calling integration works, but audio quality could be better.
  • Not all of the features advertised at WWDC were actually done in time for release.
  • Hungry for additional screen space in a way that is unkind to devices like the iPhone 4S.
  • Free iCloud drive storage is limited, higher capacity tiers aren't price-competitive.
  • With great new features comes the possibility of great new bugs. Look at some of the problems developers have had with extensions as an example.

The Ugly

  • User interface fluidity and responsiveness takes a dive on older iPhones and iPads with Apple A5 chips.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham

Channel Ars Technica