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Developers overwhelmingly liked the iOS 7.1 changes – how about you? [Poll]

Back in January, when Apple released the third beta of iOS 7.1 to developers, we asked them what they thought of a whole bunch of specific changes, and whether they preferred the iOS 7 or 7.1 versions. Developers overwhelmingly favored the changes.

You can see below how developers voted on the specific elements. We’re asking you just to give an overall thumbs-up or down to the revamped user-interface … 

There were some clear no-brainers, where iOS 7.1 either added functionality or made it clearer what was going on. Examples of additional functionality included the ability to switch auto-HDR on or off for photos, choose to have wallpaper motion on or off, and add a car display to the possible restrictions in settings. Clarity was improved in things like confirmation that there have been no missed notifications and showing when auto-flash was on in the camera.

Developers also voted more than three-to-one in favor of five cosmetic changes: the higher-contrast keyboard and music controls, darker icons – and revamped Facetime and power-off screens.

It was a somewhat closer call on the darker folders, in-call phone screen and tweaked Clear button in notifications.

The only two areas where things got close were the reduced transparency and darker dock on the homescreen, and the quite substantially different incoming phone call screen – but even here, iOS 7.1 still won out.

Do you agree? Let us know whether you prefer iOS 7 or 7.1 in the poll, and tell us why in the comments.

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Comments

  1. frikova - 10 years ago

    I liked it a lot, but I really miss the thin fonts.

  2. ondre (@ondre) - 10 years ago

    What about the Siri push to listen?

    • Ben Lovejoy - 10 years ago

      That wasn’t included in the poll. Personally I use it in noisy environments and find it worthwhile then.

      • scumbolt2014 - 10 years ago

        This new feature is fantastic. Makes Siri much more of a usable feature for me personally.

  3. lycius84 - 10 years ago

    I’m in the middle so I can’t vote.

  4. Tim Jr. - 10 years ago

    Good overall, but want my contacts photo’s to show again when receiving a call from them. not sure why they removed that.

    • Fernando Perez - 10 years ago

      ditto. also wish they left the call/disconnect buttons alone

    • Teddy Ratcliffe - 10 years ago

      Agreed! That feature must be brought back.

    • gidgiddoni2000 - 10 years ago

      Exactly. Funny enough, that change was big enough to me I am yet to update my iOS. Hoping an option to choose one or the other or customize more comes in the future. Hanging 7 for now.

  5. secdj - 10 years ago

    In my professional opinion as a designer, the new slide to unlock is really really ugly. I don’t know if they did it to kind of bring back iOS 6 slider but the design does not have anything to do with “plain and simple” The fact that the “phone” turns when u slide it doesn’t not change the fact its hideous. U put colors and thats fine, now they put TOO MUCH because its get heavy, instead of simple.

    I cannot even start with the incoming call screen. The is by far the worst thing Apple has done. It is nothing functional and it is incredibly ugly. I have to say i took beautiful high quality pics of my main contacts, and now i just delete the pic, It looks better without the pic. The tiny pic on the right doesn’t make sense, you can’t even see it. My parents have always rely on the fact the see the full screen pic. The whole screen looks empty, unfinished.

    They are making the same mistake Microsoft did. Just because circles would work ok in an “iWatch” and in CarPlay, it does not mean you have to put it anywhere. Design wise, i really have to go towards Andriod this time.

    • Could not agree more.. The circles look like crap on Google+ – why do we need them on iOS??
      I’ve been adding beautiful contact pictures to my OS X Address Book for YEARS, and now I can only enjoy the center of it.. BUT WHY????

      • jrox16 - 10 years ago

        This is very surprising to me, I feel like all the circles actually fix the overall consistency of the UI and are far more beautiful than the long rectangles which didn’t fit at all. A circle theme fits the iPhone since the home button has always been a circle and has always been on the phone and likely always will.

      • Dylan Joseph - 10 years ago

        +1 Jakob! Circles are one of my biggest beefs with iOS7. INCREDIBLY AWFUL design element.

    • I really miss the square buttons, thin fonts, transparency.
      But what drives me crazy is the animations with reduce motion activated. They’re super annoying, and slow. (I have an iPhone 4s and iPad 2, both updated. The animations in both iDevices were faster in iOS 7.0.x).

      • jrox16 - 10 years ago

        The circle buttons seem to make the UI more consistent and match with the fact the iPhone has a circular home button, I think it’s much nicer, but I do miss the thinner fonts. Not sure where you are missing the transparency, it is still there on the 5s…. perhaps they removed it from the 4s and the iPad 2 in order to improve performance since those Gaussian blurs do require additional graphics processing and older devices can struggle with that. Now before you get mad, keep in mind that no other phone maker/platform supports a 3 year old phone, heck Apple even improved performance on the nearly 4 year old iPhone 4! That is unheard of support in the phone world, Android folks are lucky to get 18 months.

      • secdj - 10 years ago

        jrox16 I understand your point, but believe me, when you have TOO MUCH of something it doesn’t make it more consistent, it makes it heavy on that items (circles in this case). Even the rectangle (which i don’t care as much as the full screen caller ID) at the bottom of the page in the active call, brought that page to an “closed” end, it put the page together… like: Top: name in the center… circles in the middle, and a rectangle at the bottom with the pic blurred… that was consistency. If you do circles all over it does not look good. The end call now looks small, alone, in the empty space at the end. Design wise, making all the elements the same is not the equal to have consistency.

      • Jrox16, the circles are not “consistent”. And they are too small…

        I’m not mad, it’s just that it could be better.

        I didn’t mentioned it in the first comment, but I can’t understand why they took the big picture all over the screen when someone calls you. It helped recognise the caller ID faster… I read complaisn from many people about this, including visually impaired people that relied in these pics to recognise caller IDs.
        It’s just strange. There’s no reason to go away with such beautiful functionality just to get “consistent” with damned circles.

    • I was going to say that the ‘slide to power off’ is nice and they should’ve implemented it for ‘slide to unlock,’ but then i realized that the ‘slide to unlock’ is for the entire screen, starting with iOS 7, while the ‘slide to power off’ is very specific to that area of the screen.

    • Ro Bobanich - 10 years ago

      Couldn’t have said it any better. I love Apple and everything they do but this iOS 7 is not apple anymore. I loved the previous iOS, 6. It looked very professional, simple and something like Apple. Now, from a distance, it looks like a kid drew it.

      I prefer Apple any day than Android but don’t you think iOS 7 reminds you a bit of Android? I’m disappointed that they changed iOS in this way. For example. To unlock your device, you can slide anywhere on the screen. Guess who else has this feature.. Android! Its not even “slide” anymore! Its swipe now! In iOS 6 you slid the little block with an arrow to the right till the end!

    • That is so true! Apple Engineers have done an incredible job optimizing iOS 7.1, making it fast and reliable, but UX and UI designers killed the party. The power slider it absolutely terrible. And the incoming call screen is ugly without the fullscreen photos.

    • Timothy Williamson - 10 years ago

      The new black “slide to unlock” text is so fugly, I throw up a little in my mouth every time I turn my iPhone on. It doesn’t match the white text that is used everywhere else on the lockscreen. Why did they change this???

  6. secdj - 10 years ago

    And i just noticed, those result right there are not the same numbers i am seeing in the original poll page…

  7. Mr. Grey (@mister_grey) - 10 years ago

    They killed my favourite text editing feature of iOS 7 so I’m going to vote “no.” The fact that they didn’t even announce it existed (for the five versions of iOS it existed for), and then killed it without even announcing they killed it, just makes me angry.

    Fuck Apple and their idea that they can decide for the entire world all at once, what features they should and shouldn’t have.

    • towamp - 10 years ago

      can you at least mention what feature you are talking about?

      • rettun1 - 10 years ago

        Don’t hold your breath

    • rettun1 - 10 years ago

      I think Apple does get to decide that, because it’s their phone.

      But based on your entire twitter history, I guess I shouldn’t have expectd you to say anything positive about Apple. Troll?

    • You should consider moving out of your mommy’s house so she can’t pee-pee in your GrapeNuts anymore.

    • jrox16 - 10 years ago

      Ummm, it is THEIR product, they can decide whatever they want and you can buy whatever you want lol.

  8. rlowhit - 10 years ago

    I like it mostly for the speed it has given back to older devices and snappiness on newer devices.

  9. Torrey Huerta - 10 years ago

    Haven’t upgraded yet, but I can say I am not a fan of the design of the poll used by this site.

  10. cyberdragon666 - 10 years ago

    Overwhelmingly HATE the update. I only did it to stop the home screen reboot bug and it is not entirely fixed. Bad update! Bad!

  11. Scott D. Brown (@hwdyb) - 10 years ago

    Was leaning towards the old screens from a graphic point-of-view. But after using the update, 7.1 is much more usable. I don’t have to swipe two to three times to answer a call now. Functionality beats pretty, but it would be nice to have both!

  12. Mike Breault (@breault24) - 10 years ago

    Reduced Motion now takes away the Weather.app animations. I liked these, but they’re not worth the terrible zooming effect. I will miss those cool lightning strikes.

  13. Oahu Mike - 10 years ago

    I feel this poll is a little misleading. Granted, I knew the numbers would change from when I placed my vote yesterday, but yesterday, the votes were overwhelmingly in favor of the old incoming call screen. Now, not only do they favor the new one (not by much, relatively speaking), but the images are different, I think with the intention to mislead. Yesterday, it showed an incoming call, full-screen image, and the new layout, with your image reduced to a tiny circle (only thing I absolutely hate and would change about the update), while today it’s just a standard background image, or a greyish-black screen. Otherwise, I think the update was long overdue, but please bring back full-screen incoming call images.

    • Ben Lovejoy - 10 years ago

      The images haven’t changed. The numbers will change all the time, as it’s still live, and now that it’s linked from this story it’s probably seeing a fresh influx of voting.

      • secdj - 10 years ago

        What i think is not fair is that, people are posting comments based on the fact is a great PERFORMANCE improvement over iOS7. The real question is: Is it an improvement design wise? I don’t think so.

      • phoo14 - 10 years ago

        How can we get back full screen photo for
        Incoming call? I seriously want back

  14. heabes (@heabes) - 10 years ago

    I know the complaint my girlfriend has the most about is the shift/caps lock button. She says she thinks is always on. Besides that they seem pretty good to me.

  15. sardonick - 10 years ago

    I still want the ios6 keyboard back. I can’t stand the hideous and clinical flat look of anything in this os. This update looks better than the original release of ios7 but that’s not really saying much.

  16. airmanchairman - 10 years ago

    Overall positive response, and no negatives so far. My iPhone 4 never felt laggy prior to this anyway, so not much by way of difference there. But in both the 4 and iPhone 5, the Control Panel and other animations are much bouncier and snappier. Calendar day view is a plus as well.

  17. W. Maxwell Esterhuizen - 10 years ago

    iOS 7.1 is fine – except they moved the shuffle playlist option to a swipe down motion instead of always being present. A minor change, but for someone who shuffles playlists most of the time, quite annoying.

  18. scumbolt2014 - 10 years ago

    I’ve liked iOS7 more than iOS6 since it was introduced. I jad many more issues with iOS6 (wifi, etc.) Comparing the two is like comparing OS9 to OSX IMO

  19. I totally miss fullscreen contact photos for incoming calls :(

  20. Eric Goodrich - 10 years ago

    Why in the world did Apple eliminate lower case fonts on the keyboard??? Okay, It’s new UI and buttons and stuff but couldn’t they show lower case letters in addition to the buttons?

  21. Daniele Gabriele - 10 years ago

    I was very pleased, until I came across a problem with the camera. Low light photography has been seriously crippled on my handset. And HDR is not working as intended. There is much more noise, and photos are nowhere near the same quality.

  22. John Gibson - 10 years ago

    Speaking of being educated, how about using the whole word…rather then speaking like a 14-year old and abbreviating your words.

    Pot. Kettle. Black.

  23. Marcel (@marcbaumb) - 10 years ago

    Still missing the possibility to create private calendar appointments (in relation with exchange).

  24. NQZ (@surgesoda) - 10 years ago

    Sorry, I’d rather stay jailbroken than get a few UI tweaks…

  25. Alexandru Chiru - 10 years ago

    After this update I can`t hear the caller speaking or my music playing without headphones ! Please help me I`m getting depressed :(

  26. Ludwig Chakhtoura - 10 years ago

    I didn’t liked the new incoming calls backround and the little pic at the top corner , it was better when someone is calling and his pic is at full screen

  27. phoo14 - 10 years ago

    I don’t want new caller screen on iOS 7.1 , contact photo is too small and I want 7.06 caller screen again

  28. Irene Voulelis - 10 years ago

    I prefered the large photo in the incoming call, it was pleasant as well as easy to see who is calling with a glimpse.

  29. Jabir Jack - 10 years ago

    the update is good,but when call coming the caller photo does’t showing,how can i fix it

  30. Lisa Morgan Chapman - 10 years ago

    I really do not like the most recent update! I want the full screen caller ID! I hate the little circle. I can’t even tell who’s calling! I really like iOS 6 better. The icon on iOS 7 look like cartoons. It doesn’t look clean, precise, and professional.

  31. Dorothy Green - 10 years ago

    Bring back the picture on caller ID incoming calls. New version stinks.

  32. Amit Gohel - 10 years ago

    i like to full screen contact image at incoming call….

  33. Ploumitsa Tsoulkani - 10 years ago

    no full screen caller id!!!

Author

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Ben Lovejoy

Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!


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