iOS 10 Public Beta Impressions (On An iPhone 6)

June 13, 2016, Apple hosted its annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), and while there were no new hardware unveiled, the crowd got a tease of the upcoming changes in the different software that Apple is planning on releasing in the near future. Ever since the unveiling of the new iPhone and iPad operating system, the “iOS 10”, people have been having mixed feelings and while I have always been an iPhone user for 6 years now, I truly welcome change when it comes to the changes whether it was good or bad, while I had instability issues on iOS 9, I seem to love the overall feel of it, and every year I have been having that same feeling but whether Apple could give a perfect mobile OS this year or not, I am very eager on seeing what is in store for the future of my iPhone.

July 7, 2016 (July 8, 2016 in the Philippines), Apple finally opened its Public iOS 10 Beta to people who wanted to try and help them by providing feedback in order to check on the new iOS, well obviously, as soon as I knew my internet was at its peak, I immediately enrolled my device to the Beta program (which is free by the way), and made a back-up of my existing settings to my computer and started the download (iOS 10 is only available for download via WiFi from your device) and voila. However, the question on everyone’s mind is: “Should I install the iOS 10 Beta on my device?”, I have spent a full day with it and here are some of the changes included and my impressions.

• Please do note that I can only use an iPhone 6 and therefore I am basing it on this device only, some features may require the iPhone 6S, 6S Plus and the iPhone SE. (eg. Raise-to-wake)
• iOS 10 is only in beta and is subject to change until its release, some features may be activated or not.
• I “blacked” out some parts of the screen for privacy purposes of my contacts.

When your screen boots up after the update you may be a bit confused as to how to unlock your phone, since sliding to the right gives you a your new “Widgets” screen and swiping to the left opens the “Camera” app. Well as much as you hate pressing the home button, you now have to as it does enable the pass-code screen and Touch ID unlock feature.

I have been having mixed feelings already with the addition of this widgets sections, while it was present at iOS 9 via swiping from top to bottom, it has now been flushed out to give you more info and clustered properly for better viewing, no denying however that it looks like something already done by Android devices, it was about time that Apple included something similar. What I really don’t like about this change is the fact that I have to press my “Home” button now, I know I am not the only one having that same feeling but hey, we just don’t like pressing it for any reason except for emergency situations (reboots!), but technology is technology and a button unused is a button wasted, I guess. You can also sort out your widgets or add some if your downloaded app has one as well.

Notifications also seem to have received some minor overhaul as they are now grouped within grey bubbles and if the app has special options (Reply, Mute, Delete, etc) you can still access them by swiping to the left of the respective notification. I kinda have mixed feelings about the “grey bubbles” covering the background now though compared to the “dimmed” background of iOS 9.

One of Apple’s greatest “selling point” of iOS 10 was the overhaul of the native “Music” app, once you open it up you will be greeted with your Library, instead of the “For You” tab. New fonts, and yes it is eerily big for some reason, it’s basically just your songs that you have on this device. While it may not be a huge change, there were still room for improvements and so far iOS 10’s music app experience is something to look forward to. You will also be pleased that “For You” and “Connect” will now be merged into one tab and the “Radio” tab is now easier to navigate compared to its iOS 9 iteration.

 

The “Now Playing” screen has been revamped to a card-like interface with less clutter and the consolidation of the menus available are accessible via pressing the “…” button, if you are connected to external speakers you can also change the output of the device by pressing the “Earphones” at the bottom. If you scroll down and you’ll find, probably in my opinion, the greatest addition to the Music app

While Lyrics had already been there for some time, it was pretty confusing to some people, so much that I have yet to see/meet someone who put lyrics on their songs and now, Apple is planning to add lyrics automatically, and while it may take sometime for Apple to add every lyrics to every song, it was a step in the right direction for a feature that was truly just underused. However, upon updating to iOS 10, I have seemed to have lost the lyrics to some of my songs with only 1 out of a thousand (and hell no, I didn’t scan through all of them but most of them) songs, having lyrics. Once I synced the device to my PC, deleted all my songs and added them back, they showed up properly. So if you want to do some mini-karaoke, iOS 10’s new feature and lyrics interface is one good reason to switch come Fall. If you scroll down further though, you will now see the “Up Next” tab which shows which songs are playing next.

The Photos app also had some new features improved as your device now automatically scans for the faces, location and time of the people in your pictures and sorts them out automatically into albums, it is a bit of a mess right now for me though as some people who were in my photos had two sections instead of one (mistakenly identifying the same face for another), it is a great feature but definitely needs to improve. There is also the memories tab which include pictures or videos that were released in a specific/pre-determined length of time (I can’t confirm it yet as my device only showed the last 2 months worth of images/videos), groups them and makes a short iMovie slideshow for it as well, very neat for those looking for one of those “reminiscent” moments.

The Messages app also gets some neate new features, from doodling over videos to font changes. You can still reply without leaving your current app by swiping down on the message notification (or swiping to the left if you’re in the lock screen) but what I liked about this is that the messages “expand” after swiping and provides you a stream of the most recent messages you have sent/received from the person, unlike in iOS 9 in which you had to open the app in-case you forgot what you were talking about, iOS 10’s messaging app gives you a few more lines to review your messages.

You can now also add images to doodles or record a video while adding doodles or just simply drawing on a specific area of the screen and send it as well, along with the enriched emoji experience in which your device highlights your message to find suitable emojis to replace them (sadly this one has yet to be deployed or yet to work for me). Also in order for your receiver to see the message he/she must be running iOS 10.

So far I have experienced some bugs or inconveniences with it though. After opening a message, the only way I know how to close it was to press the home key as sometimes the “X” button doesn’t work or isn’t there at all. Another one was that auto-correct/auto-suggest seems to be a bit broken here as sometimes some easy to interpret typos like “Hllo” (Hello) wouldn’t show up.

 

Other minor changes include the:

The iOS 10 Public Beta’s performance on my iPhone 6 has been stable, for a beta, and comparing it to iOS 9.3.2, I loved how the new user interface looks over the former, sure it may take quite some time to get used to but almost everything in this beta was a step to the right direction with only minor issues to be expected, at least in my opinion. Updating to iOS 10 beta however, so far, has fixed my phone from “stopping animations” from failing. Since updating I have had 4 crashes (One while I was using Facebook, one related to the music app, and two via messaging app), in my opinion, that is stable enough for a beta.

The battery usage has been a bit above average too as betas usually use more power/battery on your device due to the added background processes. Since updating I have tried doing my usual routine in checking websites, Team Stream, Facebook, Youtube, etc and have seen a huge power draw that saw me drop to 79% from 100% in just less than an hour or so on minimal brightness (it may be due to the fact that my iPhone was still validating some data in the background) but I have seen some improvement as I left to go check the local mall at 6:20pm and with the iPhone on Bluetooth and WiFi, and continuously playing music until I got back at around 8:54pm, it was around the 80-90% mark, however up to the time of writing this article it is now sitting at 55% with a 3 hours and 36 minutes usage time and 5 hours and 44 minutes on standby, which is still, a huge loss since I have only uploaded some photos and just used iMessage during that time period.

Once again, Apple’s iOS 10 seem to be a huge step in the right direction and whether it may seem that they copied some elements of the UI from Android, it still finally looks nice to get a “refreshed” look on our Apple devices. So should you join the public beta and install iOS 10 right now? If you’re one of those “I must have new things now” type of people, then go ahead, but if you are one of those who use your Apple device as your daily driver, the battery draw alone, indicates that you should not, even I am contemplating on restoring it back to 9.3.2 at this point because I just can’t have a phone that has me recharge it 3x a day and if you do install the beta please do read the “Legal” terms as you are about to send Apple private info.

One last piece of advice to those who do proceed with installing iOS 10, please provide feedback via the “Feedback” app as it would help the developers improve the final build quality of the iOS 10.