IMHO, the most compelling reasons to install this are RCS support in Messages and the dark mode icons.
That said, I imagine 18.1 will be in public beta soon, and people will probably be more interested in that. That includes the newer Siri model, writing tools, notifications summaries, etc.
First thing I did was test out the new RCS support, and it’s pretty awesome!
(Not a trolling/joking)Why Americans so tied to Apple messages and as result waiting for RCS? We, here in Europe, just use Telegram/Facebook messenger/Instagram direct for decade and only 1.5 nerds like me knows about existence of Apple iMessage. I’ve tried iMessages with my friends and then we just back to Telegram, because we have tried to convince our friends to use iMessages and nobody wants to learn how to use it and first question from everyone is: how I will write to people with android(most people here have android)?
There’s some history here:
SMS was ubiquitous in the United States long before smartphones. We didn’t have country codes to worry about, so anyone else in the United States was reachable in near real time over text, using an asynchronous, open, inter-carrier method of communication. If I had your phone number I could text you for free. Layered onto that was various automated systems over text (alerts, etc.). Later on, the carriers rolled out MMS for basic pictures being sent, group texts, etc.
So when iPhones became popular here, the default method of communication was SMS/MMS. The iPhone user knew that it would work with dumb phones, Android phones, Windows phones, whatever. And those habits and those chat threads predated the rise of WhatsApp, FB Messenger, WeChat, Telegram, etc., and a lot of those apps simply didn’t work with old dumb phones. Why give up an existing group chat thread just because one of those friends didn’t have a smartphone yet?
Then, whenever every member of a chat had an iPhone, the system automatically defaulted to the upgraded iMessage experience: high quality media sharing, typing/delivery/read notifications, reactions, etc. It was a slow transition, and didn’t start to show clear advantage over the open SMS/MMS standard until smartphones were ubiquitous, and where most people had iPhones.
And so once everyone had a “it just works” app, they didn’t want to switch to an app that required everyone to get a separate account and download a separate app. Especially because the iPhone hit something like 80% market share among certain demographics (the young, the non-technical rich, etc.).
Excellent write up. I hear people ask about this all the time, why the USA defaulted towards SMS/MMS/iMessage when other parts of the world didn’t. It is not the case of now but the history of the technological development and saturation of the technology within the younger demographics that got us here naturally. We didn’t have to make a choice of which platform to migrate our friend/family groups too because we had enough of the functions we needed built into all of our phones along the last 30 years.
It doesn’t come down to what is the best platform right now, it comes down to what was the best, and easiest, platform to get all my friends and family using when my country/region/friend group/etc got smartphones. There are large swaths of the world population where their technology exposure was landline>TV>Internet cafe>smartphone. Where the beginning of their online presence was through an Internet cafe and then very soon after (within years) they had a smart phone. In that model their first interaction with instant messaging was not phone to phone but computer to computer and they used messenger/instagram/whatsapp/wechat and etc and those social networks of friends migrated with them from the Internet cafe PC as the main point of access to a Smartphone as the main point of access.
I primarily use Signal because I like my chats end-to-end encrypted. iMessage is not that bad on that front.
I avoid any Facebook-written code like the plague, including WhatsApp and Messenger. They literally have a track record of putting malware in their products. I don’t understand why Europeans aren’t bothered by this.
I don’t usually install major Apple OS updates on launch; there seem to be major bugs often enough that I try to wait until the first bugfix release.
I’ve updated on launch since iPhone was initially released. I can’t recall any time I ever had an issue with bugs; not to say others hadn’t. After seeing what this OS looks like, I will be holding out on iOS 17 (on my 12 mini) for as long as possible. Apple has gotten into the habit of breaking things that previously worked perfectly well for no apparent reason. Meanwhile, we can’t get basic things like smart folders or a decent music app. I’m really fed up with the crap this company puts out.
Photos app new interface sucks.
They finally nuked the “special” widget section on the left fully… which screwed up a couple useful widgets that I was using and haven’t found a replacement for… so that sucks.
New homescreen positioning is cool, but breaks one of the workarounds I was using without a replacement either (smart stack with a background that made them invisible until I scrolled them). Minor thing, but annoying. We can position icons slightly better now… but I still can’t have 5 items in my dock? I still can’t have different grid sizes? I still can’t add custom icons? Sad.
No more mandatory camera app on lockscreen? nice. Hasn’t been needed in forever… even less with the newer models having a hardware button.
Drag n drop for control center? Better late than never. Hate the round icons though… I like squarcles. When I still had an android and they tried to move to circles for everything, I applied a custom icon set to make them revert. Dislike the circles. Also the fact that the larger size is still a squarcle… makes it mismatched and stupid looking.
Like always… feels like a step forward and a step back. :/
Gawd… I just opened the photo gallery app… that redesign is awful. I don’t want a bunch of “we’re pretending to be facebook so here’s a bunch of ‘memories’ for you” pushed at me. I know what photos I took… I took them. Go away.
The configurable control center pages is nice in theory… but what it does in practice is you open it to use it and try to swipe it back up so you can go back to your homescreen, but instead you end up swiping up the stupid control center page and seeing your media controls instead. That’s going to take ages to get used to.
The new more fluid feeling fade in for notifications on the apple watch is nice though. I still hate the redesign from the last version. Reduced functionality for me, as usual.
Just as a heads up, you can edit the sections that show and where they show in the Photos app and you can always swipe control center away if you start at the very bottom of the screen like an app.
Yeah I saw the edit button for the gallery. It’s classic Apple though. Just let you move around their generated nonsense but the app is fundamentally changed interface so might as well just get used to it.
Same thing with the control center. I know I can swipe from the very bottom to clear it. But the point was I didn’t have to do that before so it’s less convenient for someone we didn’t need and wasn’t implemented well.
Wait, where do I disable the lockscreen camera? I haven’t yet found that option unfortunately.
It’s one of my most hated “features”, to the point where I just completely disabled the camera itself to get rid of it.
You can go into the edit lock screen area and where you customize the background and widgets etc the bottom two things (flashlight and camera icons)are now editable.
Thanks! Seems there still isn’t a way to disable the left swipe camera though?
YOU STILL CAN’T MOVE THE LOCKSCREEN CLOCK. FUCK.
It’s literally making me consider a different operating system. If there were more options than just android I would probably unironically switch largely due to this.
^not guaranteed to be a true fact^
