Should I install iOS 11?

Welcome back to our blog! We haven’t posted in a while but thought we would share some of our thoughts on a few of the latest updates from Apple.

First of all, let’s talk about iOS 11! The latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system has now been released to the general public after it’s beta testing period. We have been running the beta on an iPad Pro and have been fairly impressed with its development. The question on everyone’s lips at the moment though is “should I install iOS 11?” – for the time being our advice would be to wait…

There have been lots of reports of people having issues with the latest update on their iPhones, the biggest problem seems to be that it is affecting peoples battery life. Although an initial drop in battery life is expected, due to your phones operating system reindexing files and reprocessing photos, it should return to normal again after a few days. The problem is that for some people it seems to be a permanent issue. What we mustn’t forget is that it’s still very early days in the operating system’s life and although it has been going through beta testing for some time, some issues just don’t get discovered until the software is installed on a much larger user base. A major issue here is that Apple simply can’t test the upgrade process of iOS 10 to iOS 11 with every permutation of pre-installed applications and varying user configurations.

For the time being we would suggest waiting until Apple resolve some of these early issues. It’s also worth mentioning that Apple haven’t actually included some of the new iOS key features anyway. For example, we are still waiting for our two favourite features which are messages in iCloud and peer-to-peer Apple Pay. These features will be added in subsequent updates along with bug fixes and system improvements.

If you are really keen to upgrade to iOS 11 to get the latest features our advice would be to do a totally clean installation of your iPhone/iPad from factory settings and then re-install all of your apps and reconfigure your custom configurations. Just be aware that to get the full benefit of a totally clean installation it’s imperative that you do not restore from a backup (if you restore from a backup, you are potentially restoring a problem too). The downside of this is that you will lose your existing stored messages (unless you know how to extract and restore your messages from an iOS back-up). However, don’t forget that when messages in iCloud is added to iOS you will be able to have all the benefits of a clean install and sync your existing message library as well! (This is what I’m going to do : )

We hope you find this blog post useful. We’d also love to hear from you! We’ll be posting a link to this blog entry on Facebook, so please comment with your feedback and experiences.

Do to get in touch with us if you need any help with your iPhone or iPad and don’t forget we are always here to fix/repair and upgrade your Apple MacBook and iMac computers in and around the Exeter area.

Watch out for our next blog post on macOS High Sierra coming soon!