With Apple about to announce iOS 6, the next version of its mobile operating system, it's useful to look back at what was introduced in iOS 5 – and, more importantly, whether anyone is actually using it. It's easy to announce software features that nobody really uses so you can bulk up the marketing blurb. But does it stand the real-life test?
So here's what was announced in iOS5.
Notifications
Before this, iOS notifications were primitive - and easily outdistanced by Android 2.x's set of information in the menu bar (which told you that there were new emails, calendar events and Twitter or Facebook information).
iOS 5's Notifications changed that dramatically: every app could now put information – such as the content of tweets or the sender, or the subject line and some content from an email, or the level of a stock, or the weather forecast – into the menu bar, in your lock screen or only after the phone is unlocked. It's a colossal improvement on the previous, intrusive iOS notifications, which weren't were modal (ie you had to get rid of them) and interrupted other tasks. The only place they now survive is in Mail, where if there's no connection, you'll be told – even if you know and don't care.
The granularity of iOS 5 notifications puts them miles ahead of anything presently in Android; you can get an idea of what's going on without having to jump between different apps, because only the latest information is brought to the surface. In many ways, it's like Windows Phone's tiles, though that is intended to give more of an "at a glance" view of what's happening. (I do like Windows Phone's display of your next calendar appointment in the lock screen, though it would be good to be able to configure whether that appears.)
One thing that's annoying about iOS 5 notifications: if you unlock the phone and go to an app, a procession of notiications will appear at the top, rolling over the menu bar. If you're trying to do something with a menu item, it can feel like swatting flies.
How useful? 10/10
How much used? 10/10
Over-the-air (OTA) software updates
An enormously important step forward - again, bringing iOS to the place where Android already was. Except that Apple, because it controls the handsets, has been able to push updates out much more aggressively than the combination of handset makers and carriers – so that iOS 5 adoption leapt almost overnight from zero to more than 80%, according to app developer statistics, and even point updates (from 5.1.0 to 5.1.1) can go from zero to 30% in a matter of days.
How useful? 10/10
How much used? 10/10
iCloud, iTunes Match, Photo Stream
While iCloud is subtly different from OTA updates, it is part of the overall shift away from the "PC tether" that moving into mobile means. Again, Android was ahead with this, so that you could configure a new phone by signing in with your Google account - upon which apps and calendars and email would all be available. Apple matched that by letting you backup your phone to the cloud, though you can still choose to sync it to a computer if you prefer. Meanwhile, Photo Stream could sync photos taken on the phone to your Mac, via Wi-Fi. And iTunes Match, while not part of the official WWDC announcements, is another part of iCloud, using a music-matching service to let you get your music on any signed-in iOS device. Android hasn't got that outside the US because of licensing problems.
Is iCloud popular? Well, by April, six months after launch, it had 125 million users. A fresh number will probably be announced in the coming week at WWDC.
How useful? 10/10
How much used? 10/10
iMessage
This was Apple getting into the WhatsApp/BlackBerry Messenger field. It's like SMS, but runs over the data connection, so it can be free and cheap. (A packet data connection will often work slightly better than SMS.) It only works between iOS 5 devices, and one puzzle is whether an iMessage gets sent to a phone number, or to a login. It doesn't seem to have the world on fire in Europe (iPhone penetration is far higher in the US), but it's difficult to evaluate quite how much iMessage is actually used, especially when huge numbers of SMSs are bundled into both PAYG and contract deals these days, and apps like WhatsApp offer cross-platform "over the top" message sending.
How useful? 7/10
How much used? 3/10
Newsstand
A place for all your magazine and newspaper subscriptions to automatically download and be kept together – in effect, a pre-prepared folder for pre-prepared content. You may reply "what magazine and newspaper subscriptions?" and for many people that might be the block. Perhaps if it came pre-populated with content (a slot that no doubt would see publishers falling over themselves to bid for) it might be more useful. Instead, Newsstand can be confusing: you download something like the New Yorker app, and then wonder where it is. Answer: hiding in plain sight in Newsstand.
How useful? 3/10
How much used? 3/10
Reminders
These sync with iCloud (on which more later), iCal and Outlook. You can also set location-based reminders for the iPhone 4 and 4S. This latter is a good idea, until you realise that it's going to suck your phone battery dry checking your position as it waits for you to hit the location "fence" so it can remind you. Generally, it's easier just to set a reminder for a particular time. The Reminders app in general is functional, but the world is full of to-do lists, as is the App Store. There's no golder bullet for it, which is why there will always be reminder apps.
How useful? 7/10
How much used? 5/10
Twitter integration
iOS lacks (until this coming week?), while Android and Windows Phone do have, the ability for apps to communicate between themselves and say what they can do. So on Android the camera function can pass pictures to any apps that say they can work with pictures – whether that's Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, a photo editor, or whatever.
Building in Twitter integration (notably to the camera app, but also to Photos, Maps, Safari and YouTube; names in the Contacts could also pull in Twitter avatars) is an important step forward. The fact that this was Twitter rather than Facebook limits the breadth of its appeal (rumour is that the two couldn't agree terms, not least on privacy settings), but it was also a significant move to build the API for an outside company directly into the OS, right down to the extent of including a hash tag on the top level of the keyboard. For Twitter, it's certainly been all to the good.
How useful? 8/10
How much used? 9/10 (for things like tweeting photos)
Camera
Before iOS 5, if you wanted to take a photo, you had to unlock the phone and then navigate to the Camera app and then take the photo. Result: lots of missed photos. In iOS 5, you could access the camera directly from the lock screen by pressing a camera icon (later revised to sliding the icon upwards). This put it on a par with Windows Phone, which implemented the "pictures direct from lock" first. Apple also grabbed the neat idea from the Camera+ app of letting you take a photo with the "volume up" button – something that Camera+ was previously banned from the App Store for doing.
The camera app also got grid lines for composing shots (other OSs do that too), pinch/pull to zoom out/in when composing, and tap-and-hold for focus and exposure lock. For editing you also got crop, rotate and red-eye removal. The changes to the Camera app were hugely important in getting the best use out of the phone's camera.
How useful? 10/10
How much used? 10/10
Mail updates
Mail got text formatting, text indentation, message flagging, mass message flagging (starred, read, unread) and custom mail sounds. If anybody was gasping to be able to bold or underline mail messages, we certainly never noticed them.
How useful? 5/10
How much used? 5/10
Calendar
The iPad got a year view, while the iPhone/iPod Touch got a new week view. You could also tap to create an event, and view and add event attachments. While calendars are the bedrock of corporate life – where would people be if they didn't know about their next meeting? – it's hard to make them enthralling, sexy or easy to view when you're dealing with them on a mobile screen.
How useful? 4/10
How much used? 6/10
Game Center improvements
You could use personal photos; compare achievement scores with friends; find new friends via their recommendations and their friends' recommendations. This may be the sociai network Apple built which actually works, though it's very hard to know quite how many people are on Game Center. The feeling from developers is that in fact people use Facebook as their real game centre, so this isn't so revolutionary as it might have seemed.
How useful? 4/10
How much used? 5/10
There were a ton of other little things, principally of interest to developers (unsurprisingly). But those are the headline ones. So if we tally them, we get – in this totally subjective view of what iOS 5 brought to the experience:
Overall, how useful? 78/110 (71%)
Overall, how much used? 76/110 (69%)
Is that good or bad? You decide.
(Updated: corrected modal to non-modal in Notifications.)
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