IOS 8

Hi, this is me again And I’m about to talk about why iOS 8 is definitely not the most advanced operating system not even for mobile devices.

I recently got an iPad, I bought a couple of them because I wanted to give a good looking and well integrated device to my wife, she have a computer, which runs Linux from the very first day we get it, but now it is too old and with the kids is almost impossible to have a time to sit at the desktop and work with it, beside, my wife needs I terms of computational power are quite low, she basically Checks Facebook and watch videos in YouTube.

Then I got one too, my requirements are a lot higher than my wife but I already have a decent computer, and a smartphone, why the tablet., well, to read.

being said that, the iPads that my wife and I bought are both an iPad Mini, no retina display. It should fit our needs, and it actually do, my wife is pretty happy with her tablet and kindle works pretty fine un the iPad, the obvious benefit is the bigger screen.

But there are still hard corners in the iPad which I believe they are not fixed even getting the latest model, let me explain.

Apps are still second class citizens, they can’t talk to each other and while in iOS 8 there is a way to let one app accept content from another (to share) there is still much work to do, iOS should have done this years ago. And why this just came?, well, iOS apps are apps, complete programs that open one window, then switch windows but only inside that app, there was no way to go directly to one app screen without passing through the others. On the other side Android have intents, one app is formed by several intents, actions that can be called by any other app, the developer just have to define those intents in the app manifesto and that’s al, Android as platform will let other apps know at there is an intent that fill the need to share data.

There’s  still no way to set your preferred apps, I like the Mail app, I like Safari, but I would love to set my preferred Browser (which is Chrome), set my default twitter client, my default camera app, etc… No way in iOS world. Microsoft faced a lawsuit because IE was installed by default and cannot be uninstalled in Windows, they were forced to modify their operating system to remove IE and ask you which browser do you want to use, why is this not the case with Apple?

iOS is definitely a one app only operating system, and I don’t mean having two apps in the screen at the same time, I mean switching between apps seamlessly, leaving an App means it will go to sleep mode, but frequently that mode means that the app will have to reload itself when you get back, do that while you are editing text (let’s say, a post like this), it sucks. Another example, Dropbox, you can’t use camera uploads if you don’t have Dropbox open… It sucks.

I hope that Apple will do something with his operating system to fill all those gaps, until that iOS may be a nice looking operating system and the apps would work fine (although I feel they are a lot limited because they are isolated, they don’t work together), but definitively Android is far, far more advanced than iOS, you can notice that because Apple is copying now what Android had years ago.

And then he said, iOS 8 is the most advanced operating system

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