iOS 9 review: In-depth with Apple’s most advanced mobile OS

Update, 13/11/2015: Apple is currently in the process of releasing iOS 9.2 to developers, a major point release that brings with it several improvements. The update is currently at beta 3, and is set to bring smoother 3D Touch animations to the iPhone 6 Plus, slicker multitasking view animations to the iPad Air 2, more responsive swipe gesture navigation in Safari and faster app switcher animations to the iPhone 4S. Apple hasn’t, as yet, fixed a bug reported by many iPhone users over broken Touch ID fingerprint readers, however. Hopefully, that will be fixed by the time iOS 9.2 is rolled out to users.

When is a review not really a review? When half of the people most likely to be interested have already upgraded to the version you’re reviewing.

That’s the dilemma we face when looking at big new versions of iOS. According to Apple, over half of all iOS users who are eligible for the update to iOS 9 have already done so, making it the fastest adoption rate of any new version.

And yet, as with every new release, not everyone will notice every feature – and, for anyone interested in how iOS compares with other platforms, it’s worth going through what Apple has done. In this review, then, I’ll try to give an overview of what the new features are, and finally how they compare with the smartphone competition. Does iOS 9 lift iPhone above Android (and, of course, Windows 10 for Phone) or is it on a par for features?

iOS 9 review: Multitasking

The biggest single feature of iOS 9, and the one that grabbed the most headlines at launch, is its multitasking capability. Strictly-speaking, iOS has always multitasked: after all, the email app continues to download messages in the background, you get alerts for incoming texts, and music plays while you’re doing other things. Recent versions of iOS also expanded the ability of third-party applications to do things in the background, although the operating system has always kept tight control over how much processor time they can use.

What iOS hasn’t done, though, is allowed you to run two applications on screen at the same time. Until now, that is – at least if you’re using an iPad. With iOS 9, Apple has introduced not one but three ways of running multiple apps onscreen at the same time: Slide Over, Split View and Picture-in-Picture.

Slide Over

First the good news: Slide Over is available on every iPad capable of running iOS 9. The bad news is that, for all iPads except the Air 2, mini 4 and forthcoming iPad Pro, it’s the only kind of multitasking you’ll get.

Slide Over lets you slide a small, fixed-width window over from the right-hand side of the screen. Applications need to have been tweaked to support it, but, if they are, you’ll be able to use the app in the Slide Over window at the same time as having your main app in the background. You can’t have both apps open at the same time: tap back in the main window and Slide Over will vanish.

Slide Over is great for quickly accessing an app without jumping into it, but that’s about it. It’s a convenience, rather than anything fundamentally game-changing.

Split View

If you have a newer iPad, however, you’re going to be even happier as you’ll have access to Split View. Split View, available on the iPad Air, iPad mini 4 and iPad Pro, lets you run two applications side-by-side onscreen at the same time. Yes, this is “revolutionary” – at least in iOS terms. Of course, this kind of feature has been available for some time on other platforms – Windows 8 and 10 users, in particular, have the right to feel very smug indeed.

That said, Apple’s implementation is simple and smart, and, in fact, much better than the similar feature on OS X El Capitan. You simply slide your finger in from the right, as you would to activate Slide Over, then pull a little bit further until the screen splits in two. And there you have it – two applications, running side-by-side. You don’t have a massive amount of control over the size of the two apps – it’s basically either a narrow column or half the screen – but it works, and works well, in both portrait and landscape mode. For anyone who wants to keep Twitter open while browsing, or have Notes open while writing a document in Word, it’s a godsend.

However, how much use you’re going to get out of it will depend on the iPad you own. On an iPad Air 2, using two applications side-by-side works really nicely. On an iPad mini 4, the small screen makes things a little bit more cramped. It’s not that you’re getting less on the iPad mini – the resolution, and thus what you see, is the same as the Air – but the smaller screen feels less like it was made for multitasking.

Where Split View is likely to make the most difference is on the iPad Pro. Obviously, a bigger screen will intrinsically be a better experience with two apps open at the same time, but more important is the way those apps are displayed. On an iPad Air or mini, what you get is two iPhone views side-by-side. On the iPad Pro, you’ll get two, full resolution, iPad views, which – for apps like OmniFocus, which has been optimised for iPad – will deliver a far superior experience.

Picture-in-Picture

There’s one other multitasking feature, and that’s Picture-in-Picture. Picture-in-Picture is activated by taking any full screen video and tapping the icon in the right-hand corner. This shrinks it down to the core of the iPad screen, and while it’s active you can go on and do other things. It works with videos in Safari, the Videos app, and any other software which has been written to support it – which at the moment isn’t every application, with some popular ones such as Netflix and YouTube missing in action.

The multitasking features of iOS 9 are some of the biggest and most important changes to the operating system since the introduction of iOS. Make no mistake about it, this sets up iOS for a much bigger future.

However, there’s one important caveat to all this: none of the features work on iPhone. Yes, the smaller screen makes some of them – like Split View – pointless, but surely Picture-in-Picture could work on the iPhone 6s Plus?

iOS 9 review: Safari

Safari is one of the most popular browsers in the world, mainly thanks to the sheer number of iOS users. This means any changes to the browser will affect a large number of people – and also a huge number of developers and websites.

The biggest change, however, will be something that’s welcomed mainly by users – and cursed by at least some publishers. That change is the introduction of content blockers.

Content blockers allow developers to create extensions to Safari that block specific kinds of content in web pages. This includes cookies, images, resources, pop-ups and pretty-much every other kind of content you might see on a page.

Unsurprisingly, the first applications for this have all been similar: ad-blocking tools that prevent users seeing ads on web pages. Your view on ad-blocking probably depends on your proximity to advertising revenue, but either way it’s obvious that Safari’s content blocking capabilities are going to change the game for users and publishers alike.

iOS 9 review: Notes

Notes has always been the app serious users didn’t use. If you’re a power notes user, Evernote, OneNote, or one of the wide range of other apps have always been your first choices.

Things are changing. Notes in iOS 9 is not only significantly more powerful, it’s also just as simple to use as it’s ever been.

First, the most basic feature of the lot: at long last, iOS Notes has folders, so you can split out your work and personal notes, or whatever way you want to organise things. However, as welcome as this is, it isn’t particularly sophisticated. You can’t, for example, have nested folders, which would be handy for splitting out notes connected to specific projects.

Apple has introduced a very smart additional layer of organisation, though, adding the notion of attachments. The attachments view groups together specific kinds of things, which you might have added to a note: maps, from Apple Maps; webpages, from Safari; photos, video, audio, other documents, and sketches. All this is grouped together in the Attachments browser, making it a simple process to find that drawing of your cat you made earlier.

Notes themselves now have much richer formatting. Although previous versions of Notes could view things such as bulleted lists and italic text in notes made on OS X, iOS devices couldn’t actually create them. Now they can, and it’s also possible to add things like titles, headings and checklists.

Of course, there are irritations. Checklists, for example, have no relationship at all to iOS Reminders, so they’re effectively yet another way to not really manage your to-dos. There’s also no way of finding all the checklists in your notes, which would have turned notes into a decent to-do list manager.

I mentioned earlier that sketches are a content type that shows up in the Attachments browser. The sketches tool is actually rather nice: you get different tools to work with, such as pens, markers, pencil and eraser, as well as a smart ruler tool, which lets you draw perfect straight lines at any angle. You can use this with either your finger or a stylus, but it will come into its own when used with the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil.

iOS 9 review: Maps

Yes, finally: Apple Maps on iOS has public transport directions. It’s only in a limited number of cities, but it works surprisingly well. What’s particularly nice about it is that, for cities such as London, it knows which exits you should use for tube stations, on top of being able to deliver walking directions when required. Train or bus times are also given, so, for example, it will tell you that the Northern line trains run from Goodge Street to Leicester Square every three minutes, but it won’t give you live departure times as Google Maps can.

Walking directions, too, have been improved and Maps appears to know decent short cuts through pedestrian-only routes. For example, it gave me a cut-through route via Borough Market which was much quicker than simply following roads.

And, finally, Apple is combatting one of the principle uses for Google Maps: finding local businesses. There’s now a Yelp-powered search feature that lets you find local restaurants and the like. At last, my caffeine fix can be fulfilled.

iOS 9 review: Proactivity

One of the features Apple has spent a great deal of time talking about is the new proactive Siri. The most obvious thing about it is the new look – Siri now appears as a kind of colourful waveform, which modulates along with your speech. There are more natural language queries, so you can ask Siri to show you all the photos you took on a specific date. And you can set reminders based on the context of what you’re doing, so if you’re on a webpage you can say “Remind me to read this tomorrow” and it will set a reminder that links back to the page.

Proactivity means more than this, though. The most obvious place you’ll find proactive Siri is on the Spotlight screen (accessed with a swipe to the right from your homescreen), where you’ll see suggestions for people to contact, apps you usually open based on time and location, and recent news items.

Sometimes you’ll also see suggestions for nearby places, again based on place and time. Siri will also occasionally suggest applications you might want to open in the multitasking switcher, at the bottom of the screen, depending on context – for example, plug in headphones and it will suggest you might want to open Apple Music.

So far, so “meh”. These are nice touches, but they’re also the kind of things that don’t add a great deal to the user experience at present. It’s easy to see how, as time goes on, this might become more useful, but at the moment it’s just another slightly-confusing little extra.

There are, however, other more useful proactive features. For example, in Mail, if a message has something that looks like a meeting request, it will offer to create a calendar event for it.

The counter to this is that, if you compare it to Google Now, it all looks pretty childish. But it’s worth remembering that much of this is the consequence of Apple’s decision to not violate your privacy too much. Unlike Google, it’s not diving down into your email, your browsing history, and your calendars to learn more about you. That’s obviously good if you don’t trust Google – but it limits what Apple can do with the data.

iOS 9 review: Apple News

It’s fair to say that Newsstand was a bit of a flop. Pushing publishers’ apps into a ghetto of content users didn’t understand did no-one any favours.

The answer to this is, apparently, Apple News – an app publishers can submit feeds and content to, and allow users to either add them as a favourite or see their content as part of a topic. Some publishers – The Guardian, for instance – have access to tools to create Apple News-specific layouts, which look very nice. Others have to rely on how Apple news parses their RSS feeds.

When you first use Apple News, you’ll be asked to select at least three publications you want to add to your favourites. These form the core of what you’ll see on the “For You” tab. Based on these selections, what you read, and what you like (using the same “heart” icon that appears in Apple Music), News will start to customise what you see over time. There are also tabs to directly access your favourites, explore different topics, search, and for articles you’ve saved.

Saved articles is another example of duplication in iOS 9. Safari has the built-in Reading List, which does exactly the same thing, but for the web. However, there’s no unified way to see both the stuff you save in Apple News and what you see in Safari. It’s as if different teams within Apple are reinventing the wheel over and over again, and it’s starting to get a little annoying.

Please, Apple, just think about the tasks, and organise things around them, rather than focusing on the application and adding in yet more features that duplicate other features in other apps.

Apple News isn’t for real news junkies, who probably already have an RSS feed reader that pipes articles directly into their brains. But neither is it really for casual consumers, who would probably only want to read one or two sites anyway. It sits in an awkward middle ground: neither powerful enough for power users, nor simple enough for the mass market.

iOS 9 review: Battery life and performance

Every version of iOS comes with some steps forward in performance, and some steps back – and iOS 9 is no exception. As always, Apple has improved the overall performance of Safari, particularly with complex JavaScript. You’ll notice the difference on more demanding web pages. However, if you’re running an old (but supported) device using the Apple A5 processor, iOS 9 will be a less than optimal experience. It’s no worse than iOS 8 – but it’s not much better.

There are, though, a couple of wins. First of all, your apps should gradually use less storage space, thanks to the app-shrinking features, which mean you’re no longer downloading code for every other device – just what’s applicable to your own. This is big win for anyone who, like me, uses a 16GB iPhone.

Second, there’s a new low power mode, supplemented by richer data about how much power your apps are consuming. The low power mode is only supported on iPhone, but it helps to squeeze out as much battery life as possible without turning too much off. It lowers the brightness a little, locks the screen after 30 seconds, and strictly limits background app refreshing and mail fetching. It also throttles processor performance, not to such a degree as it becomes a pain to use, but certainly noticeably. You can enable low power mode at any time, and when you hit 20% or 10% battery life you’re alerted and given the option of turning it on.

iOS 9 review: iOS 9 vs the rest

First, the good bits: iOS 9, to me, remains the optimal mobile operating system. It’s good looking, the system of extensions brought in with iOS 8 makes inter-application work easier, and the new multitasking system is simple and well thought-out, albeit with a few rough edges.

But there are weak points in iOS 9. Looking at the multitasking features, it’s clear that this is a release that sets up the iPad for a brighter future, but there’s less here for the far more numerous iPhone users. If your primary use of iOS is on an iPhone, there are some nice features, but nothing that makes it an absolute must-have update over iOS 8. That’s not to say “don’t update”. You should and, as I said at the beginning of this review, you probably already have – but its changes aren’t essential.

On the iPad, on the other hand, iOS 9 is a massive leap forward, and lays the foundation for the iPad Pro, which looks like a really interesting product. If you’re an iPad user, and particularly iPad Air 2, you want to run iOS 9 right now.

And that’s why I would split the comparison between iOS and Android into “Android on phones vs iOS 9 on iPhone” and “Android on tablets vs iOS 9 on iPad”. On tablets, there’s a clear winner: iOS 9 is a big step up as a tablet experience, and keeps Apple well ahead of the competition.

On phones, though, it’s more debatable and a lot will come down to personal preference. Note that word I used early: “optimal”. I think iOS strikes the right balance between power-user features that are accessible, good design, and an excellent app ecosystem. Some users, though, will prefer the balance that Android has – and don’t count out Windows 10 for Phone, which may turn out to be a viable third choice if Microsoft’s efforts at growing the app ecosystem with universal apps pays off.

Much of the decision comes down to two factors: personal preference, and how deeply you are committed to Google or Apple’s respective ecosystems. Some people simply prefer the look and feel of Android – and that’s okay. I tend to prefer the look and feel of iOS, and iOS 9 certainly gives me reasons to stick with it.

Overall, though, iOS 9 is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s a great update for iPad, but just a good one for iPhone. If you haven’t downloaded it already, it’s probably about time you did.