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iOS 12 is all about making your iPhone work better

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Re: iOS 12 is all about making your iPhone work better

#21

Oh the irony. I updated to iOS 12 after reading this post, and now I cant paste quotes into the response box from reply view on HN from my iPhone SE. It's pretty obvious the smaller phones have been abandoned at this point.

This is a beta release, so I'd expect some bugs at this point.

Re: iOS 12 is all about making your iPhone work better

#22
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would require keeping a connection open to the mail server 24/7 which is a bad idea.

It's a way better idea than periodic polling, which is the current behaviour when the mail server operator doesn't collaborate directly with Apple to implement their push notifications.

Way better by what metric? Periodic polling is going to be better for battery than keeping a connection open 24/7.

Re: iOS 12 is all about making your iPhone work better

#23

Oh the irony. I updated to iOS 12 after reading this post, and now I cant paste quotes into the response box from reply view on HN from my iPhone SE. It's pretty obvious the smaller phones have been abandoned at this point.

iPhone SE has so many bugs with iOS11, compared to iOS10, I was hoping this would be fixed in iOS12.

SE is a good form factor. Do customers need to buy a 5S on eBay instead of SE from Apple Store, to get Apple support for a small phone with iOS12?

Re: iOS 12 is all about making your iPhone work better

#24
post #15

Can we have a VPN button in Control Center? How about per-app VPNs with Apple Configurator, i.e. no MDM? If Apple wants to support privacy, it should be possible to route one or more apps to a dedicated VPN where their traffic can be restricted and monitored closely.

Doubtful as they'd get on the bad side of a lot of governments doing that. VPNs are something that the upper brass are aware about and will make a fuss about if they're added. It's a high profile security measure.

In some countries, enabling an IKEv2 VPN on iOS will cause any app (including Apple Mail, Safari or even Settings) to crash the first time it uses the active VPN.

Those countries may be exploiting an iOS bug, by injecting packets into IKEv2 streams. Observed for more than a year, still present in iOS11. This doesn't happen with OpenVPN, possibly because it's easier to break OpenVPN wire traffic without compromising the phone OS.

The point is: governments can already use VPN traffic as justification for exploiting targeted devices, they don't need any help from Apple. Android has many options for network security, why should Apple be hamstrung by hypothetical governments who will break iOS anyway? Apple customers are paying a premium and still being needlessly exposed on insecure WiFi networks.

Millions of Apple users would benefit (motivating device purchases!) if Apple removed their VPN dark patterns from iOS, e.g. make it easy to enable Always-On VPNs which don't leak unprotected packets.

Re: iOS 12 is all about making your iPhone work better

#25

"Newer" iPhone because your older iPhone will be screwed.

Aren’t they supporting iPhones all the way back to the 5s with iOS 12? That’s way better than any competitor can claim.

Have you tried to use one of these old devices they claim to support?

Apple journalists don't and happily chime on about how great it is without understanding the realities.

Re: iOS 12 is all about making your iPhone work better

#26
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a way better idea than periodic polling, which is the current behaviour when the mail server operator doesn't collaborate directly with Apple to implement their push notifications.

Way better by what metric? Periodic polling is going to be better for battery than keeping a connection open 24/7.

Uhmm... how exactly?

Idle, open connection won't suck your battery at all, it's just an open socket sitting somewhere in the RAM. The only problem with it is having to send keepalives due to broken NATs being prevalent that can quietly close your connection with you having no chance to know that until you decide to send something through it. Anyway, keepalive pings are way easier to process than a complete poll and will send your processor and baseband back into sleep much quicker. Also, on most networks you can actually keep a connection open for much longer than 15 minutes, and when the network is so horribly broken that you can't, you can always fallback to polling.

Both Android and iOS already employ various techniques for dealing with keepalive timeout calculation because... guess what... that's exactly how their push notification systems are working.

You gain better battery life from rarer pings, less roundtrips and easier to process responses. Periodic polling is absolutely the worst for your battery - isn't it just obvious?

Re: iOS 12 is all about making your iPhone work better

#27

"Newer" iPhone because your older iPhone will be screwed.

Aren’t they supporting iPhones all the way back to the 5s with iOS 12? That’s way better than any competitor can claim.

I'm running 12Beta2 on my 5S.

I'd say performance is better than iOS11 at this point. There's still a lot of rough edges and I suspect they have a debug build released at this point. I think the final build will be really good.

Re: iOS 12 is all about making your iPhone work better

#28
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way better by what metric? Periodic polling is going to be better for battery than keeping a connection open 24/7.

Uhmm... how exactly? Idle, open connection won't suck your battery at all , it's just an open socket sitting somewhere in the RAM. The only problem with it is having to send keepalives due to broken NATs being prevalent that can quietly close your connection with you having no chance to know that until you decide to send something through it. Anyway, keepalive pings are way easier to process than a complete poll and…

If keepalive pings weren’t a thing, you’d have a point, but you admitted they are. The keepalive pings have to happen at least every 2 minutes I think (and usually more frequently than that) as I believe 2 minutes is a common timeout for this sort of thing. Meanwhile polling is every 15 minutes at the most frequent (or 30, or every hour, etc). This means it fires up the radio less often, which means better battery.

I’d also guess the OS tries to schedule these fetches to coincide with the radio already being on as they don’t have to be precisely timed.

Re: iOS 12 is all about making your iPhone work better

#29

"Newer" iPhone because your older iPhone will be screwed.

For phones specifically, only a small portion of people are using iPhones older than 5 years. So basically the vast majority of active iPhones are supported by iOS 12.

There’s probably a decent number of active iPads that can’t run this iOS version but that’s probably for the better since the older ones would probably be too slow.

Re: iOS 12 is all about making your iPhone work better

#30

Oh the irony. I updated to iOS 12 after reading this post, and now I cant paste quotes into the response box from reply view on HN from my iPhone SE. It's pretty obvious the smaller phones have been abandoned at this point.

I thought Apple was still committed to the SE series. Just not updating it as often as the main line.
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