Apple Fixes The Two Worst Errors In iOS 7

There were two significant errors in Apple's first release of iOS 7. The first was that there's a minority of the population subject to motion sickness. The new design with flowing animations and so on could set this off in that segment of the population. So that rather needed to change as no one really wants to be made ill to the point of vomiting by their new piece of shiny, shiny tech kit. The second was a problem with the accelerometer: Apple had switched manufacturer for the part itself and the new part was markedly less accurate than the old. This needed to be fixed as well. And as part of yesterday's announcements of new iPads and so on we also got the latest release of iOS 7, that's the iOS 7.03 release. In which both problems are indeed fixed.

Here's the first one, about the design and thus the motion sickness:

Apple has released an update for its iOS 7 software to deal with a raft of complaints from users about motion sickness, problems with iMessage and poor calibration of level sensors on the iPhone 5S.

The update, available on phones or through iTunes, also adds the "iCloud keychain" feature to randomise passwords used on different sites.

The release of iOS 7 in mid-September was a radical remodelling of Apple's interface. But the animations when apps were launched and when messages were sent led to complaints from a number of users who suffer from forms of motion sickness that it literally made them feel ill.

Now Apple has enhanced an option to "Reduce Motion" in its Accessibility setting which stops the zooming transitions when changing between apps or starting them. The screen simply changes to the new app. Users of older devices such as the iPhone 4 who have found that the animations tax its processing power may also benefit from using it. (The setting is found at Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion.)

So, there you go if you're one of those who has been suffering. And do note that as it's only a minority of people who suffer from this problem Apple has made it an option, not a necessity, to be able to turn off or down the animations.

The second was the problem with the accelerometer:

Today a little bird (who works at Apple) told me to check the ReadMe file for today’s Apple mobile operating system update, iOS 7.03. That same bird, who couldn’t or wouldn’t comment on “sensor-gate” earlier, was giving me a broad hint which I didn’t understand until a few moments ago, when I lined up all the iPhones in my possession to test the devices’ sensors post-iOS 7.03.

The upshot is that Apple has fixed sensor-gate.

It was always known that the problem could be fixed by a piece of calibration code. The only question was whether apps developers would need to incorporate it into their apps or whether Apple would put it into the OS:

Just a week or so ago, a tiny 3D-sensing software company released a fix for iPhone’s errors which allowed developers to apply a correction algorithm in their own apps. At the time, I wondered whether Apple would incorporate it into iOS, so that developers wouldn’t have to do even that small amount of work for hundreds if not thousands of apps.

Clearly, Apple has.

Clearly the sensible solution as that only has to be done once for each iPhone rather than once for each app.

As to the larger point here, it is entirely true as Kathleen Sebelius has said about Healthcare.gov, that there are mistakes in Apple's products when they're first released (this is true of everyone's products in fact and leads to the old, old advice that you should never install the version x.0 of anything at all). The thing is though they do tend to get fixed after a couple of weeks: something that we cannot say about Heathcare.gov as yet.

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