What Was the Most Frustrating iOS Ever?
We have been covering people's frustrations with Apple's iOS 7, but is it the most frustrating iOS update ever? No, at least not according to Google searches, which suggest iOS 5 sent more people searching for glitch fixes than this year's upgrade.
.We have been covering people's frustrations with Apple's iOS 7, but is it the most frustrating iOS update ever? No, at least not according to Google searches, which suggest iOS 5 sent more people searching for glitch fixes than this year's upgrade.
It didn't feel that way from our perspective, though. Judging by reader interest, particularly the high level of search traffic, in our post "The Biggest Complaints About iOS 7 and How to Fix Them" about common problems found in the latest iPhone software — it seemed like this iPhone software update has caused more complaining than ever. According to our various analytics packages like Chartbeat and Parse.ly, about two thirds of the readers of that post have been people searching things like "iOS 7 battery life" and "iOS 7 problems" — a far higher level of search traffic than what we normally see for a popular post. In addition, dissatisfied readers have emailed in additional glitches, bugs, and issues, looking for fixes not found in the post. All together, it left us with the impression that there are a lot of people with iOS 7 related problems that need fixing.
But, despite our admittedly unscientific reasoning, iOS 7 is, so far, not buggiest iOS update of them all. Searches for both "ios # problems" and "iOS# problems" — both with and without the space — spiked most for "iOS5 problems," as you can see below:
Overall, Google searches show more general interest iOS 5, which was released in October 2011 with the iPhone 4S, but not enough to account for the difference in searches for problems. As you can see in the graph below searches for "iOS5" peaked higher than any other operating system. But the differences between the spikes is much smaller than the spikes for "problems" searches.
Of course, iOS 7 has only been available since yesterday afternoon. But, third party metrics say it is the most popular upgrade yet, and more people than ever have iPhones.
Looking back, iOS 5 did have a particularly hard time out of the gate. In addition to the usual slow upgrading process due to overloaded servers, some users reported that the upgrade had wiped their phones of all their apps, pictures, and other precious data. However, it wasn't the worst offender for battery life issues, which often plague phones post software updates. That honor goes to last year's iOS 6: