I've been running the latest beta for a while, and I'm updating my devices now. Here's my beef:
This came too late. For months now - ever since iOS 7 came out, I've had to tell people "iOS 7 is great, but buggy. Don't worry, Apple will release 7.1 soon that will fix a lot of these issues." Time, and time again, I said that. With each beta it became more and more obvious that Apple wasn't releasing a quick fix for the myriad of issues that plagued users.
I think Apple did this wrong. 7.1 contains new features and updated UI elements. Fuck that. I wanted the hundreds of bugs that were impacting users to be fixed back in October. I expected the new iPads to be running 7.1. I think Apple should have focused solely on fixing the bugs present for 7.1, and then released 7.2 that had these features. But since September 18th, (173 days ago!) I've been dealing with a buggy OS and been apologizing for it [0].
To me, that is unacceptable.
[0] I'm a big Apple fan, and develop iOS apps, and a lot of people in my circle come to me with their Apple questions.
This is interesting - I've been using iOS7 since the day it came out and don't think I've seen a serious bug yet, certainly not hundreds of them. I really am curious - is it the hardware (iPhone 5s here) or different usage patterns? I'm a developer too, and just haven't had this experience. Please let me know a couple of the specific bugs you've seen, as I'd like to try and recreate them before upgrading to 7.1
Oh, I've had this one too (on an iPhone 4.) As far as I can tell, it's caused by switching cell towers on 3G/4G; you suddenly get apparently-great signal strength, but no service whatsoever.
I've found that entering and leaving Airplane mode fixes things, presumably because it causes the phone to notice which cell it's actually connected to now.
In order for this to be effective in the app you have open, though, you have to stay in Airplane mode long enough to time out whatever TCP connections the app is attempting. Tower-switching is a purely physical/routing-layer effect, so you still have the same IP, and TCP connections stay established. If you trigger the carrier renegotiation without staying in Airplane mode for long enough to drop your DHCP lease (usually about three seconds, I think?), the phone will go on waiting for a reply to a TCP SYN that never actually hit the tower, so you'll find, like you said, that you may have to kill-and-restart the running app to get it to work.
iTunes Music has been horrible for this. I'll stream some music, then hit pause and walk away for a while.
When I come back and hit play, most times it'll play out the buffer and then decide it has no internet connection, fixable only with a kill-relaunch. And some times it'll reboot the device altogether.
Oh that reminds me of a couple more. Tons of lag and crashes in the iTunes Store app, and tons of lag in Podcasts, along with chunks of the episodes lists showing up white when I knew there were episodes that should be there.
I also had an issue where around half of my music got corrupted during a sync. It acted like everything was fine, then as soon as I tried to play a broken song it would just skip it. Which was particularly irritating because it made "previous song" via 3-clicks on the inline play/pause button stop working. I'd have dead spots in the middle of playlists that I couldn't rewind past because it would hit them and immediately jump to the next song.
Resyncing seemed to fix the audio, but ran out of space because it left behind 4 gigs of cruft in "Other" that the storage page in settings couldn't account for anywhere. I had to do a restore to get everything working again.
So all in all, my experience with iOS 7 haven't been great.
EDIT: One more complaint in the design department, even though I don't mind the iOS 7 style as a whole. The new Music app is very clearly designed for the iPhone 5 and up with taller screens. The scrubber has gotten a lot harder to use, and if you're not precise enough you'll end up setting the song's rating instead.
For what it's worth, I've had horrible performance in the iTunes App Store since my first day with my first iPhone. And the switch to the new store 'style', heavy on pop-ups instead of directing to distinct pages, has been worse than before.
I don't think I've ever had an acceptably performant session in the App Store, at any time of day, on any device, from any network. Even direct links to app pages from other web pages have always been slow.
So I'm not one who'd be able to notice new 'lag'. But I haven't had any crashes.
The "Other" space tends to be MMS messages. If you're not manually clearing conversations, those pictures, videos and sound files are just getting filed away forever. They really need a fix for that. If nothing else, offering a setting to automatically trim conversations to only the most recent X weeks.
Not MMS here, I'm using Google Voice, and any MMS messages to that number just vanish into the ether. Only a couple of people have my "real" phone number.
The Other space ballooning definitely coincided with the music syncing bug. Before that it was a barely noticeable sliver in the space meter.
As far as App Store, that one actually runs well for me. It's only the music store that sucks.
The app store is so painfully slow even over wifi. It used to be much better before the switch to the screenshot-heavy layout. I like the screenshots in theory, but it is so slow that it makes browsing apps feel like a huge chore.
On a 3rd gen iPad here and by far my biggest issue has been that multiple background downloads (a batch of app updates or track downloads from the store for example) will more often than not cause the whole device to deadlock, with the only way to recover being to do the power + home button hard-reboot combo.
Really hoping this was fixed in 7.1, which I'm running now and so far seems smoother (doesn't stutter anymore when switching to the task switcher view, for example).
The other persistently anooying bug I've seen has to do with text fields on some webpages (eg Outlook Web Access and the Amazon Kindle web app) where if you tap to change the cursor position inside the field, you can no longer type characters in it and have to deselect the field (by tapping another on the same page) and then reselecting it again. Makes fields on many pages simply un-editable (the Amazon web app is the worst as you have to leave the store section entirely and it breakd the product Search field). Not sure if it's page or Webkit specific but it'a been around unfixed even on iOS 6 if I remember right. Fingers crossed on that one :)
* the music player corrupts itself and starts skipping all songs, may or may not be fixed by rebooting the device. May require resynchronising all the music (remove/readd everything)
* it regularly decides to stop opening sync sessions with iTunes and has to be rebooted
Apart from that it's been pretty smooth sailing.
Oh yeah, and every single update re-enables bluetooth, that's annoying.
The only bug I've seen is that the device would restart itself on occasion. There was a critical bug right when iOS7 came out where if you tapped define in mail or notes, it would completely freeze the app. Seems to be fixed now.
Then again, I wouldn't say I'm a heavy user. I mainly use it to check on my mail, read some news, etc.
The cell phone modem is a separate hardware piece in your phone, it has its own operating system. The smartphone OS communicates with the modem over an interface usually using "AT" commands. The iPhone 1-4 had an cell phone modem design by Intel (GSM version, modem manufacturer got bought by Intel).
The iOS UI consists app(s), so it may crash and restart.
That one (screwing up the music library) has been annoying me a fair amount lately. I've had to re-load my music library two or three times since iOS 7.
I disable it because I've absolutely no use for it, and it's one more possible attack vector on the device. I've no idea if it has an impact on battery life (and it's probably not much of one in the context of my normal use of the device).
The problems I've experienced, and this is in no way restricted to iOS 7 (goes all the way back to the first iPhone in fact), is that the apps that are the least reliable, most likely to crash or have obvious bugs are those written by Apple themselves. I too am a developer and I love Apple products but wtf?!
My 5s has definitely been a bit buggy but I'm putting that down to "whole new 64bit OS and SDKs and app developers who never follow the documentation and whoops, now it's all gone to cock when things change".
I do wonder what happened with this release. Beta 1 came out ages ago on November 18th. My guess is that CarPlay got added to the iOS 7.1 content, and then that had delays, and then had to be properly announced at a big motor show.
This came too late. For months now - ever since iOS 7 came out, I've had to tell people "iOS 7 is great, but buggy. Don't worry, Apple will release 7.1 soon that will fix a lot of these issues." Time, and time again, I said that. With each beta it became more and more obvious that Apple wasn't releasing a quick fix for the myriad of issues that plagued users.
I think Apple did this wrong. 7.1 contains new features and updated UI elements. Fuck that. I wanted the hundreds of bugs that were impacting users to be fixed back in October. I expected the new iPads to be running 7.1. I think Apple should have focused solely on fixing the bugs present for 7.1, and then released 7.2 that had these features. But since September 18th, (173 days ago!) I've been dealing with a buggy OS and been apologizing for it [0].
To me, that is unacceptable.
[0] I'm a big Apple fan, and develop iOS apps, and a lot of people in my circle come to me with their Apple questions.