Three Weeks With iOS and iPadOS 15 ⇥ macstories.net
Victoria Song, Gizmodo:
Most people are perfectly fine waiting until September for the annual upgrades to iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS. But for the impatient few among us, you can actually test out Apple’s next-generation software for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch starting today by downloading the public betas if iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and watchOS 8.
For the past three weeks, I’ve been running the developer beta of iOS and iPadOS 15 on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and M1 iPad Pro, respectively. Common wisdom says you’re not supposed to install early developer builds of iOS and iPadOS on your primary devices; I have to ignore that since work on my annual iOS and iPadOS reviews starts as soon as the WWDC keynote wraps up, which means I have to get my hands on the latest version of the iPhone and iPad operating systems as quickly as possible. As I explained on AppStories, putting together these reviews is some of the most challenging work I do all year, but it’s rewarding, I have fun with it, and it gives me a chance to optimize my writing setup on an annual basis.
The result of jumping on the beta bandwagon early is also that, at this point, having used iOS and iPadOS 15 daily for over three weeks, I have a pretty good sense of what’s going to be popular among regular users, which features power users are going to appreciate, and what aspects of the OSes still need some fine-tuning and tweaks from Apple. […]
Like every year since iOS 5, I have done the same because I am an impatient fool. So far, I have found that these betas are remarkably stable and, since the most recent seed — which happens to be the same as the now-available public beta — battery life isn’t too bad, either.
I appreciated Viticci’s early look at the good, the bad, and the Safari. I am still getting used to the Focus options. One little thing I noticed is that the “Driving” Focus mode defaults to switching on when it detects that you are in a vehicle in motion. This is perhaps something you may want to change if you, for example, ever take the bus or are a passenger.