Integrating iOS 17
Table of Contents
While there are a lot of iOS 17 reviews and articles out there, I wanted to share some of my thoughts. If you want a very comprehensive review, I suggest you hit Macstories. There is no place better for these Apple OS reviews. They aren't really reviews, but are more of a what is available and how to use it (both at an entry and a pro-level). It's my go to every year.
For this article I want to talk more about how I've incorporated iOS 17 into my life and what has made things easier and what maybe isn't where I want it to be.
Intro
Each year I look forward to the enhancements. I start paying attention right at WWDC, and even before that in the rumors. Years ago, I used to install the beta super early in the process. This was before they did public betas and we had a developer at work that had an ID and Jason, my co-host of the g4f podcast, and I would need to start testing and figure out what was going to work and what wasn't.
But for the last several years, I haven't wanted to mess with things because I didn't want to deal with all the issues that come along with the early betas.
This year, Jason and I decided to put on the betas pretty late in the cycle. I think it was like beta 8. It was pretty cool to test it out and I really enjoyed talking about it on the podcast. That was episode 15 of g4f: https://player.captivate.fm/episode/ca4441fd-a8a3-425c-a10c-d02ddbd0875e
Beyond potential bugs and all that, there is still a downside to grabbing the betas. Every time I have done that, it has felt kind of anti-climactic when the release comes out. This year was not an exception to that as far as features of the OS go. But it was a better year because I did some significant hardware upgrades. You can check out that article here: https://www.mtneboconsulting.com/upgraded-ecosystem
But even with all of that, there are some places where iOS 17 has made a difference in my life or at least changed some of my habits. Let's talk about some of those.
Standby Mode
This is one of the reasons that I wanted to upgrade my hardware. I wanted the always on display which required a 14 or 15 series phone. And while MagSafe isn't required, I thought this would be a good opportunity to upgrade. I had a wireless charger as part of a charging station, but my phone had to lay flat. So I grabbed a stand for both my desk and my nightstand.
Those stands actually came before my 15 Pro Max so I had them set up pretty much how I wanted them. If you aren't familiar with standby mode, there are three different screens you can use. The first is a widgets screen. There are two place holders for widgets where you can put a single widget or a smart stack. In that screen, I have an analogue clock and then a few other widgets I can swipe between. I really wanted this screen to be crazy useful, but only being able to do two widgets side by side combined with a lack of adoption from developers on apps makes this the screen that I use less than anyone else. My thought for this screen was that it would be the one that I would use on my desk and it would dynamically show me the information that was most useful. The feature just isn't there for that.
To get the feature there, it would need to detect things like a game in progress and do a better job of presenting the live activity (more on those in a minute) or other things like that. I think this applies to smart stacks in general. The smart part is a relative term and I wish they knew better what I need at the moment. Maybe AI will help that come.
The screen I have started using at my desk is the photos screen. I've got the types of pictures set that I want it to display (mostly landscapes and city pictures) and it rotates through them. I thought this would be cool but until I got the phone with the always on screen, it wasn't terribly useful because every time it timed out, it wouldn't show anything until I unlocked the device. I'll keep playing with this one.
What I think would make it better would be more controls and configurations. Being able to do things like determine how often it rotates pics, or to rotate on tap, easier to determine which pics to include, live photos and other things like that. Or maybe even allow us to put videos on there. Not that I'd want many of my own but maybe things like the Apple TV screen savers would be great. If you do that, then some super small widgets like those on the lock screen that could display a small clock or other simple information. I know there are some additional controls coming in 17.1 so hopefully we will keep seeing new things.
One kind of cool things is that there is a subtle zoom that happens on the photos. I really like that. So that is a nice touch.
Where I find standby the most useful is on my nightstand. And it's nothing fancy that I do. The third screen is a clock screen. There are some fancy things but I almost exclusively use the simple digital clock one. It has the time super big as well my upcoming alarm time (almost like a widget) and then the weather. When the sensors detect it's dark, it changes the readout to red so it's not as hard on the eyes. And if you are in sleep mode (I didn't know it did this), it actually turns off the display and then turns it on if it senses motion. Good feature I think but I'd like it to go even dimmer so that I could leave it on all night. But that's not a huge deal.
So essentially this has made it like I have a good old fashioned alarm clock with a smarter display. I wish it was a little more interactive, like tapping on things would take you to simple versions of apps or something like that.
One other thing I would really like is something the apple watch was. When it comes to charging, I'm great optimizing charging. But what I like about the Apple watch is that when I want to overwrite what the watch things it needs to charge to, I can tap the charging icon on the nightstand display and have it charge to full. Would be great to do that on the phone.
There is one other place I have tested out standby just a bit and that's in my truck. I recently grabbed a MagSafe charger for the truck. I assumed standby would just work but it didn't and I'm not sure exactly how it's supposed to work. I'm not sure if it's because it's connected to the usba in the truck or that connecting it to the truck via bluetooth triggers driving focus mode or maybe a combination. I was able to get it to work a couple of times but I'm still not sure exactly how. I'll keep trying some things here and maybe update on the podcast later.
The other thing I'm not sold on is the notifications. Think of things like a new message. I like that it shows who sent the message nice and big but I'm not convinced that it's easy to get to the message from standby. I'll keep testing those as well.
Dynamic Island, Live Activities & Notifications
My first impression of the dynamic island is that I love it and would love for developers to find other cool things to do with it. Maybe they should take advantage of existing functionality first (like supporting live activities). Even Apple doesn't have live activities where I thought they might (like in weather). I've seen a couple of apps that will do live activity when there is some sort of storm. I think it would be cool to have the current conditions always in the dynamic island but I haven't figured out how to do that. I guess you get the same thing on the lock screen widget but I'd like to see what it's like to have that black pill to always have something in it, even when the phone is locked.
One app I'm using for live activities is Sports Alerts (why EPSN doesn't support this I have no idea). Beyond that, I'm not traveling so things like travel apps don't do me a whole lot of good. I think I'll have a flight in the next few months so it will be cool to do everything through a live activity.
One thing I'd like to see is just a better setting approach to live activities. This is partially due to discoverability and the other is just for easier management. Because app update notes are generally garbage and for someone like me that didn't have the dynamic island till now, I'd love a settings page where I could see all the apps I have installed that support live activities and be able to turn them on and off. Instead, you essentially have to go into the settings for every app and figure it out there.
A Few Other Things
The switch from having to say hey before siri I think was a good one. I haven't had issues with it although I don't really get how to make the follow up inquiries work. I actually don't use siri for much of that anyway. I use it to control music and tv on my homepods and to do things like set reminders and timers. So I'm definitely not a power user. But I've pretty much adapted to not using hey anymore and I don't get a lot of false or non-activations. I previously had this turned off on my phone just because I didn't want it to hardly ever be the device to respond. I have it back on now, mostly because I'm using my AirPods way more.
Music fade is nice. This is the feature where you can have two tracks blend together for a few seconds. It's noticeable and is fine but I don't think I would have missed it if it wasn't on by default.
Contact posters is fun. I'm setting up new ones for people when I get a chance. To be honest, I just don't get a lot of phone calls so the contact photo I see way more than the poster.
New messaging features are great. I like the drawer. Live stickers was cool to try out but haven't used it since.
Live voicemail I have used a couple of times. I haven't tried leaving a facetime voicemail yet so we will see if that comes up anytime soon.
AirTag sharing is one of those things that I'm glad it's there, I set it up and now I don't even think about it.
Grocery list is cool. Gets used a lot but I don't do the shopping (thank you pick up orders).
Shortcuts in splotlight search is fantastic. I'm hoping they do some refinement there.
One feature I'm super excited about is the journal app. It's not out yet and it's not in the 17.1 beta so I'm hoping it's coming in 17.2.
A Concern
With all that being said, I'm still concerned about the behind the scenes stability of the Apple ecosystem. Several months ago I was having major problems with all my devices playing nice with each other, especially my homepod minis. Just seemed like I was restarting them regularly. That and all of the data sync and stuff really seemed to stabilize.
With the introduction of all the new OSs, it feels like we have gone backwards in this area. I say feels because it's really hard to pin it all down but it does seem like data and communication between devices is not solid. I was hoping once I upgraded my Mac to Sonoma it would improve but doesn't feel like it.
This started with health data not syncing to the ipad like I expected. Eventually it would get there but it took a long time. Then when I transferred data to my new iPhone, messages on my ipad got out of sync. My notifications don't always show up on the device I expect them to. Just today I was paying attention to this and I'd see a message notification but no chime or notification on my Apple Watch, just a 1 in the complication. I didn't have messages open anywhere else so the system should not have assumed I did not need to be notified on my watch.
I've also been trying to figure out with Watch OS 10, how I can play the music directly from my watch without it defaulting to my phone. I mean, for most users, it would absolutely make sense to want to play from the phone instead of the watch. But for me who stores gigs of music on my watch for this exact reason, that doesn't make sense. I've seen a lot of people reporting this issue. And in my testing, I do find it strange that when I turned off bluetooth on the phone which disconnnected the watch from the phone and hit play, it was playing the music on my phone. I assumed, incorrrectly apparaently, that with bluetooth off they wouldn't talk to each other. Apparently there is more to it than that and they must be using wifi and all of their back end services to do this.
So those are some of the reasons I anxious to get into later releases of iOS 17. These kinds of stability issues drive me crazy and I hope they get resolved.
Widgets & Home Screen Customization
So as not to end on a low note with my concerns, I want to talk about how widgets and some of the other features have changed how set up my phone, particularly my home screen.
On my 12 and before that even, I used widgets only in a limited way. Since I use my watch a ton, most of the glanceable information I would get from the watch instead. But with interactive widgets and some of the enhancements, plus other apps taking advantage or even enhancing widgets (like widgetsmith), I wanted to see what I could do.
Now, I have two home screens and the only app icons on the main one are the four in the phone dock. Everything else is widgets. I'm using smartstacks to group like information together. For example, I have an Overcast recents, Music and a Widgetsmith Coverflow widget as a single smart stack. With the Overcast widget, I can start any of my recent podcasts right from the home screen. The Coverflow one is a genius application. I have several of my most recently used playlists added to the widget. I simply tap through them and then hit play on the one I want. That starts the music playing and updates the music widget so I can see what is playing. I love it.
I have another smart stack that has my work type stuff. To do's, notes and fantastical. I'm leveraging widgetsmith to have a nice locket sized picture of my wife and behind that a find my widget so I can see if she is on her way home. Then I have one more widget that is a direct link to my latest quick note. Those take up my entire homescreen.
The second screen has a few more widgets but then also has icons and folders to things I use quite frequently. But to be honest, it's almost easier to just use spotlight search to get to those other apps.
All in all, I love the new homescreen set up and it wouldn't be possible without interactive widgets and some of the other features.
Wrap Up
I think that's probably enough here. All in all, iOS 17 is a solid update and I really enjoy how these features are really making a difference. I think it will be interesting to see which I'm still really leveraging in six months or even when iOS 18 comes out.