iOS7 is good but... -

Sure iOS7 is far better than the seemingly unfounded fears rampant through the development stage. Sure the icons and interfaces are flat but in a minimalistic way. Once again Apple has push us by giving us what we wanted before we knew it.

Unfortunately there is indeed a dark spot on this seemingly sunny day. Apple seriously has to rethink it’s deployment strategy. The new mobile OS was released yesterday and as of this morning it only had a 28% adoption rate. Droid fan boys and Microsoft will of course spin this as end user rejection however it truly has more to do with the ridiculous deployment scheme employed by Apple.

Consider a family with two or more iPhones on a less than optimal internet connection having to each individually download the binary update. I saw reports on twitter of 52+ hours to download. At one point my computer reported 84 hours and the number of times that iTunes froze during the download is utterly unbelievable. Each time you restart the process it begins all over again from the beginning. Saying that this experience is frustrating would be an infuriating understatement. This is incredible because the file is only 752MB, which makes me want to shout, ‘What the Frak?!?’

Consider Blizzard entertainment’s recent StarCraft 2 security update that weighs in around 6.5GB which can depending upon your connection to the internet take a long time to download. However, it has peer to peer seeding my like a bittorrent and more importantly an auto-resume feature. A seemingly simple technology readily available on most UNIX and Linux based platform thus making me wonder why in the hell that iOS a derivative of FreeBSD would lack this feature.

Consider a family with 4 or more iPhones, each being required to individually download the update. This just does not make reasonable sense. Consider now that Apple recently updated their Airport Extreme wireless router product why did they not incorporate this sort of consolidated download ability into that product? If they had I would certainly have a real reason to upgrade mine. More importantly Mac OS X Server used to have this feature so why would it be unreasonable to expect Apple to offer it on a lesser product? Honestly you can program OS X server to download and distribute software updates to all bound devices why not add a lite version of this to iTunes or the Airport?

Let’s be honest the features available on today’s smart phone barely differ. What would make the difference would be the ability to quickly update one’s device. There is honestly no excuse for this lack of vision. Truthfully this is not just an Apple problem. If you have an Android phone you still have to download your update individually. In fact when I had mine the only source was Verizon so the update had to come through the wireless carrier which honestly is worse than the situation experienced with flaky internet delivery.