Crash Test: iOS 8, Yosemite

If you are a developer or just an early adopter with an iOS Developers License who is considering upgrading your iPhone to the iOS 8 beta released yesterday,  we tested a bunch of different apps to see how they fared.

For the most part, the apps were OK. Some had minor issues, which is to be expected at such an early stage in the operating system’s development cycle. Only a few apps failed to work, though.

The most notable broken apps were:

• Google Chrome (though other Google apps seemed to work fine)
• 1Password
• Amazon Web Services Console
• Untappd

Tweetbot also had a handful of issues that affected its secondary features.

We also did a quick test of Yosemite. For the most part, we were impressed with the speed of the operating system. It is slow at first, when the OS first loads, files are being indexed, and databases are being upgraded. Once you are past that step, though, it moves pretty smoothly.

There was some glitches within programs (i.e. tabs covered the bar in Chrome) but no apps failed to load, including Adobe CS6, Microsoft Office 2011, Coda 2 and even Parallels, which is famous for forcing you to throw money out the window to upgrade every time a new OS comes out. That is not to say that Parallels, Inc. won’t find a way to claim that the software is “incompatible” by the time the operating system is officially released. For the time being, though, users are safe.

The main issue we encountered with Yosemite was the look. While some users may find it refreshing, cleaner, or even flatter — it certainly is as flat as can be — it looks like a cheap Linux distribution.

After we test the features of both the mobile and desktop platforms in greater detail, we will report our findings. However, we cannot promise that we will not get sidetracked by playing around with Swift.