Report on the NEW iOS 8.1 Revision Today

Finally stepped forward and updated my iPad air from iOS 7.1.2 to iOS 8.1. And what i see is, noting but lag & bugs here and there! Share sheet icons still shift thier positions, safari stutters between tabs and even while opening folders in fav's. Opening control center(try opening cc in safari with keyboard up, u see things stutter. Open cc on homescreen with a folder open and it stutters again!!!!), spliting keyboard and even a basic task like moving between pages on homescreen(like never & ever before, icons on the next page takes few msec to show up) feels bad because they lag!! And all this on a year old device. Multitasking gestures still fail every 1 out of 10 times( which used to be 5/10). iOS 7.1.2 still feels like a safe place! Too bad...hoping for many fixes on next update!

did you try a full reset ?

Typing this on my freshly upgraded iPad 2. I was one of those who reverted to 7.1.2 while it was still accessible but due to issues with my backup, restored to a fresh 7.1.2 build, so my 8.1 update has been to a relatively clean 2 - 3 week old installation of 7.1.2, not some version with quite literally years of accumulated upgrade history. The upgrade was painless, and the behaviour since upgrade has been impressive, and promising.

Just the slightest hint of slower performance on the iPad 2 under 8.1 compared with what I'm used to with 7.1.2, but nothing like the lag and jerkiness I experienced with 8.0 - I never tried 8.0x - preferring to wait.

And the killer issue for me was the constantly breaking 3G connectivity. Well it hasn't gone off so far, but it's too early to say if it is all sorted yet. I'm hopeful, and will keep people posted over coming days.

Cheers,

Trevor from Oak Park

Hi trevorfromoakpark, after reading your post, it seems like (with a clean install) you can get iOS 8.1 under control and running similar to 7.1.2. However, after reading what others have written, and having tried 8.1 on iPads at an Apple Store, I don't want to create a lagfest on my rMini. I've been reading around, and Safari still seems very buggy (and tab view very laggy - especially when closing tabs). What I don't understand, is how some people have a smooth experience with iOS 8.1, whilst others are not. If it really comes down to a clean install, it seems like a (fairly) easy fix. Also, did you update through iTunes or OTA?

Thanks a lot in advance

Due to a failed IOS 8.1 update attempt I was forced to restore from my iCloud backup. The helpful people at the Apple Store did the restore now my iPad 4 runs like new. I wouldn't worry about IOS 8.1.

Hi moritzhberg, yes it seems like having a clean, or near clean install of the earlier OS is a key part of iOS 8.1 install success. For me my fall-back plan - if you can call it that - was to blow the iPad away to factory settings and install 8.1 as a fresh install. After all, that's what I'd had to do a few weeks back to get 7.1.2 back onto my machine, when I'd discovered that my backup was no good, and I couldn't go back! I'd done it once, I figured I could do it again. There was nothing on my iPad in terms of documents, photos, settings that I could not reconstruct from elsewhere.

With regard to Safari, I must admit for better or for worse, as with my desktop, I tend to use Chrome on the iPad, and that seems to be working pretty well.

When I did try to use Safari for example to access this site, as I use a password manager, and I was trying to paste in the password into the password field from my password manager, Safari certainly didn't behave as neatly as Chrome in terms of accepting my tap gesture to get the "Paste" chiclet up in the password field. I'm not sure what is the cause of this, but it seemed to work much more reliably in Chrome.

As I said, there is a general perceptible performance hit across the board on the iPad under 8.1, but it does't seem as massive - unusably massive - as I perceived it to be with iOS 8.0 on the iPad 2.

For me with that original release there were two key factors that made me believe it was a no brainer to go back to 7.1.2 while I still could:

1. 3G kept dropping out

2. Performance of the "Gold" version of iOS 8 on iPad seemed totally performance mismatched / ill-tuned to the now admitted agieng iPad 2 Platform.

For those reasons I decided to hold off, but I must admit I was now up to at least 5 apps that no longer updated because they were now iOS 8 only so I knew I was going to have to move sometime. To date for me it looks like a good decision to have moved.

Cheers,

Trevor from Oak Park.

Hi trevorfromoakpark, thanks a lot for the detailed response, it was very helpful to get an insight of how iOS 8.1 performs on an iPad 2. I know that UI lag isn't as much of a problem, but I kind of like to keep my devices performing like when I unboxed them to avoid longing for an upgrade after two years of use (for example, my iPod Touch 4, which shipped with iOS 4 is a nightmare on iOS 6). When testing iOS 8.1 at the Apple Store, one example that I could consistently recreate without fail on every iPad (even the Air 1) was lag when closing tabs in Safari in the new tab view (load up a few tabs, and swipe them off one by one, and you will see that they pause halfway through the animation). Can you confirm that this is no longer present after performing a clean install?

Thanks a lot

Rick600, why do you suggest a hard reset?

I've been following this thread for a while now and would like to ask contributors if they are aware of

a) any official Apple response to the problems some iPad users are suffering on thier previously ok units since the ios8 update and

b) a definitive answer to any self help fixes, for example restoring the iPad with a pre iOS 8 back up, would this do the trick?

c) any further upgrades to sort out the issues?

to be honest I'm pretty disillusioned with the whole thing now and very frustrated after thinking I was stepping into a better world than the one dominated by microsoft

a) No. Apple has not said anything that I have heard yet on this subject.

b) No. Restoring an old backup will only restore the old data. It doesn't restore the old firmware.

c) No. Not so far.

Thanks allen

HI tony1305.

In a few other forum posts I have been in the past few weeks where the iPad issues were Safari problems, constant pop ups, cellular/ wifi connectivity issues, a couple of people contacted Apple support or went to an Apple store. They were instructed that the issues would be solved by erasing all their data and reinstalling the iOS. Some did it hooking up the iPad to the computer connecting to iTunes and others like myself did it by erasing/reinstalling with an iCloud backup. it solved my pop up and many Safari issues, but over the past few days I still have some Safari issues with pages not loading or responding to touch when trying to open a link.

hope this helps.

HI jglnaz

i have had those issues and then some! Slow jerky operation, lag when switching apps, non of which I had before the original update. Any subsequent updates have failed to sort any of my issues.

fortunatly I don't appear to alone in having these problems so I know it's not a problem with my ipad

thanks for replying anyway