Spent about two hours of my Saturday morning fighting with my phone's storage so I could finally install iOS 9. It's been out since Wednesday (the 16th) and I'd been putting it off, mostly because I remembered what happened last year with iOS 8: my old 16GB iPhone told me flat out that it needed 4.6GB free just to start the update, and I had to delete three apps, three photo albums and a voice memo I actually wanted just to clear the runway. Not doing that dance again, I told myself. Turns out I mostly didn't have to.
The storage thing actually got better
At the September 9th keynote, Craig Federighi made a point of saying the over-the-air iOS 9 update would only need about 1.3GB of free space instead of the old 4.6GB number. I was skeptical, because Apple says a lot of things at keynotes that sound great and then don't quite hold up once you're standing in your kitchen with a phone that says "not enough storage" anyway. But this one's real, or real enough, they're apparently using some of the same space that gets freed up mid-install and reusing it, instead of needing everything reserved up front. My phone asked for 1.4GB. I had 2.1GB free after deleting one podcast app I never open. Done in under ten minutes on wifi.
If you're on an older device and it's still choking, here's what actually worked for me and a couple of people I follow on Twitter this week:
- Plug into a computer and update through iTunes instead of doing it over the air. iTunes doesn't have the same live-storage requirement because it's not juggling space on the device itself.
- Offload your camera roll first. Mine was eating 3GB and I hadn't backed up to the computer since June, which, yeah, that's on me.
- Delete the Podcasts app if you don't use it. It ships pre-installed and does nothing for a lot of people, myself included.
What's actually in it, once you're through
Low Power Mode is the one I think normal people will notice fastest. You get a little notification around 20% battery asking if you want to turn it on, and it visibly slows the drain. I ran mine down to 8% at a coffee shop yesterday just to test it and got another forty-some minutes out of it doing basically nothing but texting.
The News app is fine. I gave it my usual sites and it's basically a nicer-looking RSS reader with ads, which honestly describes half the apps I use anyway. Transit directions in Maps only work in a handful of cities right now (San Francisco, New York, Toronto, a few in China), so if you're not in one of those, it just quietly punts you to a list of transit apps like it always has. Kind of a letdown if you'd read the keynote coverage and were expecting it everywhere.
The security stuff is the part I actually care about. Passcodes are six digits by default now instead of four, which is a small thing but it matters: four digits is 10,000 combinations, six digits is a million, and most people were never going to bother setting a real alphanumeric passcode anyway. If you've got an iPad Air 2, you also get Split View now, actual side-by-side apps, not just the slide-over panel thing. I don't have one so I can't tell you if it's good, I just know my friend Priya wouldn't stop texting me about it Wednesday night.
One thing nobody warns you about: after the update finishes, your phone spends a good while "optimizing apps" in the background, and it'll feel sluggish and warm for like twenty minutes. Mine did anyway. Don't panic and don't restart it, just let it finish. I made the mistake of force-quitting a stuck progress bar once on an iOS 7 update years ago and paid for it with a bricked phone and a very unpleasant hour on the phone with Apple support, so learn from me on that one at least.
Also, completely unrelated, but the new iPad Pro and the Pencil they showed off at the same keynote aren't shipping for weeks still, so if you were hoping to walk into a store this weekend and buy one, you're out of luck. Same with the 6s and 6s Plus — preorders opened last Saturday but the actual release isn't until the 25th. Patience, apparently, is the theme of this particular September.