iOS 9 was released just a couple of days ago for all iPhone and iPad users with lots of new features. One of the new features touted by Apple was improved performance across the operating system, specially for older iPhone models. But do these claims stand correct in real world usage? This video puts iOS 9 through the tests.
The purpose of the video is to test boot times and app loading times on various iPhone models. The testing is done on iOS 9 and iOS 8.4.1 to see if there are any improvements on Apple’s newest smartphone operating system. The benchmarks also include Geekbench, HTML5 and Speedtest so there are some numbers to back up the, otherwise, unscientific testing method.
The iPhones used for testing are:
- iPhone 4S
- iPhone 5
- iPhone 5s
- iPhone 6 Plus
As you can see in the video, the performance improvements are either negligible or not improvements at all on older devices. In older iPhones, the speed for app launching and loading is better in iOS 8.4.1 where as iOS 9.1 adds a delay between when you tap the app icon and when the app launch animation starts. There is also a delay between the app screen showing up and the data loading inside it. On newer iPhones, this issue is less visible but still, the performance increase that Apple talked about for iOS 9 is not there.
This concern seems to be addressed in iOS 9.1, as per our hands on testing. App launching, multitasking and animations are simply smoother in iOS 9.1 (tested on iPhone 6 Plus) as compared to iOS 9, or even iOS 8.4.1
It seems that Windows’ ‘wait for service pack 1’ theory also applies for iOS releases now as we can tell from iOS 7.1, iOS 8.3 and now with the upcoming iOS 9.1 which would be fixing the complains users have with the major releases. Luckily, OS X 10.11 El Capitan and WatchOS 2 releases perform better than their pervious versions.
