Every time there’s an iOS update, the internet goes crazy about their phone being slow or hot or not holding a charge. Then, a day or two later, the background system processes finish doing their post-upgrade homework and everything goes back to normal.

To be fair, iOS maybe should put some visual indicator that it is doing this. Then everything would be obvious.

While this might be appreciated by a small number technical people it would just be confusing to the overwhelming majority. The cell, wifi, and battery indicators all provide information the user can affect by moving the device or plugging it in. An indicator would not provide any actionable information to the user. Also progress bars and time estimates for tasks are typically expected but in practice very difficult to make accurate. So you could not even accurately tell the user how long they need to wait for the device to finish it's background work

I don't see why they shouldn't include this when they include the info when it happens for a mac. When you get a new mac or it updates, you can see that spotlight is busy reindexing which explains the slowdown. I'm surprised there is not some one sentance explanation somewhere in the phone, like "processes will continue to update in the background and phone performance may be affected until this finishes" and boom, the OP article would have never been written.

"Background system processes running" wouldn't be obvious to non-technical users. It might even be distressing. If the process isn't something that can easily be explained to a regular user, I can see why Apple wouldn't try and communicate about it.

Though I could see maybe detecting that a user is a developer and showing a message only for those users

True, but it could be marketed a bit better: "Update finishing in the background"

People hate updates, it would make them more aware they are happening.

People deserve to know what their digital brains are doing on their behalf.

This is how Android shows it, and I think it is quite good because the phone feels slower while finishing the upgrade.

But unlike this (which is timed in hours) in Android it's done in a minute and then the notification is gone. Maybe Apple should start by doing the update in minutes first.

I find it really bizarre that it takes hours to run whatever background process iOS has after an upgrade, especially because in Android's case this is AFAIK rebuilding the Dalvik bytecode while iOS should use a compiled language (ObjectiveC/Swift).

Does someone knows what is iOS doing at the background?

Well I've been developing iOS apps for a long time, and updated many times. I don't remember anything as dramatic as this!

Hmm, if I specifically go looking for reports of benchmarks going down, it does seem to be a much more prevalent story with this version than any previous one.

Yes. The slow down was real and very significant and it lasted hours. It was not people freaking out for no reason.

Reports of post-upgrade slowdown are pretty common (google it for various versions), but this is the first time I’m seeing lots of reports of post-upgrade benchmark hits.

Except for when apple started throttling phones with batteries below 85% capacity.

…to extend the usable life of those batteries.

Yes. So now instead of driving 100 miles with 100 miles pers hour I'm now doing 100 miles with 85 mph.

Did you know that batteries are made of chemicals and don’t last forever? Over time their performance degrades, but you can use them for longer if you don’t use as much peak power.

If your update system requires 1-2 days of "post-upgrade homeswork" time and slows your phone by 50% in the process, you've designed a very poor update system.

It's a non-concern for 99% of users. iOS vs Android version piecharts always look like this:

https://www.alistdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/assets/alist-a...

Apple successfully upgrades a huge majority of all their phones in the field, and nearly all of those users are barely even aware of it. They plug their phone in at night, sometimes in the morning there's a message about a new version. Maybe they notice their phone is slow for a day or two, likely they don't. No major incidents involving mass-bricking of phones, no rollbacks, no data loss... arguably the most successful update system in the history of technology.

Why? Seems like this just ignores reality.

It’s just true that data structures change over time, and sometimes new features mean that old data needs to be re-processed.

> It’s just true that data structures change over time

Sure, but it seems only 1 of the OS's takes this long to be fully usable post-update. Why is that? Does Android not ever have to change data structures and if so, why doesn't it take their OS 24-48 hours of post-processing to finish the update? You find this acceptable?

Android doesn’t have the same feature set. Comparing the two like this is an obvious fallacy. For example, Apple does their ML e.g. for photos on device for privacy reasons, whereas Google does it in the cloud.

I’m not saying ML is the cause although it could be. I’m saying they are different products with different values, so expecting them to behave the same doesn’t make sense.

And yes, some background processing after an update is more than acceptable. It’s desirable if it means sending less data to Google.

Aaaand it's fixed... I didn't do anything specific. It took a few hours (?!) after the upgrade. It scored many times low, but now it seems to score at a normal level (3000+).

Really wonder what the explanation for all of that is.

Background process doing some sort of migration or other data conversion between versions? Strange the device wouldn't wait until during the night while plugged in, but without context, that might not be an option.

Kind of sad that we don't have a top or process viewer. Or free -m / open system. This makes me yearn for an open source OS on my phone again, I may have to look into a pine phone.

If you connect your iPhone to your Mac you can run Instruments on it to figure out what is going on. I used to recently to figure out that Slack had been making my entire phone slow because it was busy looping in the background.

I agree, but it shouldn't be a classic process viewer. It should be a task viewer which has some context or understandable description. Like "photo analysis job" or "iOS 14.5.1 data migration job".

Yes... I remember back in the day I had terminal with root access on a jailbroken iPhone. You could install almost any package on your phone via terminal.

Stick a fan in it so I can hear if a background process is being run!

Might explain why my battery dropped that much, too.

One of iOS' more annoying quirks is its opacity and lack of user affordances.

The volume buttons don't seem to affect haptic noises, but the mute button does. The OS locks up for about a minute when you change passcodes while it re-crypts everything, but from the user's perspective it just looks frozen. The implications of opting into their 'find my...' and iCloud networks are not adequately explained. The devices take 15-30 seconds to actually cut power after they appear to shut down, and during that time they won't respond to any button presses.

The list goes on, using a modern iPhone feels like you are constantly negotiating with a disingenuous UI. The OS regularly claims to be done with something while it continues working furiously in the background, and it is full of undocumented exceptions to common settings.

Indexing or rebuilding I guess.

Yet no notification. The goblins inside the ios doing their thing behind closed doors.

Even a heads-up saying "hey we're doing some work behind the scenes on your device as part of the upgrade" would do.

Is there mention of this in any of the dialogs that one is asked to click "I have read and understand" that were not actually read? I remember Photos telling me that it was scanning the library to do their new layout after whatever update that was. That was to that specific app, and not a system wide notification, but it also said it would be paused until it was plugged in.

I could see a new something in the Settings that indicates post-OS upgrade showing migration status being useful.

If there was I didn't see it. But that is no surprise. Its not a way for them to escape a notification either imo. Especially if its slowing everything down.

That's potentially a good idea. It could even be hidden in the developer section, since those are the people most likely to notice.

Yeah pretty sure it’s this. Have seen various complaints about both macOS and iOS sluggish performance post upgrade to end up being just temporary while caches / indexes rebuilt, file systems migrated etc

Likely, yes. The thing is, the phone does not "heat up". Perhaps they throttle the whole phone down globally and let the background update processes run at a slow speed/low priority so they don't heat up the phone too much.