The release of any new operating system brings a slew of slight problems and annoyances. iOS 7 is no different. With that in mind, here’s how to fix some of the more common annoyances.
Disable Parallax
Parallax is iOS 7’s new moving home screen. When you tilt your phone, the wallpaper shifts with it. It’s a cool parlour trick, but not really useful. It’s also incredibly distracting on the larger screen of an iPad. Worse is the fact that disabling it is hidden away. To turn it off head into: Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion. Turn that “On” and parallax is disabled.
Disable Control Center Within Apps
[related title=”MORE” tag=”ios7launchguide” items=”1″]Control Center is the handy new feature where you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to get quick access to various system toggles. It’s great, but not all apps are ready for that gesture to exist. Subsequently, sometimes you’ll accidentally pull up the Control Center drawer when you’re playing a game or using an app. You can turn off Control Center in apps though. Just head to Settings > Control Center and toggle “Access Within Apps” off. It still works on the home screen and the lock screen.
Improve Battery Life By Disabling App Background Refresh
We haven’t done extensive tests with this, but running iOS 7 on an third generation iPad drained the battery significantly. The fix turned out to be disabling “App Background Refresh”. This is the smarter multitasking feature that keeps apps running in the background and refreshing content. It also appears to drain a lot of battery life in our case. To disable it, head to Settings > General >Background App Refresh and toggle the setting to off. Your mileage may vary, but it helped our battery life a lot.
Get The Old Notification Center Back
Notification Center sees a huge overhaul in iOS 7. You now have a calendar view showing what’s coming up on your calendar, as well as a quick summary of the weather. If you want something closer to the old Notification Center, you can pop into Settings > Notification Center and change a few options around. Turn off the “Today View”, “Today Summary” and “Tomorrow Summary.” Then set up your notifications for apps you’d like information from.
Disable Automatic App Updates
Automatic App Updates is a new feature in iOS 7 where iTunes automatically downloads and updates all your apps for you in the background. That’s handy, but as we all know, sometimes an app will introduce a bug or feature that you don’t want. If you’re not comfortable with automatic updates, you can turn them off by heading into Settings > iTunes and App Store and toggling the “Updates” setting of “Automatic Downloads” to off.
Make Messages Display A Person’s Full Name
By default, Messages no longer shows a contact’s full name. This is handy when you have friends with obnoxiously long and very specific names, but chances are you know a few people with the same name. This can cause confusion. To reenable the last name display in Messages, head to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Tap the “Short Name” option under “Contact” and change it to whichever selection you prefer.
Comments
55 responses to “iOS 7’s Biggest Annoyances (And How To Fix Them)”
Just stick with iOS6 then if you’re going to turn off all the bloody iOS7 features off ffs.
But, but, but, but fragmentation!
I’d hardly say 6 features is all of them. Just the battery draining, stupid motion effects (if you you could disable the lame animations that slow everything down) and accessing control center from inside apps, though i presume that control center has the same protections that notification center had for full screen apps making it hard to accidentally activate.
I am just waiting for the full review of iOS7 on iPhone4 (or 1 week, which ever comes last) before i upgrade just to make sure there are no show stopping issues. To possibly eeek out an extra year before i upgrade to Android of WinPhone.
I got it on my 4S, it’s ok so far, it could be jittery swiping from screen to screen though.
I find it’s jittery during messaging which is annoying because that’s what I use it for most, next to twitter.
I’ll definitely turn off the parallax though. That’s driving me nuts.
I don’t even notice the parallax, I actually hopping that you can do more ‘movement’, you can barely see the effect now.
I’m guessing it depends on your background. My wife had a starry-looking one and the little dots were swinging all over the place. It was actually giving her some motion sickness.
check this out, not super comprehensive, but has an ios 6 vs 7 comparison video on an iphone 4.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/new-lease-on-life-or-death-sentence-ios-7-on-the-iphone-4/
Thanks, i read their “iOS 7, thoroughly reviewed” this morning, where he said the iPhone 4 one will be out later, i presumed later in the week, so i didn’t think to check for it yet.
It actually looks more responsive than my iPhone 4 currently is, so no idea if it’ll make things worse or not, but ill give it a go later.
Basically if you have a 2 year old phone you should never upgrade to the latest software. You’ll get lag and battery issues on any device prior to iPhone 5.
I bit the bullet last night, the responsivity is fine compared to what i already had. Jury is out on battery, its at 44% atm, but ive been playing with it for 3.5 hours (including app updates and reading Zite, only time will tell if battery is negatively effected.)
By your reasoning i shouldn’t have even upgraded to 6, and you say that 4Ss should not be updated to 7, which i think is crazy talk.
iOS7 has some great improvements that shoudl have been there years ago (Control Center, Slide to unlock without opening the notification that just appeared, timestamps on all SMSs [pull messges to left to reveal], MouthTime and more) its almost as good as getting a new phone. Still not good enough to keep me on iOS though, i especially hate the calendar, ill have to get a replacement now.
Tim, try Week Calendar. It is everything the iPhone calendar should have been.
ta, ill look into that one
You mean downgrade.
No
Why don’t you just say ” Just Get Android ”
I got mine this morning, loving it so far. Looks like I have Android theme app on my iPhone lol
I actually like iOS7. Its a refreshing change and a move in the right direction. I like all the shortcuts from the lockscreen, like android. Still love my HTC One through and my Lumia 925 is really growing on me. I have too many phones :P.
Because that is trading one set of problems for another. It’s just like those who say ‘Get a Mac’ when there is a problem with Windows.
I think both of those situations have a lesser of two evils for the majority of users ;P
if your not happy with iOS7 switch to android or Win 8, the stuffs old tech anyway, samsung and the others are the driving force behind new tech so why bother with an overrated ipod with a crappy camera
Crappy camera? Think again!
so it now has a 16 mega pixel camera same as the Nokia?? they fixed the weird purple haze issue as well, when did they announce this???
Stick with iOS 6 unless you want iMessaging / FaceTime that no longer activates – seems to be an issue for many – see apple community forums
I got no issue with my iMessaging and Facetime on 4s, the only weird thing actually since iOS 6, the iMessage from my friend now came up as email address and separated from the phone number, used to be one before iOS 6
That would be because their iMessage hadn’t activated. Apparently, according to Apple when I went in store to ask, Telstra was the slowest carrier to activate iMessage via the phone number. Optus and Vodafone users were without issues. Took me 4 days to activate via the number due to demand on the network.
Why do you need to activate it again? I am on Optus.
my biggest annoyance……
can’t quick access to music player controllers on lock screen anymore… if music isnt already playing when the screen locks up while in other another app
Mate you can just swipe up in lock screen to get the control to music player.
i know that, but tap and swipe is SLOW, double tap is much faster on the old iOS 🙁
God this shits me!
Nevermind I just realised that anyone can start enabling all sorts of stuff on your phone, killing your battery if you’re not paying attention…
Make sure you have control centre enabled for use within apps.
I just found out (the hard way) that in iOS 7, the tried and true swipe to delete an item (like in mail, messages, contacts, etc) has been removed. Instead it either takes you to the details view or to a previous view (like in the mail app, it takes you back to a list of inboxes).
Does anyone know how to bring this back?
Never mind, found it. To just swipe from right to left to invoke the delete command.
WiseHacker??… Hmmmm
I’m wise, not infallible. That right is reserved only for the Pope.
FYI. The pope is human…therefore falliable, especially in that he’s also catholic. Tee Hee!
…Swipe in the other direction?
Hey anyone with ios 7 know how to switch accounts on Game Centre?
In settings, not in the game centre app anymore.
I can’t get the weather to show up in my notifications.
Same here .. no weather in notifications… anybody else?
Hey,
I had this issue too for a while. As annoying as it is, especially from a battery life standpoint, you need to turn on location services and enable weather. Once you do that it’ll appear in your “Today” view in notification centre.
Hope that works for you 🙂
Same here!
Try to activate the location for wheather, settings > privacy > location service > tap on for the weather
Mine was like that and this show the weather 🙂 don’t forget to turn on the “today summary” in the notification service
Same for me. I have tried everything to get weather back.
i had this problem. I’m not too sure if it was coincidence but I went into the weather app, played around for a few minutes, and it miraculously appeared after that. I think you have to have the location thing on too.
Me neither. Anyone figure this out yet?
I had the same problem. What I finally did was launch the weather app. It wasn’t displaying any info either. I then went into settings, and noticed the temp pop up. Went to the notification screen, and there it was.
Same did not work for stocks. Not that big a deal to have them in notifications I suppose.
Where’s my passbook, stocks, compass, and weather apps? And why isn’t weather in my notifications?
Guys please help me! After this update my home screen have much bugs when i close any app so its bit slow to come again on home screen ! Even though when i opened my kik on ipad so its bit annoying tht its on full screen only ! Half screen feature is lost! Shit on ios 7 really !
How do i get back my half screen feature ok kik ! Its so annoying tht kik is on full screen everything is blured …plz helpp
I know this is off the subject but I just updated my software to iOS 7 and now my inbox won’t show up on my yahoo account. All my other folders are there except for my inbox. Does anyone have any info on this issue or am I just having a blonde moment? Even though I’m a brunette…
If background updates are disabled, what happens when you are using a GPS app, “Maps” or “TomTom” or Google Maps, for directions and a phone call or text message comes in?
Will you miss directions, turns, walk into a wall? This doesn’t seem well thought out.
Under IOS 6 Apple Maps will run with the phone locked, activating the screen whenever course changes are necessary. If background execution is disabled, I guess we just get lost????
BAH HUMBUG
I have put the update on my iphone 5 and everything is good except the fact that my imessages are now being sent from my email address – i have tried everything to fix it – settings > messages > send & receive > my number used to be in there but greyed out but now it’s totally gone! and when I plug my phone into iTunes in the summary part at the top where it says Phone Number: it has n/a – whaaat!! I have also tried resetting my network settings, i have erased all content on the phone and restored it, I have tried all the little tricks that people are saying work but they don’t…can someone help!!
I updated yesterday.. so far so good… not a big fan of the new icons, bit of a step backward in my view.. but they’re just icons.. nothing to get angry about. I still wish they’d have put the VPN toggle on the Control Center though.. it’s the one I use the most.
My Apple Maps always log out when I open it . Please help me .