5 Biggest Problems With iOS 7 And How To Fix Them

Apple released its iOS 7 OS for iPhones, iPads and iPods a couple of weeks ago and the company saw adoption rates as high as 33 percent in the first day and 58 percent during the first week.

However, as with all things new in software, iOS 7 has some bugs and they need fixing. Apple has already launched two updates of its new OS, iOS 7.0.1 and 7.0.2, but they are yet to fix the following problems.

Battery drain

Most of our readers who're using older phones like the iPhone 4 and 4S have lodged this complain. Upon testing it on our own units we realized that they were right. iOS 7 drains the phone's battery much faster than iOS 6 did. We believe that since iOS 7 improves on the ability to run apps in the background while focusing on your primary task, there's an increased battery drain.

So yes, this happens because iOS 7 makes your phone do some more background multi-tasking all the time. If you wan to fix this, then head over to Settings" and "General > Background App Refresh. In this area, choose which apps you want to permit to run in the background and which ones you don't. Apart form this, you can also apply the usual touchscreen phone solutions which unclude dimming brightness to low, and turning of Wi-FI, Blutooth and GPS when not in use to save on battery life.

Certain apps log you out

This one came in from a reader, Jignesh from Ahmadabad, who complained that certain apps were constantly logging him out. Here' our understanding of the situation. When Apple hands out new updates of iOS, apps that rely on specific parts of it must get updates as well. So until this happens, they sometimes log users out constantly. We noticed this happening on our unit's Mailbox app especially, apart from a few others.

The fixes for these kinds of problems have to come from App developers, so until they do all the required tweaking, there isn't much of a solution. What you can resort to is Settings> General > Background App Refresh. You're going to have to kill any apps that are misbehaving.

iMessage problems

This is one app issue that we caught ourselves. Many of our texts weren't going through because of an update issue. At first, we sent messages and they appeared to relay just fine. However, moments later we were surprised with frustrating exclamation points which indicated that they weren't going through. Several readers wrote to us pointing out this issue as well and here's our solution to the problem: wait it out, because until Apple rolls out its next update, there's nothing that any of us can do about it.

Apple has acknowledged the problem: "We are aware of an issue that affects a fraction of a percent of our iMessage users, and we will have a fix available in an upcoming software update."

Lock Screen Bypass

The company has already addressed a "Lock screen bypass" issue that was reported during initial days of launch by rolling out 7.0.2. As a part of this issue, if a user was running the Camera app and had Control Center activated on his Lock screen, an intruder could unlock their phones with a few simple steps.

Next Update

We're waiting for Apple's 7.0.3 update which is reportedly being tested as we speak. Apple should fix most of the issues that users have been facing with it.