Someone in the family updated to iOS 7. I got a chance to use it.
Anyone else think it's extremely cluttered? Not that I want skeuomorphism back, but at least back then it had lines that delineated what ended where. I just pulled this image below off Google as an example, but it's not even the best example of this. Each thing bleeds into the next which doesn't sound like a bad thing on paper but on such a small screen, things feel really cramped and cluttered to me. It almost reminds me of WP8 with the fonts almost blending into each other.
EDIT: Here's a better example. The top navigation pane just looks out of balance:
The colors are also insanely bright. There is sooo much white. White everywhere! It almost made my eyes hurt and took time to adjust. As I predicted, I liked the transparency effects, but found some of the icons downright ugly. They're not as easily recognizable either. You have to sort of read what the app is before recognizing it. I guess it takes time to adjust to an entirely new look.
Control Center is nice, as everyone has said. It's a damn shame though you can't customize it. It's begging to be customized. I just don't need music controls there all the time and it takes up such a huge chunk. I don't use Bluetooth either nor do I need the calculator/stop watch so readily accessible. It's a shame I can't swap those out for things that I might want easier access too.
I can definitely understand all the complaints about the slow animation. They feel slow especially when I took out my HTC One to compare apps opening. Apps on Android still open/close with that zoom in and zoom out (like exploding/imploding) effect but it does it so much faster.
Safari is a HUGE improvement. Like, ridiculously huge. Probably my favorite thing about iOS 7. It's very much like Chrome now, with slide-able tabs and a unified great search bar. It's SO nice to not have to use so many taps and slides just to switch tabs. It's unbelievable it took Apple this long to improve Safari. And yes, finally, private browsing where it should be. Kudos to them.
Mail still sucks tremendously. I hate that you can't tell from which inbox a mail in "All Mail" is from. Am I just using it wrong? Is there a way to tell? There isn't as far as I know. And again, on such a small screen, things really do feel cluttered.
And the keyboard... still the same ol' keyboard. I won't go into detail here, but as most of you already know, I hate the keyboard. Why are all the letters still permanently in caps? Why is this keyboard not adapting? Where is swipe/gesture like functionality? Why can't I long press for secondary characters? Why do I still have no control over my personal dictionary?
Anyway, I don't have much else to say. I obviously didn't have very much time with it, as that family member wanted his phone back, but I couldn't help shake the familiarity of iOS. In other words, it felt like iOS no matter how you spin it, and that's good for Apple's main target base.
iOS is growing in interesting ways and it's about time, but at this point in time there's simply no way it's significant nor fast enough to tempt me back to the iPhone.
My One feels immensely more powerful and I don't mean spec-wise either (except for the larger and prettier screen); I mean it software wise. Android is so much more flexible, so much more adaptable to my specific preferences, and just -- I'm not sure how else to describe this, but... -- just makes more sense to me. Even things as basic as the back button or the menu button I was missing right away. With iOS, I had to actively find how to go "back." Much like iOS of past, sometimes it's top left, sometimes top right, sometimes it's a "cancel" button on the bottom. Ditto the menu button. Sometimes I want to tinker with the settings to see different results, and I forget that I have to actually leave the app to accomplish this. Does this really make sense to anyone? Not to me.
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
EDIT:
I wonder if a lot of iOS' limitations comes from the fact that it's built on legacy software meant for smaller screens. I really hope when Apple adopts a larger screen, it'll also expand (figuratively and literally) iOS. Gestures should become universal (I like how iMessage lets you swipe to go back, much like how it is in Hangouts. Nifty and useful feature). We should be able to get into the settings screen immediately within an app. Things ought to be more customizable. It doesn't have to be complicated. For example, keyboard sizes can be "small, medium, large" to offer different heights. Swiftkey does this. It doesn't have to be numerical value like other keyboards (though assigning numerical value shouldn't be mind-bendingly difficult, either).
