General iOS 9 Beta 5 battery and performance thread!

[lagwagon]

Better than an iPhone 5 on iOS 6? I must download to see this?! (I've had a iPhone 4, 5 and 6)

Only way to know is to install yourself and see. Because performance seems to vary quite a bit person to person. For me personally iOS 9 Public Beta 3 is the fastest I've ever seen. However it is only a few hours in and that might change weeks down the road. But for now, it's very good on my iPhone 6.

 

[batting1000]

Any word on Air 2 performance? It was incredibly smooth on B4, but I was experiencing touch delays when using the status bar to go to the top of a page and delays when using split screen

 

[Ashin]

Bear in mind that all iOS beta software has a lot of data collection etc going on which affects performance and battery.

 

[KHall2010]

How about re springing every 10 minutes or so? Experienced that a lot on PB 2 DP 4.

 

[GreyOS]

Because it's a beta. The performance and battery life are gradually coming. There's still at least 1 more beta left and that's BEFORE the GM.

But they gave concrete figures for how many battery life hours iOS 9 would add, both through general improvements and tgrough the power saving mode.

You would have thought these were in place in time for the beta, and the beta was for testing stability and getting developers to make sure their apps were compatible with API changes and also were given an opportunity to take on new features... You wouldn't have thought they would use the beta period to finish implementing the things they already announced.

The beta is for testing bugs not finishing the features

Very strange...

 

[Abazigal]

Beta 4 (public beta 2) was generally quite okay for me on my 5s, just that it had a tendency to freeze in areas of poor signal or wifi. Just installed PB3, will play around a bit and report back later.

 

[lagwagon]

But they gave concrete figures for how many battery life hours iOS 9 would add, both through general improvements and tgrough the power saving mode.

You would have thought these were in place in time for the beta, and the beta was for testing stability and getting developers to make sure their apps were compatible with API changes and also were given an opportunity to take on new features... You wouldn't have thought they would use the beta period to finish implementing the things they already announced.

The beta is for testing bugs not finishing the features

Very strange...

Apple have their own internal builds and usually far ahead of what gets released to devs and the public beta program.

Betas get released in stages to test certain things at a time to make sure certain bugs aren't cause by something else randomly.

 

[batting1000]

Apple have their own internal builds and usually far ahead of what gets released to devs and the public beta program.

Betas get released in stages to test certain things at a time to make sure certain bugs aren't cause by something else randomly.

Yeah, and I remember when Apple used to say what beta testers should focus on (mainly on the Mac, but still).

Edit: Or maybe this was for AppleSeed, don't remember.

 

[KHall2010]

Going into your text messages the grey message area before switching to normal is gone. Opening apps is more fluent. Significantly less "stutter" than DP 4.

 

[JulianL]

But they gave concrete figures for how many battery life hours iOS 9 would add, both through general improvements and tgrough the power saving mode.

You would have thought these were in place in time for the beta, and the beta was for testing stability and getting developers to make sure their apps were compatible with API changes and also were given an opportunity to take on new features... You wouldn't have thought they would use the beta period to finish implementing the things they already announced.

The beta is for testing bugs not finishing the features

Very strange...

Agreed regarding thinking that the battery saving improvements would already be in the code and not a late feature that gets added in during beta.

My guess/hope is that the betas still have a fair bit of extra logging and internal error checking code included to make it easier for Apple to debug crashes that happen during beta testing. I used to be a Unix kernel developer at AT&T Bell Labs and we certainly did this during testing. If such code and internal sanity checking is in there then I would expect it to get removed as we approach final release and wouldn't expect any such code to be in there for any of the release candidate builds.

 

[batting1000]

Agreed regarding thinking that the battery saving improvements would already be in the code and not a late feature that gets added in during beta.

It's a new feature though, and how it works is something that can be tweaked and optimized over time.

 

[JulianL]

It's a new feature though, and how it works is something that can be tweaked and optimized over time.

Well, none of us have access to the source code so we can't know for sure but personally I doubt that it is a new feature as such. I suspect that a lot of the improvements in battery life have come from tightening up particularly frequently used code paths quite deep in the kernel plus maybe some ground-up redesigns of a few internal algorithms and data structures to reduce cycles. That sort of stuff isn't something that one would drop in late in a beta cycle because it's just the sort of thing that can have unintended consequences so really needs to be put into the testing cycle as early as possible.

 

[batting1000]

Well, none of us have access to the source code so we can't know for sure but personally I doubt that it is a new feature as such. I suspect that a lot of the improvements in battery life have come from tightening up particularly frequently used code paths quite deep in the kernel plus maybe some ground-up redesigns of a few internal algorithms and data structures to reduce cycles. That sort of stuff isn't something that one would drop in late in a beta cycle because it's just the sort of thing that can have unintended consequences so really needs to be put into the testing cycle as early as possible.

Exactly, because it needs to be optimized and perfected.

 

[Blaster13]

I've deleted my photos but I posted on another thread about my battery. I'd barged to 100% after installing beta 5...
My battery literally loosing 1% every few minutes to a minute and went down to 68% within 28mins of being unplugged. I have restored to iOS 8.4 then reinstalled a full new download of beta 5.

My use age whilst I was loosing it so quickly was

Whatsapp, Facebook, texting, 1 phone call for 10mins and collecting stuff of clash of clans. I killed all apps once I'd used them and was still loosing battery pretty quick.

 

[batting1000]

I've deleted my photos but I posted on another thread about my battery. I'd barged to 100% after installing beta 5...
My battery literally loosing 1% every few minutes to a minute and went down to 68% within 28mins of being unplugged. I have restored to iOS 8.4 then reinstalled a full new download of beta 5.

My use age whilst I was loosing it so quickly was

Whatsapp, Facebook, texting, 1 phone call for 10mins and collecting stuff of clash of clans. I killed all apps once I'd used them and was still loosing battery pretty quick.

The first couple of cycles always suck. You gotta give it time

 

[Zaft]

6 plus performance?

 

[nerdriot]

Performance on iPad Air seems a little better than the previous release. Still seeing a stutter in app switching, Siri suggestions and control center on occasion.

On my iPhone 6, it performs pretty well. So far, it seems pretty stable. News is working great without crashes (finally).

 

[Prof.]

*knock on wood* I have yet to have an application crash under PB3 on my iPhone 6 Plus. Let's hope this trend continues. Apps load pretty fast, however there is still a 1/3 second delay when you tap an app. Multitasking is smooth, but there are rare/occasional hangups, which end up making you close the wrong app. I've also noticed an ongoing issue where the home button doesn't respond on the first try since PB1.

 

[SoYoung]

On the iPad air 2 I don't know for the battery performance yet, but in terms of general system experience its the best beta so far. Everything seems smooth and I have no third party crash on me yet.

In previous beta's I always go back to 8.4 but in this one, I think I will finaly keep it. Oh and the 2 second lag when you open apps is greatly reduced like some guys posted above. Overall its a big improvement imo over beta 4/pb2.

 

[Abazigal]

The public beta restored spotlight search and handoff on my iPhone 5s. Not a bad start.

 

[Yun0]

battery usage seems to be on par with ios 8.3/8.4 so far (best beta so far), while standby usage is extremely good so far

 

[VSMacOne]

Great update. It's running miles better on my 6Plus. Too early to tell about battery. But this is definitely a step in the right direction.

 

[vigilant]

On A8 hardware iOS 9 doesn't seem noticeably slower then iOS 8.4.

On A7 hardware iOS 9 is getting steadily faster.

Performance improvements from moving animations to Metal likely won't be fully realized till the the OS is fully completed.

A7 performance is noticeably getting better though in my use. It's still very usable.

 

[nerdriot]

Not that this matters much, but there is a slight improvement in Geekbench scores too.

 

[Yongkykun]

I notice that the new Beta helps out my iPhone 6 by a lot in terms of battery life whereas my iPad Air is exactly the opposite. Meh.. just a case of hit and miss. Loving the improvements so far though.