Cover flow was awesome. Now it is just a big... Cluster**** of 3 rows of artists streaming across the screen, completely flat. It's overwhelming to look at. It's like a scavenger hunt now. They could reimplement it and it wouldn't completely betray their "flat" look. Remove the reflections, put in new fonts, and make the background a blurred version of the wallpaper, or maybe make it so when you stop on an album, make the background fade to an enlarged, blurred version of the album art. BUT THEY SHOULD IMPLEMENT THIS SO IT CONTINUES TO RUN AT 60 FPS.
You hit the nail on the head. I also hate when people who aren't overly critical (nothing wrong with it at all) or aren't great at perceiving frame drops, call us crazy. iOS 7 and 8 are a laggy mess. On iPad it's three times worse. I trust my iPhone 6, but not nearly as much as I used to even trust my iPod 5 (already out of date hardware) on iOS 6. It was *so* fast, and stuff didn't so readily get flushed out of memory. My iPod literally turned off so fast that the loading wheel didn't even go around half-way before it was done. iPhones were different because of the extra cellular radios to turn off, but still. Now when booting down iOS 8 on any device, you see a very long black screen, then a loading wheel that sits for a long, long time. Then when you boot up the device, it's very sluggish right after it is booted up. On iOS 6 everything was ready, 100% smooth, 100% speed.
Multitasking feels like a huge race. Don't leave an app for more than 60 seconds or you surely will lose everything! Don't do too much with translucency or scrolling, or frame drops will occur! Don't use the phone on brightness above 40% or have any features enabled or the phone won't make it through the day! I'm sick of that. iOS needs some serious help. If Apple doesn't acknowledge these problems and cut the crap, I don't know what will happen. Apple may just end up throwing specs at these issues rather than fix them, like many phone companies using Android on their smartphones.
I really really hope iOS 9 isn't a disappointment performance wise, much like iOS 7 and 8 were. I was excited for the new design of iOS 7! But it was buggy, and stuttery. I was excited for the new stuff of iOS 8! And since there wasn't *too* much that was new, maybe it would bring some speed, stability, and UI performance improvements! Nope, was a big fat middle finger in those areas. I don't even have much more I want in iOS... Sure, customizable control center and dark theme would be cool... But that's it, really. Just fix the damn bugs, fix the damn UI stuttering, fix the damn memory/cache management, and fix some of the stupid design decisions that cause so much lag; like the overdoing of translucency.