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19 October 2017 | My Gripes with iOS 11


​Let’s get the biggest disappointment out of the way: the Files app. I was looking forward to using this, not to perform finger acrobatics with selecting multiple files and dragging them here, there and everywhere else. No, I was looking forward to keeping all the various storage options I have in one place. Since you could use the share sheet from within Files, this seemed to be a great way to do certain posts with this app.

But then funny things started happening. I keep three folders under Favorites; two of them come from my Dropbox account which is where I keep the bulk of my work files. Clearly, it’s much easier to access the most used folders by marking them as favorites. Only these two folders show up only when they feel like it. Sometimes I can open the Files app and see only one folder, sometimes two and sometimes all three. When I’ve had the privilege of having my Dropbox folders show up there, I’m often greeted with “unable to show files” after tapping on one of them. Why is this the case? Since these files are not physically stored on my iPad, I can accept that some kind of refreshing might need to take place, but that undermines the concept that you can access cloud-based storage with no latency. More often than not, I have to tap the “Try again” link in order to see my files.

Yet here comes my favorite part. Since one of these favorite folders has several thousand graphic files (all JPEG), it’s clearly easier for me to do a search to find what I’m looking for. All of these files have numbers in them, but to illustrate what I’m talking about, let’s say that I have a file containing the string “1234” in the name. I can’t seem to find anything if that’s all I type. Now, to be fair, if I do the same search in the Dropbox app, I don’t get any results either. Except I remember that there’s a “0” in that file name, so I type in “01234.” In the Dropbox app, I can see the file. In the Files app, no dice. It never shows up.

This is beyond perplexing. How can a search function (in either app) *not* find a string of numbers in a filename? Setting aside the Dropbox app, why can’t Files find this file? There are no hidden settings to configure (i.e., entire name, any matching, that kind of thing) so I’m at a loss to understand why Files consistently will not locate a document with a string of characters in it. And this has severely lowered my excitement as using the app as an easy way to make posts to social media. What should take about 30 seconds to do has turned into several minutes worth of trying to find a file, realizing Files was never going to find it, then switching to another app in order to accomplish anything.

Let me move to iBooks now. It’s 2017 and we’re at the newest iteration of iOS with version 11. And yet: iBooks cannot sync samples from one device to another. When I’m at the bookstore, I often pull out my phone to do a search on a title that I want to note for a possible future ebook purchase (or not). If I decide to use my iPad at some point later in the day, I don’t see these samples at all. They’re only available on my iPhone. Why? And if you’re like me and download a lot of samples, you’re going to be shit out of luck if you upgrade the OS on your mobile device because everything is lost. The only way to keep those samples you download is a screenshot.

I hate asking this, but how hard can this possibly be to do? I cannot be the only person who wants to have book samples synced across devices. I even went through the trouble of creating a special list and put my samples in there, thinking that since collections are synced, maybe I just needed to make a new one and *this* would be synced. No dice.
The Kindle app is wonderful at doing this. Even if you setup a new iPad, your samples will appear in the Kindle app, patiently waiting for you to download if you choose. The consistency and usefulness of this should not be underestimated, but iBooks cannot do it. (I won’t complain too much about the lack of great typefaces, including ones you load onto your iPad, but there’s that as well.)

I don’t dislike iOS 11, but I remain flummoxed that these glaring issues are there, dampening my desire (particularly with the Files app) to use my iPad more in lieu of my computer.

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