I’ve experienced most of these; by far the most annoying are the absurdly long “backup” syncs and the sloooooooow text input.

As for the apps mysteriously reappearing on your phone — have you deleted them from iTunes?

It doesn’t strike me as very Apple-like, but in order to delete an app off the device, you have to remove it from the iPhone and also from within iTunes (under Library > Apps).

Otherwise, it will just be reinstalled the next time you sync.

I’ve noticed a lot of these too, but I’m surprised that the ridiculously-slow Contacts app wasn’t mentioned. Once I tap “Contacts” either on the home screen or in the phone app, it takes about ten seconds before I can do anything. I am using the MobileMe “push,” so there might be a correlation there, but…I only have around fifty contacts. iPhone 1.x Contacts.app wasn’t nearly that slow.

The re-appearing apps seem to be poor design in the way the iPhone is synced: iTunes installs all of the apps that are checked under the Applications tab of the iPhone page in iTunes. If you delete an app on your phone, it’s not unchecked from iTunes on your next sync, so it’s reinstalled during that sync.

But at least we can have OmniFocus in our Dock! Makes it all worth it to me.

…that I haven’t seen discussed more widely is the phone erroneously wiping out an apps data.

I don’t know what causes the problem, but it’s happening to many people. It happened to me, and it doesn’t seem to be limited to any particular app. Ken Case of OmniGroup even twittered about it:

http://twitter.com/kcase/statuses/864815730

Thankfully this has only happened to me with game apps, and not with more valuable data like in OmniFocus. I had all of my game data in MotionX Poker wiped. I was playing the game, closed out of it, opened Twitterific, which resulted in a full machine crash. After rebooting, going back into MXP showed that I was basically starting the game afresh. Super annoying.

It’s to the point where I’m actually afraid to use the iPhone, for fear of actually losing anything more valuable.

Not good.

I’ve noticed that turning off the keyboard clicking sound seems to speed up the keyboard. It can still be slow, but the worst lagginess is significantly reduced.

So, I will grant you there are some problems with the 2.0 software that Apple can solve: In there own apps. But the problems with speed, or glitchy 3rd party apps is hardly their issue.

Let me backup. The iPhone/iPod Touch (the device) has 128MB of RAM. Part of this goes to the system, part of this goes to a fake virtual memory block (that’s right boys and girls there is no virtual memory on the device). All told you are looking at about 70MB to play with as a developer. This goes down if the user then tries to play music while using your app. If the device runs out of RAM, it kills the app or in some cases reboots. There is a memory warning system that tries to free up memory by deallocating objects when it is critically low, which is why you sometimes see periods of slowness or stalls.

While the device is running OS X, it is NOT a desktop. But the majority of iPhone developers are desktop programmers. The majority of whom I think really understand this distinction. But some don’t. First, there is no garbage collection (and shouldn’t be - I won’t get into why) on the device. But there is on OS X. Secondly, while there is autorealease pools on both, they should be released far sooner on the device then on the desktop (actually you should try to avoid them as much as possible on the device).

This is all to say that developing on a mobile device is hard and you are going to see some terrible apps along with a few good ones. None of which is Apple’s fault.

This (slightly ranty comment) is not directed at the folks who originally wrote this article (because they didn’t participate in the media fiesta I’m about to describe), but I’ve seen this elsewhere on the web, mostly from the media. The same media that lost it’s mind when they found out there wouldn’t be background apps (now that you’ve read the above paragraphs, does anyone think that’s a good idea?). The same media that bashed them for not having 3rd party apps a year ago. And the same media that (I’ll admit, not as much as the first two) who had doubts about the whole App Store thing.

This is what happens when people who don’t know what they are talking about become the primary commenters on a product. Macworld, Mac blogs and others like them are completely unqualified to say “boo” about an SDK (unless they are a developer), but yet their voice was so loud that (my hunch is) it effected product development. Now their complaining?

This is not to say there aren’t problems in 2.0 that Apple needs to address; but if your primary problem is crashes. Blame the right people.

I’m assuming that the issues being described are related to running the 2.0 software on the original iPhone hardware. Can anyone say whether or not they are seeing the same issues on the iPhone 3G? It’s just a matter of time (and availability) before I buy one. Just curious…

Brand new iPhone 3g- absolutely glitchy. Dropped calls galore which I NEVER got with my other iPhone. System crashes and resets…

and the worst problem, which no one else has mentioned- during phone calls, the sensor which should turn off the screen when you hold it up to your face has gotten turned around- when I hold the phone up, the screen turns on, and when I put it down (this only happens during/after a call) the screen actually turns on. If I hold it back up to my face, back on… if I want to avoid a 2 minute lag until the screen decides to come back on by itself, I have to hold the phone up to my face, look out of the corner of my eye and manage to find the end call button. If I can press it, I can have my screen back- if not… no display for you!

Just ridonkulous… I really expect better from Apple

It is like using a pretty version of Windows ME

You probably just need to click “Dont transfer purchases” when prompted during a sync. Be careful not to do that if you have purchased anything though, because you might lose it.

I’ve had everything mentioned previously plus one more big one for me.

I’ve used Outlook synching over USB since getting the phone to keep my calendar handy. Since ‘upgrading’ to 2.0, I can’t synch my calendar anymore. My company won’t support the ActiveSync, so I can’t go that route.

Apple’s aware of it, but all of their suggested fixes don’t work, and the big one they suggest, I can’t use. (No Apple, I can’t create a new user on my laptop and a new Outlook account just to get my calendar back.)

The iPhone is now useless to me as a calendar device since my schedule is hopelessly out of date.

The other thing that’s driving me nuts is Location Services. I have a “classic” without GPS, but every time I switch to camera to take a quick picture, I have to dismiss the nag box asking if I want to let the camera use location services before I take the picture.

If I turn location services off, I can’t use the cell tower triangulation to get my location in maps.

Would it be too much to give me a settings pane allowing me to give LS access to certain apps? Or a dialog with 4 buttons, Allow, Deny, Always Allow, Always Deny?

I’m going to do a full restore on it and see if it gives me the option to just use the original firmware until iPhone 2.0.1 comes out.

good news: i was experiencing the extremely slow backup every time i sync’d my phone. after a restore the backup time was reduced dramatically so that it’s not really a problem for me anymore. maybe just deleting the backups and starting from scratch would help.

bad news: since upgrading to 2.0 on my Original iPhone, i’ve experienced a lot of dropped calls and signal strength does not seem to be as good as before.

more bad news: i’ve seen the phone restart while it was sleeping, and one time when i was receiving a call it just vibrated without the ringtone sounding (it wasn’t set to silent, the ringtone was one of the stock ones) and i couldn’t answer until the call had gone to voicemail—the phone was completely unresponsive. i think there is a lot of funk in the OS and maybe the apps are being unfairly blamed.

more good news: on a positive note, i sync my phone on 2 different computers. i have a mini set up as a media center where all my music resides. my office mac has my podcasts. it used to be that syncing to the music computer would wipe the podcasts off the phone, but since 2.0 it leaves my podcasts alone. so it’s nice not having to re-sync podcasts on the office machine after syncing music.

I agree, I’ve experienced most of these. The freezing while typing, the opening a webpage and having it just go back to the home screen, the failure to open an app or a crash.

One thing that I had hoped they’d address with the 2.0 software that seems to have gotten worse for me is the podcast syncing with iTunes.

Granted, I’m using Windows, but I have the continual problem of a podcast I’ve listened to on the phone not being seen as “listened to” in iTunes. Or, I’ll listen to it, turn off the phone, come back in and it’s marked as new again.

That’s really annoying to have to manually mark them as played in iTunes in order for them to be taken off the phone, and even then they sometimes come back!

I was told at the Apple store to just go in an mark them as played. Doesn’t seem like a very “Apple” thing to do.

Just wanted to drop in a comment that none of the above problems have happened to me with my 3G 8Gb iPhone.

It’d be good if those who say their iPhone is not meeting their expectations would tell us what version they have and capacity so there might be hint as to where the problems lie.

Is it the 16Gb that are the bad bunch? for example.

On the ‘I delete apps on my iPhone and iTunes reinstall them when I sync’ whine that keeps coming up.

Since this is exactly the functionality that iTunes has always supplied with iPods why is anyone surprised? I am very, very happy that I have to take some serious effort to blow away my paid for apps. I definitely consider the current functionality to be a definite feature and highly desirable. Please pause before complaining about this any more and be absolutely sure you’d be happy if Apple did what you seem to be asking them as I would regret it and I think there’s a chance you might too.

Peace out

i hated 2.0 SO MUCH that i actually removed itunes 7.7, and downgraded (and “pwned”) to 1.1.4. once it was installed, i felt a huge relief. I actually started to not like my iphone. thankfully i have a 2g so 1.1.4 is an option.

I’ll take a jailbroken 1.1.4 with the ability to actually customize it how i like, with cool applications, than apples pathetic 2.0 release, with the “socialnetworkingstore” (seriously - how many twitter clients does the world need?) - i’d go as far as to say this isn’t even beta.. its alpha.

my appstore rant is something that doesn’t belong here necessarily, but its part of 2.0…

its terrible. horrible. tons of 2-bit applications that feel like some kid/investor/businessman threw together with the hope of selling a million bucks worth.. nothing of substance. its like people are selling hello world apps for a buck. give me a break. everything on the already-existing (and better!) installer.app blows appstore out of the water.

i can’t see myself bothering with 2.0 ever.