Apple iOS 8 review

With iOS 7, Apple took its aging mobile OS and gave it a much more modern look and added new features, such as Control Centre, that made it quicker and easier to use. With the next version, iOS 8, it's arguably the biggest change the company has made, taking the work it did before and adding a ton of new features that dramatically change (and improve) the way it works, particularly if you own multiple Apple devices.

As with other Apple updates, it's available for free and for a wide range of older devices. See how to install iOS 8 for more information on preparing your device and for compatibility information. With the new OS comes new features, which will need new apps to make the most of them. Check out our best iOS 8 apps for more information. Currently, users have reported some iOS 8 bugs, although we didn't encounter these during our testing. A patch to rectify the issues also went wrong, so our advice is to wait for iOS 8.0.2 before you upgrade - we'll update this review with the latest information as it's available.

Look and feel

From a first glance you can't tell that much has changed with iOS 8, as it retains the same look as iOS 7. That's no bad thing, though. Familiarity helps people pick up the new OS more easily; besides, we largely liked the new icons and look of iOS 7, so it's good to see it retained here. There are a few little tweaks, though. Most noticeable is that the task switcher now displays your most recently contacted and favourite contacts in little round icons. You can disable this feature if you'd prefer not to have it. 

Spotlight has also been revamped, so it now searches external sources, as well as just your iPhone. As you start typing, Spotlight will search your phone and Maps, Wikipedia, News, the iTunes and App Stores, and suggest websites for you. It's a big improvement and makes the search a lot more useful than it was. Apple's also simplified the Today screen. You still get the Today screen, which can now house custom widgets from any app, but there's a single Notifications screen for every alert, rather than a separate Notifications and Missed screen. All of the other changes come under the bonnet, with iOS 8 completely revamping the OS and adding in a ton of new features.

Interactive notifications

A neat new change is that notifications are now interactive, so you can respond to them without having to open up an app. For example, if you get a new text messsage, you can swipe right-to-left on the Notifications screen or lock screen and tap Reply. You can then quickly compose your reply without having to open up Messages in full. It's only a small time saver, but the feature could get more powerful if developers make the most of it.

Continuity

One big change with iOS 8 is the way that it interacts and plays with your other Apple devices. Continuity is a great example of this, letting you share and use resources on one device on another, all seamlessly. For example, if your iPad is on the same network as your iPhone and someone calls you, your tablet will ring as well and you can answer the call from there. Your iPhone 'simply' takes the call and pumps it over your Wi-Fi network. It's brilliant news for those times where you've got your phone on charge or you've left it in another room, but you need to answer that incoming phone call.

Call quality isn't bad, either. There's a slight delay to the call and, as the iPad is a hands-free device only, your speech isn't quite as clear as when using the iPhone itself. Don't get us wrong, the call quality is more than good enough for most purposes. Should you want a bit more clarity, you can go to your iPhone and tap the green banner at the top of the screen to return the call back to the iPhone.

With iMessage, Apple created a new messaging platform that wasn't reliant on mobile networks, so you could send and receive messages from any of your Apple devices, provided that they were connected to the internet. With iOS 8 and Continuity, you can now send and receive SMS messages from your iPad. As with the phone call system, the iPad sends the message through your connected phone. Everything we've talked about here is simple and configuration-free, and genuinely improves on how you deal with calls and messages.

Handoff

While Continuity features happen automatically, Apple has also added Handoff, which lets you share tasks between your devices. For example, if you've started writing an email on your iPhone, you can carry on writing it on your iPad, or vice versa. As you'd expect, switching tasks is incredibly simple. On the device you want to send the task from, you just open up the app (they have to be Handoff enabled) and make a start. On the receiving device, you can then either select the icon that pops up on the lock screen, or you can select it from the Task Switcher. Either way you can then continue compising the message from where you left off.

Handoff also supports Safari, so you can send the current page you're viewing from one device to another. It doesn't do anything different to iCloud tabs, though, which already let you view websites open on your other Apple devices. For security, the sending device has to be turned on and the app open. Secondly, Handoff uses Bluetooth for discovery, so it only works at relatively close range. Finally, as only the current app is made available for Handoff, nobody can view all of your open tasks.

OS X 10.10 Yosemite

The good news is that all of these features are coming to OS X 10.10 Yosemite, which will be a free update when it's released. Once you've got this update installed you'll be able to receive phone calls on your Mac, send SMS messages and use Handoff with any of the supported apps.

Automatic hotspot

Creating a hotspot from your phone was an easy way to share its mobile connection, but Apple has made it even easier now. Now, with Continuity you can set up the hotspot from the device that doesn't have an internet connection, most likely an iPad. All you have to do is go to Settings, Wi-Fi and your internet-connected phone will appear - tap it, and its hotspot is turned on automatically, and the requesting device connects automatically. It means you can pull your Wi-Fi tablet out and get online without having to juggle setup on two devices.

Safari

Safari has had a few important updates too, including the way that Private Browsing works. With iOS 7, you could start a Private browsing session, where web pages you visit aren't stored in History and anything you enter isn't saved to Autocomplete, and you'd get asked if you wanted to keep or close all current pages. With iOS 8, you don't get this choice. Instead, you can have Private tabs and regular tabs, switching between the modes as you see fit. For anyone that's really paranoid, you now have to shut down all of your Private tabs manually; if you don't and you hand someone else your phone, they can switch to Private mode and see what you were looking at.

Equally important, for some people, is that any video or audio file that you open in Private mode, automatically appears in the playback section of Control Centre, which you get by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. So, if you go into Private mode, watch a YouTube video and then switch back to regular mode, you can then bring up Control Centre, hit Play and the video will pop-up in Private mode and carry on playing.

A bigger and more useful change in Safari is that it can scan credit cards using the phone's camera. Rather than sitting there having to type in your details, you just point the phone at the card and OCR does everything else for you. It's quick to pull in the long card details, but we still had to manually enter the start/end dates and security code.

Safari's been able to store passwords for a long time, but now other Apps can tap into this repository. For example, if you create an Amazon account and Safari remembers your username and password, the Amazon app can pull the same information out. It's neat how this information can be shared and should make switching between the web and an app an easier and more straightforward experience.

Apple Pay

Of course, this card scanning technology will come in use when Apple launches Apple Pay in the UK. This will let you store credit cards in Passbook. You'll then be able to use the details to pay for goods online and, with NFC-enabled devices (currently the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and Apple Watch), in stores using contactless payment. At the moment, Apple Pay has only been launched in the US, so we're going to have to wait a while before we see how it works in the UK.

Family sharing

Family Sharing is a much-welcome feature for anyone that lives in a household full of Apple owners. It lets you share purchased films, books, music and eligible apps between your entire household; share photos and videos in a special photo stream; share your location with other family members; schedule events in a family calendar; and track down lost or stolen devices using Find My iPhone. One member is the lead in the family and they pay for everything using their account. Don't worry about bill shock, though, as you can switch on a mode that forces your kids to ask permission to buy an app.

Camera app

Apple has given the Camera app a slight tweak adding in a couple of new features. Time-Lapse is one great new addition, capturing video at a slow frame rate, so you can capture a long event and view it in a short period of time, such as bustling crowds, or clouds floating overhead. It's pretty clever the way it works, too, adjusting the frame rate to match the duration of the video. There's a great explanation of this over at Studio Neat.

iCloud

With previous versions of the OS, the iCloud cloud storage service was there for backup, photos and documents, but these functions largely stayed separate from one another. With iOS 8, iCloud has changed. For starters, you can save documents from any supported app into your iCloud Drive, which is then accessible from any supported app on your iPad, Mac or Windows PC. Likewise, you can drag-and-drop files from Windows or your Mac into iCloud drive, and then access then from your iPad or iPhone.

It's going to take a while for developers to add in iCloud support into every app, but this is definitely a move in the right direction. Just watch out, as some developers are charging for iCloud access, such as for DocsToGo.

Find my iphone

Find My iPhone gets an overhaul, with a new option letting your handset send its last location to Apple when it runs low on battery. This is a really handy feature if you lose your handset when it's just about to run out of power.

Photos

With iCloud you used to only be able to share the last 30 days' worth of images, up to 1,000 photos in total. This meant that on every device, you had your Camera Roll and My Photo Stream, each with different photos. With the new iCloud, things are a little different. At the moment, there's now no separate Camera Roll and My Photo Stream. Instead, both are combined in the new Photos app. At the moment, My Photo Stream works in the same way as before, but an update is coming with the new iCloud Photo Library.

This stores all of your photos from PC, Mac and iOS devices online on Apple's servers permanently, including Raw photos. You can then download and view them from any device when you like. As this will require more iCloud storage, Apple has dramatically dropped its cloud storage prices. This feature is in Beta, but new sign-ups have been closed, so we couldn't test this out. We'll update this review once we've had a chance to use it properly.

On top of that, you can now hide photos that you don't want other people to see, by long-pressing a photo and selecting Hide. All photos that you do this to appear in the special Hidden folder. More useful to most people is that recently deleted photos are moved to the Recently Deleted folder, letting you recover them before they're gone for good.

Extensibility

Apple has made iOS 8 its most open operating system yet. With previous versions, the company was always extremely strict in some areas. For example, you couldn't install a different keyboard and an app couldn't add its own Widget into the Today screen. With iOS 8 that all changes. Now you can download and install your own keyboards, switching between them at will. It's a bit of a faff to do, as you have to download the keyboard app, then select it in Settings as one you'd like to use and then give it full access to the system. However, it's great to see Apple finally taking this step. While we think that its new keyboard is a big improvement, there are plenty of other alternatives out there, such as the excellent SwiftKey.

It's good to see that Apps can now add their own widgets into the Today screen, too, letting you get the information you want much faster. There's still no full home screen widgets, Android style, but both approaches have their merits: Android gives you complete flexibility, but it can look messy and you have to remember which home screen your widget is on; Apple's arguably less flexible, but having everything in one simple menu that you can access from anywhere is extremely useful.

Extensibility goes further, too, letting you carry out an action in one application from another. For example, you can use photos to browse your images, but then open up Camera+ or Fragment to edit the photos. For this to work an application has to support Extensions and you have to enable the operation from each app you want to use it in. Still, it's a great thing to see and having more choice and flexibility in iOS 8 is something that we've all been calling out for.

Keyboard

Apple's keyboard has always been a little basic, but QuickType is a huge improvement. As you type, you get choices of words and phrases appearing above the keyboard, which you can tap to autocomplete. It also learns, so text messages are more colloquial than emails, and you get an easier tone with friends and more formal one with colleagues. It's pretty neat and we found that it really improved our typing speed, while cutting out errors that the old auto-complete system would make.

Messages

Messages gets a few new features, including the ability to add voice and video notes directly to a message. We also like the new Group management features, which let you remove someone from a group when you no longer need them or to use Do Not Disturb to mute a thread, so you're not bothered by a cacophony of incoming alert noises.

Email

Although the Email app remains largely unchanged, Apple has improved the way that Draft emails are handled. Now, you can switch back to the main inbox, while the email you're composing drops to the bottom of the screen; just tap it to bring it back into focus. It's much quicker than the old method of having to manually go into the Drafts folder.

Health

Apple's Health app collects together health and fitness data collected by other iOS 8 apps and brings everything together in one place. Heart rate, calories burned, blood sugar, cholesterol, sleep patterns and more can all be measured and recorded on an iPhone through apps such as Nike+. The Health app also lets you create an emergency health card that's available from the lock screen, detailing blood type, allergies and other important information.

Apple hopes that Health and the underlying HealthKit developer software will allow hospitals and medical professionals to receive health and fitness data, allowing medical information to be more easily tracked and monitored. It's early days for the system yet, but we're bound to see more and more apps and devices using it as time goes on.

Conclusion

While it maintains the look and feel of iOS 7, iOS 8 is a big step forward for the company, revamping and completely changing how it works. It's now a more open and customisable OS, with the likes of new keyboards and Extensibility making iOS not such a strict and locked-down system. With Continuity and Handoff more tightly integrating all of your Apple devices, iOS 8 is doing something that simply can't be done in Android or with Windows. As such, this is an essential upgrade for anyone with an older iOS device.