Follow Up - iOS 14.4 Beta 1

Hi, everyone.

Here for  iOS 14.4 beta one has been out to developers and public beta testers for a few days. And so I wanted to do a follow-up since many of you are asking the other day, I did a follow-up on iOS 14.3, and so many were asking where’s 14.4. since it was only out for a couple of days at that point. So I’ve been using it primarily on my iPhone,12 pro max full time since it came out. I also have it on the iPhone 11, my iPad pro 12.9 from 2020 and the iPhone seven. And so I asked quite a few of you on Twitter as well, how this has been. And so well take a look at that in a moment, but the first thing is my overall experience is pretty good. There are some issues though.

One of the things that I really like about this update is the new feature that brings the sort of bringing your phone close, using the Apple U one chip set, playing music to a home pod. So here’s my home pod and you can see already it showed up. So it sort of pops in, and it’s a little bit buggy at this point, but maybe you’re playing music. Uh, let’s go back to say a different song here and well just hit this, but I won’t play it. So well go ahead and hit play. 

And as I’m playing it, if I bring my homepod nearby, it should pop up on the screen. Now, like I said, this is kind of buggy. It should see my office desk. And again, well try it again. So I had to try this multiple times in the video showing this feature because it’s kind of buggy, like I said,  so you can bring it close and tap it in the song will jump, but as you bring it closer. So for example, if I just swipe this off, close it out, go back in, unlock it and let’s try again.

And now you can see, it says move closer to have it jumped to the home pod. So as I do that, it jumps over to the home pod. You select the album apparently, and then it will start playing. And so it jumps from here to the home pod. And it’s one of my favorite features. I think it’s really nice. It’s easier than just having it as you get closer to whatever home pod you have, it will jump if you have more than one. And so I really liked that feature. There will be more in future beta updates, but the problems I’m having other than that being a little bit buggy is the issue I’m having as well is stutter or sort of lag overall. So maybe you’re in an app, you close it out. This was an issue on iOS 14.3 as well. 

And it will sometimes just sort of stutter. So it will sort of do this sort of motion and then close. And so that’s a continued issue with iOS 14.4 beta one. I hope they fix this in a future update. This affects every single device here. So people are saying the same thing on the iPhone seven, for example, go and do an app close out. Sometimes it will stutter or leg. So people are saying that along with the other issue I’m having. which is really odd and I’m experiencing this on the iPad as well. So maybe I’m going to a webpage and then I’m loading that web page scrolling through. Then maybe I want to look at the AirPods max here. And sometimes it just won’t load. And in order to get this to load, I’ll have to go into Wi-Fi, turn it off.

It jumps to 5g or 4g whatever’s available, and then it will continue to load. So if I hit buy, you’ll see its nice and fast. It just takes a second to load. And I’m on that page. Sometimes when I’m on Wi-Fi, it won’t work. So on my iPad, the same thing occurs. So I’m on my iPad. I try to browse it doesn’t work in this case, I turn Wi-Fi off, turn it back on. And then it works. And so this is a continued issue on this device and I’m not sure what’s going on with that. 

I don’t think it has to do with the modem as far as the 5g or 4g modem, because that works fine. When I jump off of this connection to that just seems to be something with Wi-Fi. It doesn’t matter. The Wi-Fi network I’m on. I can be in my office. I could be at home. I could be anywhere on someone else’s Wi-Fi and have the exact same experience. I experienced that the other day on someone’s Wi-Fi.

So I’m still having this sort of issue. Were just jumping around. It doesn’t seem to work properly. Now this is the case across all devices. So people are not only reporting that, but they’re also reporting crashes or re-springs. So meaning the phone you’ll be using it. And all of a sudden it looks like it reboots and then comes back up to the home screen or the lock screen. 

You unlock it and you’re back in. So I actually haven’t had a single re-spring or reboot, but some people are reporting that that is an issue. Now there’s continued issues with the HDR issue. That’s specific to the iPhone 12 series phones. So the iPhone 12 mini 12, 12 pro and 12 pro max people are having that HGR issue where the pixels that are actually black, when you’re playing a movie, don’t appear black.

So they sort of look like they’re backlit, and then they’ll go off and they’ll flicker back on and off. Now, for me, it seems to be fixed in 14.4. So I can’t reproduce it here. And then also that green tint issue is not fixed. So the green tin issue, let me see if I can show you. This is from jury. He sent this in, I showed this the other day, let me turn the lights off here so you can see it, but there is a green tint on the display. So you can see the green and here there’s a green tint when he goes in and out. And this seems to be a continued issue for some people. 

So those that have that on the iPhone, 12 Apple has said, they’ll fix it. They have not given a specific date. Hopefully we’ll see it soon, but right now that’s still an issue. And that leads me to, when do you expect iOS 14.4 beta two. And I mentioned some of this the other day yesterday with my update, as far as new hardware coming out. And as far as public releases, well, beta two, we could see probably as soon as January, but last year we didn’t see any public releases until January 28th to fix any problems.

And then we saw an iOS 13.4 release on March 24th. Now, hopefully they’re hard at work and they’re going to get this under control very quickly. They actually fixed it with the iPhone 11 pro and 11 pro max series when they had the issue with green tin. So I suspect they’ll fix that with an update. I wouldn’t expect beta two until at least maybe the week of January 3rd. 

In the reason I say that is Apple is generally on vacation. Now they may not be on vacation because many people have been working from home so they could change these dates up. And we could see an update. As soon as today, late today, Apple has been really changing things, but generally they take this amount of time off. And then we won’t see an update released to the public until probably the third or maybe even the week of the 10th.

So it’s hard to say what Apple is doing here as they’ve been kind of random lately, but based on the past, I really wouldn’t expect anything until the week of the third, but again, they could change it. So don’t hold me to that with this particular year. It’s been a crazy for everyone now, as far as any other issues while I know a lot of people are waiting for that 5g connectivity with dual SIM, meaning you use a physical SIM card and then an e-SIM, well, they’ve said they’re going to do that according to Mac rumors, but we haven’t seen that released yet. So were not sure when, so when you’re on 5g, there we go. When you’re on 5g, you’d be able to use 5g with two SIM cards at the same time. Currently,

you can’t do that. Hopefully they’ll release that fairly soon. So that leads me to battery life.

I know a lot of you want to know how my battery is, so let’s go ahead and take a look at battery life because it varies greatly. This is my iPhone 12 pro max. So the health is pretty good. And if we go to the last 10 days, let me show you my usage from yesterday, 50% screen on time, got me two hours and 52 minutes of screen on time, four hours and 40 minutes of screen off time playing music. 

If we go back a day here, you’ll see it was only two hours with 50% usage. So, so far it’s not been great. This day was okay where it was about 40% usage with almost four hours of screen on time at three hours of screen off time. So I’m only getting about seven hours if you were to sort of use this up to 100%, but that said I’m using it an entire day and using only 50% of the battery. So maybe I’m just not using my phone as much this time, but the overall battery life is not great.

This day got me four hours and 50 minutes, but I still used between 50 and 75%. So not great battery life right now, but it’s an early beta. So I’m not really too upset about that. I would expect it to go back to normal, which is about 10 to 12 hours on the 12 pro max is normal, but on my iPad battery life is terrible. So let me go over to my iPad pro, and I’ve mentioned this before, but well go into settings, battery, wait for it to load here the last 10 days. 

And you can see it was last charged 100% this morning, and I’m at 81%. I’ve done absolutely nothing. And it’s been on for a little bit of time. So this is today an hour and 36 minutes of screen on time, 30 minutes of screen off time, 76% of that was on YouTube. And generally you should get about 10 minimum or so on an iPad pro. And so I’ve mentioned this many times before, maybe I just need to fully completely wipe this device and re-install, and I’m going to do that after this video or later tonight, because I need to try it out and see if it works.

Because Apple has said with earlier versions of 13 of iOS14, rather that you need to wipe the device if its having terrible battery life. So I’m going to try that. Start the iPad from scratch, see if it makes any sort of difference. And hopefully it does. And if it does Ill report back, of course. So that leads me to, should you install iOS 14.4 beta one? 

Well, if you’re already a beta tester, you know what you’re getting into then sure. Go ahead and install it. But if you’re on the public release of 14.3 or earlier, I wouldn’t update to this because it’s an early beta. So at this point, it’s going to have some bugs and if you’re having bugs, make sure you report them with the feedback app and then go from there.

Otherwise I would stay on the public release at this point, unless you know what you’re getting into because betas can be unstable. And this one is definitely leggy for a lot of people. Now let’s go over to Twitter where I asked how this has been going. Now I did want to mention YouTube because I did a YouTube community poll the other day of 14.3. And this has been the most successful vote. Yes. 42,000 of you voted on this, which is incredible about iOS 14.3. 

So I did a follow-up about this. Read some comments from it where there’s almost a thousand comments. And I actually looked through every one of these comments, search them for 14.4. And the number one thing people were saying is lag and stuttering. So some people are having good battery. Some are having bad, but according to Twitter that I asked, well, not too long ago, let me refresh this feed here. There we go. An hour ago, Braden said it’s a bit buggy and battery. Isn’t too great.

Some people say it’s great. Like Ryan Reed, Brandon forest, that very click glitchy. Nikki said, sadly, it’s very bad on my old iPhone seven, which I used for beta testing battery life is terrible compared to 14.3 betas and overall performance is very bad as well. So from the feedback we'll sum up as lag. So you’ll see there’s a lot of different things in here. 

So stutters galore great was performing quite buggy on my tennis had to downgrade to 14.3 on and on and on. Most people are saying, well, terrible, pretty good. I had my phone crash on me, but not sure if that was software or what happened on the iPhone 12. So a lot of people, so I’ll go through here and hard all these, but fast battery drain HDR issues, not fixed, lag, lag, more leg. Noah said not too bad. 

The only issue I’m having is stuttering animation and frame rate lag at times when swiping between pages on the home screen on my iPad, pro 12.9 fourth gen Jeremy DeBose said the same here. So again, that lag is a continued issue. That seems to be ongoing over and over. And no, I think beta two will be in a couple of weeks, but again, I could be wrong, but I’ll go through here. 

And anyone that replied right now, I’ll just go ahead and heart because I appreciate the replies Of course, when there’s more and more,  I can’t do that on every single one. So, but thanks again for commenting on here. I really appreciate it. And you can go back through and look at this and see what you think.

But in general, this is lagging. So that’s the number one issue. I’ll go home and go ahead and heart those a little bit later, but overall, this is lagging. And so don’t install it if you’re not on the beta yet, if you’re on the beta, well, you know what you’re getting into and you know how to go back. If you probably are on this, you’d like to get your hands on this wallpaper.

Thanks for watching. This is Aaron. I’ll see you next time.

iOS 14.3, iOS 14.4 and more - Updates Apple