Apple’s iOS 8 finally arrived at 3am this morning, ready for download onto compatible iDevices, but you’ll need 5.8GB of free space to install it ‘over-the-air’, unless you use iTunes – plus a last minute bug has made HealthKit sick.
The long awaited free iOS 8 upgrade for compatible iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches is finally available to download free of charge, but a ‘free space’ glitch is causing installation issues.
This happened to me this morning, with both the iPhone 5s and 5C I’m using needing additional space to reach the 5.7GB storage I was asked to have free.
Other people have reported needing 5.8GB of free space, which can be difficult on a 16GB device, let alone the 64GB of storage on my iPhone 5s.
Click to enlarge |
What my iPhone 5s was telling me at 6.01am this morning when I tried installing iOS 8. |
Luckily, there’s a workaround – you can use iTunes to download the new OS and install it for you, and while you’ll naturally still need some free space, it appears to be gigabytes less free space than if you update to iOS 8 from your iDevice directly using Wi-Fi.
For more information on the workaround and the iOS 8 installation process, please check out MacWorld’s excellent guide here.
Unfortunately, downloading over iTunes is apparently taking hours for some users this morning, but on launch day when potentially tens or hundreds of millions of people are trying to download the update at the same time, this is to be expected.
I have also downloaded the Nuance Swype keyboard for iOS 8, finally allowing users to slide their finger over the keyboard to spell out words, resulting in vastly faster typing speeds.
It costs 99c in the US but $1.29 in Australia, but as I can now use the Swype keyboard on all my iOS devices for the one purchase price, it’s 129 cents I’m more than willing to pay.
Swype rocks! At long last, iPhones can use Swype, it was the one feature that iPhones didn’t have before across all apps and it’s a breath of fresh air.
So too is Apple’s own QuickType keyboard, the upgraded default keyboard for iOS that has an excellent prediction engine to guess what word you’re trying to type and what word you want to type after that!
QuickType is Apple’s version of another popular third-party keyboard, which is called Swiftkey. Unlike Swype, Swiftkey is free, but both keyboards are sure to leap to the top of the App Store sales charts in very short order.
iOS 8 itself looks fantastic – you can see subtle changes here and there, even the option to use “bold” text has text which is evidently bolder and easier to read.
iOS 8 is what iOS 7 wanted to be when iOS 7 first launched, but as iOS 7 was such a radical change from iOS 6, it has clearly taken Apple a couple of cycles to really get iOS 7 right, with that “right” version now known as iOS 8.
Whether iOS 8 is going to dramatically slow down iPhone 4S or iPad 2 models is yet to be seen, as these kinds of slow downs have affected people in the past with the iPhone 4 and iOS 7, and in earlier years with the iPhone 3GS and iOS 6.
We’ll have more to say on iOS 8 when we’ve had more of a chance to play with it, but thus far, despite needing to clear large apps and transfer all my photos to my Mac and wipe them from my iPhone 5s, it has been smooth sailing.
Finally, a bug in Apple’s HealthKit API has seen Apple temporarily remove HealthKit apps from the App Store, leading to the irony of HealthKit being “sick”.
The Next Web quoted Apple stating: “We discovered a bug that prevents us from making HealthKit apps available on iOS 8 today. We’re working quickly to have the bug fixed in a software update and have HealthKit apps available by the end of the month.”
This means that apps updated to use HealthKit, such as MyFitnessPal, CarrotFIT, WebMD, AskMD and others, have also been temporarily pulled from the App Store so they can be resubmitted without the HealthKit components and can be resubmitted with HealthKit accessibility once Apple heals its HealthKit issues.