iOS 11 has not seen the best of reviews since its release in September of last year. It has been plagued with reliability issues and also saw a slow rollout in comparison to earlier iOS updates. However, subsequent updates have been pushed to resolve many of the issues. As of December, according to the numbers from the company’s app support page for developers, iOS 11 had been running on 59% of devices.
Today, a report from Axios states that Apple is delaying certain features that were meant to be in the next iOS release in favor of focus on performance and reliability. According to the report, features that are being pushed to 2019 include a refresh of the iOS home screen and Apple CarPlay’s in-car user interface, as well as improvements to the picture taking, photo editing and sharing experiences, and core apps such as the native Mail app. The report also states that the announcement of the revised plan for the forthcoming updates were made by Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, at a meeting earlier this month.
The features that may make it to this year’s release, however, include improvements to ARKit, Apple’s augmented reality technology, the health platform, and parental controls. In addition to these features and usual bug fixes, Apple will aim to make iPhone devices much more reliable and responsive, the report states.
Following the yearly cadence, Apple is expected to announce the next major update to iOS in the fall of this year. Following the criticism faced by the company this year with regards to certain security features, few annoying usability bugs and the backlash for CPU throttling of old devices, for which the company publicly apologized, it is to be seen what other features make it to the next release in addition to the renewed focus on reliability.
As with all rumors and internal reports, this news too should be taken with a grain of salt, as internal plans may change at any time until the final release.