I've seen a few people on AppleVis who are saying things that would imply that they feel no choice but to upgrade their devices to iOS 13, despite them feeling nervous about encountering the bugs that the AppleVis Editorial Team has helpfully compiled into lists for us.
In short, you don't have to update yet.
iOS 13.1, which will be released in a couple of days, still contains many bugs that VoiceOver users will experience, not to mention bugs in the operating system that you might encounter whether or not you use accessibility features.
I think some people might remember the horrors of iOS 8. Just about all of the users who upgraded in the first couple of weeks experienced bugs, not just VoiceOver users.
The reason why there were so many bugs that year was because Apple introduced many new features for that version of iOS.
iOS 13 also has many new features that change numerous aspects of the operating system as a whole.
Like in iOS 8, along with these new features came many new bugs.
There were many features of iOS 8 that excited me, like the new Health app and Braille Screen Input. But nothing excited me about having to contend with bugs—not even the new features.
There were bugs in the early versions of iOS 8 that would have made my phone crash and make VoiceOver hang. I use my iPhone for several hours each day, and I knew that I would get frustrated with these bugs very quickly.
I love tinkering with technology, but I love my sanity more.
So I waited until iOS 9.
That’s right—I updated straight from iOS 7.1.2 to iOS 9.2. It was the first software update my iPhone had experienced in about eighteen months.
In the time I was waiting, I only found one app I wanted to use that wouldn’t run on iOS 7.
I was sad that I had had to wait a whole year to use those features from the WWDC 2014 Keynote which had excited me. But after my iPhone had greeted me with a cheerful “Hello”, “Hola” and “Bonjour”” and I had completed the brief iOS 9 set-up, my iPhone bristled with new energy—an energy with no overheating, silencing, hanging, restarting or crashing.
It felt like I had a new iPhone—something worthy of the $1000 I had spent on it a few years before.
I’m waiting again.
Many of the new iOS 13 features announced at WWDC 2019 made me feel excited. I’d love to start using VoiceOver activities and the new features in Maps, Safari and Siri, but I know I won’t be able to enjoy them just yet.
I love discovering hidden features of software I thought I knew well, but I don’t like finding bugs.
There’s no reason for me to update now and use iOS when it has a bug infestation.
Why should my iPhone, which works so powerfully now, have to be reduced to something uncooperative and slow for several weeks? Why can’t it always be fast and efficient when I want to use it?
I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait. I don’t like having to wait. But I am going to wait until my iPhone will work with no overheating, silencing, hanging, restarting or crashing.
I like using technology that works close to 100% of the time, and I know that I can’t expect that with iOS 13 at the moment.
So I’ll wait for as long as it takes for these bugs to be resolved.
I'll update when I feel ready—maybe before next September, maybe after.
I’ve seen people saying that iOS 12 is no longer secure. That’s not true at all. If anything, iOS 13 is less secure than iOS 12.
Security vulnerabilities have been found before in versions of iOS which introduce significant new features.
But if my iPhone was attacked and I lost all of the data stored on it, I know that my data is still safe in the backups I’ve made to iCloud and iTunes.
And if iCloud was attacked and iTunes became unavailable, I know that I can set up my iPhone from scratch if I need to.
Are there any compelling reasons why I should update to iOS 13 now?
I can’t think of any.
I don’t think I need to update when iOS 13.1 is released, or maybe even for several updates after that.
And I don’t think you need to update yet either.