My iPhone is running iOS 16.7.2 Now that I’ve learned that it is too late to update to 16.7.7, I have to decide whether to jump to iOS 17.
I am hesitating because it seems like there is an unusually high number of serious complaints and warnings about iOS 17 breaking apps, killing Wi-Fi, wasting battery… With many people wishing they could go back to 16.
Is there any statistic about what percentage of users are happy with iOS 17.4.1 ?
Thanks.
I don’t know how you’d even begin to determine happiness. 
Millions of people are using iOS 17 without any more problems than would crop up with any version of iOS. People who have problems complain, but most people say nothing because it just works.
In my opinion, it’s not worth putting that much thought into. iOS 17 is the currently supported version, and there’s nothing special about iOS 16 that makes it better overall.
Yeah, my mistake using ‘happy’ as a measuring stick. Dumb-di-dumb-dumb.
Many thanks for sharing your perspective
Agree with @ace - iOS17 is stable on the 4 or 5 devices I’ve installed it on. If you go back, people complained about iOS 16, iOS 15, iOS 14, etc etc ad nauseam.
My household has multiple iPads and iPhones running version 17. None of us regret making the move.
I’m seeing similar results as others posting to this thread: the iPhone and iPad I have are working normally and solidly, and I haven’t encountered any issues (significant or otherwise) that weren’t there in earlier iOS versions.
That’s been my experience with almost all iOS versions. I wait a few weeks to see if anything major pops up (plus letting the first iOS X.1 bug-fixing release a chance to come out), and if there are no reports, I make the upgrade. I’m hard-pressed to remember any iOS issues in the last 8 or 9 years that had me waiting more than 2 months to make the jump.
PS: iOS 17 has been one of the rare releases where there’s been a new feature which I’m finding very useful: the “Live Voicemail” option which shows a live transcription of a call before you answer it. It’s the kind of feature that keeps me impressed with Apple.
The upgrade to iOS 17 has been fine…except for the 17.4 upgrade which broke one app (iOptron Polar Scope) on some, but not all, of my devices. The developer has identified the problem but not the solution.
Be careful not to fall into the trap of “millions of people have already upgraded.” You need to proactively check that functions vital to your needs still work in new versions.
It’s not necessarily true that everyone who uses all the programs, apps, or functions you require will post problems where you’d see them, that creators will timely find or announce unfixed problems, or even that other users would know how to report problems publicly at all.
“Research before reboot!”
My experience has been that iOS 17 solved a few minor issues, made a few cosmetic changes, but otherwise doesn’t act or feel very different from iOS 16. (Dumb like: I’m happy that Photos recognizes pets as individuals and can pick out their individual photos from my collection. )
If iOS 17 were causing widespread problems, it would literally be on the evening news and front-page news across the web.
On the other hand, the Mac OS 14 upgrade caused serious problems with several apps, some of which were solved by and update from Apple and some by developers. So you can’t be totally cavalier about it.
I’ve been holding off on upgrading to iOS 17 just because of one app, but one I use daily: Grocery IQ. I’ve downloaded and tried almost every other shopping list currently out there, but none of them are as good as Grocery IQ, which won’t run on iOS 17, and is unlikely to do so, because it was bought by Microsoft.
Even the apps that come close to matching the features I use - permanent database of all my standard items, along with pricing and ordering by aisles for different stores, and a history of past purchases - tend to require a monthly or annual subscription, which stings when I bought Grocery IQ once 15 years ago and have happily used since then.
I guess the other way of looking at this is you’ve got your money’s worth from that purchase!
You of course don’t have to upgrade to iOS 17, but it’s worth finding a replacement to Grocery IQ (even if inferior) as one day you will have to move to a new phone. It’s best to migrate while you can do it at a relaxed pace. You don’t want to be in a situation where you drop your phone in a river and before migrating you’ve lost access to Grocery IQ because your replacement phone won’t run it.
You’ve probably heard this before, but it’s worth repeating:
Skipping an iOS update not only means skipping whatever new features (and new bugs!) comes with it; it also means skipping the security updates within the iOS update.
To see which iOS updates you skip when you skip iOS 17, go to:
And view the lists at these links for the security updates you’ve missed so far by skipping 17.4 altogether:
iOS 17.4.1
iOS 17.4
iOS 17.3
iOS 17.2
iOS 17.1.2
iOS 17.1
iOS 17.0.3
iOS 17.01
iOS 17
The list is long. If you trust every app you have on your iPhone, maybe you can ignore the issues with “Impact: An app may …” and/or “Impact: A malicious app…”. But others you should care about for sure are those with:
Impact: Processing web content …
Impact: A remote attacker …
Impact: An attacker …
Impact: A remote user …
Impact: Visiting a website …
Impact: Processing web content …
Impact: Processing maliciously crafted web content …
Impact: A maliciously crafted webpage …
Impact: Processing an image …
Impact: Processing a file …
Impact: Shake-to-do …
… Where most of those problems are not app-specific, but involve a security problem in a system library used by multiple apps (3rd-party apps and Apple apps).
For more detail on what each security update fixes, look up the associated CVEs.
FWIW, that also includes:
iOS 16.7.7
iOS 16.7.6
iOS 16.7.5
iOS 16.7.4
iOS 16.7.3
These security releases are only available to the devices that can’t run iOS 17 (iPhone X and iPhone 8 and 8+),
I really wished Apple (and others) didn’t force its users to update to newer major OS versions that can run the newer version. I prefer to stay on older supported versions. :(