iOS 7 seems to store both portrait and landscape shots of apps that support both. Previous versions presumably wouldn't have needed to, so we could be talking anything up to double the memory here. It's not really transparent enough to look into without jailbreaking.
I am seriously SERIOUSLY cheesed off (language toned down so not to incur the mods wrath) about ios 7. I installed it a couple of days ago only because it had auto downloaded the damn thing and I couldn't delete the files. Not only is it FUGLY and makes my ipad look like a fisher price toy but.. Its crippled my ipad now!!! Everything is really sluggish and slow, safari takes longer to load, apps take 3x the time to switch from one to another and generally the OS seems very slow and sluggish at times. It's taken my lovely ipad2 and changed it from being great to use to being a pain to use. EPIC FAIL Apple!! and of course I'm stuck with it as they don't allow downgrades. Basically Apple say if its too slow, buy a new ipad. Well you know I was going to actually do that this xmas but after this fiasco I will not bother. They have almost crippled my ipad2 I tried to contact apple support for help and you know what? They want £25 for me to talk with them online support. They want me to pay they £25 just say 'oh, your ipad is old, buy a new one'. Seriously lost faith in apple over this fiasco.. ios7 should never have been released for the ipad2
And this is why my iPad is never going to have more than 2.9gb of free memory of it for the foreseeable future
I discovered that as a general rule of thumb, through trial and error, that it would be safe to upgrade to the latest iOS version as long as my particular iDevice was still being sold in the Apple Store. The moment it is yanked off the shelf, it would be a very bad idea to install any more updates, for the reasons you had eloquently detailed. Hear, hear, running on less than 1GB here. Had that upgrade to the last version of iOS supported by your iDevice experience with my 3G. It became a sluggish device after that...
I really really wish I'd read that before I upgraded. I think its outrageous they shove an upgrade on you that all but cripples your device. Its disgusting, they should either enable downgrades to 6.x or had a warning screen that the upgrade severely affects the ipad2s performance. It's almost like 'here's a forced upgrade and if your machine is too slow, tough you'll get it anyway and force you to buy a new device'. Disgraceful and shoddy business practice.
They have to force it. They know it's pointless and fugly. When it's forced upon you, you have no other choice but to accept it. And for those with the lesser of devices, it will help insure you buy their new ones. Can't trust the system.
Well they failed this time. I was planning on getting an ipad4 come Christmas but now I'll not bother. I don't mind apps and games coming out that don't work on the ipad2 but when they upgrade the OS and effectively cripple the older system, I find that unacceptable and will no longer purchase their products.
I myself ain't getting optimal performance from my device. Sluggish and un-refined. Hopefully a few updates will iron out these issues.
You may well want to go with the full "Reset Content and Settings" and basically reinitialise your device if things are that bad; it won't get you back to iOS 5 or 6 as you originally asked, but it should improve performance. The vast majority of feedback from users running iOS 7 on second-gen iPads is that it is roughly as responsive as iOS 6, if not more so, with severe cases of degraded performance noted as anomalies often resolved by a complete reset. This thread over on Mac Rumors, for example, is just one of many threads composed mainly of people confirming that iOS 7 is running just fine on their iPad 2, so I'd suggest not giving up just yet. Quoting a couple of posts from one user to give you hope:
Thanks for that. I've just spent 5-6 mins writing down the names of all my installed games, I'm going to do the reset contents and settings right now. Sucks that I'll lose all my saved games but if it helps its worth it, atm this ipad is borderline useless. Lets hope theres some improvement, here goes!!
I'm not seeing any major performance hit on my iPad 2. I have a lot of things shut down tho (like Bluetooth, background updating for apps, auto updating for apps, push is off for mails etc, only necessary notifications on). I'm using apps that pushes the iPad 2 to the limit when it comes to CPU and RAM usage (and way beyond if I let it), and I'm seeing that iOS 7 handles RAM differently. It might initially load a lot more crap into the ram at first, but it does free it up as needed (whereas iOS 6 was slower on this and just crashed apps at random). I did a "dirty" over the air upgrade on my device. But if you're really getting such a big hit on performance, try reset all setting first (the one that doesn't erase your apps). If that doesn't work, do a backup, wipe the iPad, do a clean iOS 7 install, and either set it up as new or restore from backup (you might wanna try set it up as new first and see how it performs, then do a restore from a backup to get all your stuff back on it). Edit: There are random bugs, introduced with iOS 7, in various apps obviously (there will always be). Some bug might be that a certain app renders graphics considerably slower, but a quick update from the dev is all that's needed in most cases. Or a bug that affects the touchscreen response, and again a quick update from the dev is all that's needed...and so on...
I don't believe that for a second but it's irrelevant. My iPad is slower and it's iOS 7's fault. Balls to everyone else.
I had heard that iPads were struggling with iOS 7 and lagging. My friend that works at Apple said she didn't recommend upgrading any iPad to iOS 7.
Just buy an ipad 5. All the motion and parralax stuff will look really nice on it with no sluggishness. And changing backgrounds won't take 5 minutes to do on old devices, but probably 30 seconds. Mene, also, if you are not on ios 7.0.2, upgrade to that before doing the wipe ipad. 7.0.2 fixed most problems for me.
Wow, a budding Toucharcade romance. That is strange, while ios 7 was probably designed more for ipad 5 in mind, the ipad 4 should run well on it too. I am curious, gotta run to an Apple store to do some ipad 3 vs ipad 4 comparisons, like time to change wallpapers, etc. Well, now that my ipad 3 is running pretty well after ios 7.0.2, there are of course good and bad in both sides of the issue. But as I have mentioned a couple of times (haven't seen other reports), but there is something underneath the hood in ios 7 that is causing some games to run or look so much better. Games like Dariusburst, pew pew 2, mutant storm, space qube, and many more look so much better on ios 7. And iphone only games. So the future is bright after they fix all the current problem with games. And hopefully they will add 20 icon folder options and have a static landscape full picture background option too. But with that said, I would still recommend waiting til ios 7.1.
