iOS 10.3 will probably make your iPhone feel faster

Apple released iOS 10.3 yesterday with a new modern file system, but like any software update there are many undocumented changes. One particular change has been revealed through Apple engineer Renaud Lienhart‏, who works directly on the iOS operating system. “iOS 10.3 feels ‘snappier’ because many animations were slightly tweaked & shortened, for the better,” says Lienhart on Twitter.

Most of the obvious animations that Apple uses in iOS can be seen when you launch or exit an app or switch between them, but during my own testing I wasn’t able to notice any significant differences between an iOS 10.2.1 device and an updated 10.3 one side-by-side. However, iOS does feel slightly more responsive during overall daily tasks on my iPhone 6S+.

Apple’s new file system in iOS 10.3, that’s rolling out to millions of iPhones and iPads, should help make the OS feel a little faster, too. As APFS is designed to be low latency, this should also improve read and write speeds on iOS devices. You won’t notice this immediately, but apps that write a lot of data to a disk (like video processing) might seem faster.

iOS 10.3 could help rectify the many frame drops, skips, and odd interface bugs in iOS 10. Chris Pirillo has been documenting a large number of problems with iOS 10, claiming that Apple has failed to deliver a smooth 60fps promise for iOS. It’s clear from the tweaks in iOS 10.3 that Apple is at least aware that it needs to improve its iOS animations.