iOS 12 Beta 1 Seen to Outperform iOS 11.4 in App Load Times, Speed on iPhone 8, iPhone 5S

Apple's iOS 12 was previewed at the main keynote at WWDC 2018 in San Jose, California on Monday. While there were features galore during the keynote, the primary focus remained on performance upgrades and bug fixes. iOS 11 has been criticised in the past year to be bug-ridden and unstable, and Apple wishes to change that with the latest upgrade. Speed tests are already live and they give us a look at how fast iOS 12 performs on devices compared to its predecessor.

According to Apple, iOS 12 is "designed to make everyday tasks" more responsive. The company said with iOS 12, the camera launches up to 70 percent faster, the keyboard appears on screen up to 50 percent faster, and that typing will be more responsive. Apps can launch up to twice as fast, Apple added.

Now, in a video posted on YouTube, iOS 12 has been compared to iOS 11.4 both running on the iPhone 8. Do note that this is not a stable version of iOS 12 and instead is the first developer preview. Loading times were significantly faster on iOS 12 when stock apps like Camera, Apple News, and Apple Music, and even third-party apps like Sonos, Amazon, Apollo were opened on both phones put side-to-side. Even heavy social media apps like Tweetbot, Instagram, and Facebook loaded faster on iOS 12 despite it being a beta update. App Store was an exception as it opened up faster on iOS 11.4 than the one on the iPhone running iOS 12.

Interestingly, according to the video, iOS 11.4 was also faster while loading games like Flip Master and Voodoo. The uploader observed that native apps tend to open much faster on iOS 12 than do third-party apps on the new software.

As for loading websites on the preloaded Safari browser, the results were mixed with some of them popping up first on iOS 11.4 and the other ones loading up faster on iOS 12. Geekbench scores were, however, where the real difference was. The tests saw about a 5 percent jump in single-core and multi-core scores in iOS 12 compared to its predecessor.

As iOS 12 is supported on all the devices that support iOS 11, iAppleBytes got hold of an iPhone 5S, the oldest iPhone to support iOS 12, and put it to the same comparison. The unit running iOS 12 Beta 1 booted up slightly faster than the one running iOS 11.4. App load times and keyboard pop-up speeds were once again faster on the former, both for native as well as third-party apps. App Store was, however, snappier on iOS 11.4. Overall, the latest and oldest smartphones to run iOS 12 Beta 1 had better performance over the last stable update. 9To5Mac even polled several users on Twitter and received mostly positive responses, with users comparing iOS 12 Beta 1 to stable versions of iOS 11 across iPhone and iPad models.