iOS 8.1 mini-review: Testing Apple Pay, SMS forwarding, and more

iOS 5, 6, and 7 got many minor updates throughout their life cycles, but each received only one “major” update in their year or so as Apple’s newest mobile operating system. iOS 5.1, 6.1, and 7.1 were all released several months after the initial release, and each update marked the point where the version became “mature.”

Apple is mixing things up with iOS 8. Version 8.1 is here just a month after the initial release, and plentiful evidence shows that both versions 8.2 and 8.3 are already in testing at Cupertino. It’s a rapid-fire schedule more in line with iOS 4, a release in which bug fixes and new features were introduced at a steady but more gradual clip.

iOS 8.1 shouldn’t be compared to iOS 7.1, which gestated for a full six months and was vetted in five separate beta builds. It still introduces quite a few new features, though, and in the spirit of keeping our comprehensive iOS 8 review up to date, we’ve taken the most important ones for a test drive. This release doesn’t fix all of iOS 8’s biggest problems, but it’s an important first step toward a more stable and more useful OS.

Apple Pay

Apple Pay is handled through Passbook.

Andrew Cunningham

Apple Pay is handled through Passbook. Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Enter credit card information manually or take a picture of it with the camera. In good light it’s usually pretty accurate, but the more worn your card is, the more it struggles.

Andrew Cunningham

Enter credit card information manually or take a picture of it with the camera. In good light it’s usually pretty accurate, but the more worn your card is, the more it struggles. Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Enter credit card information manually or take a picture of it with the camera. In good light it’s usually pretty accurate, but the more worn your card is, the more it struggles. Andrew Cunningham

Adding a card requires a confirmation message to an e-mail address or phone number associated with the card.

Andrew Cunningham

Typing in the confirmation code.

Andrew Cunningham

If your credit card provider doesn’t support Apple Pay, the phone will tell you so.

Andrew Cunningham

Cards offer lists of recent transactions and ways to get in touch with banks.

Andrew Cunningham

The Staples app, which supports in-app Apple Pay purchases.

Andrew Cunningham

Using Apple Pay to buy a Coke from an NFC-enabled vending machine. It only failed because I didn’t hold the phone to the NFC reader for long enough.

Andrew Cunningham

Once the transaction goes through, it shows up in Passbook.

Andrew Cunningham

Apple Pay is the most anticipated feature enabled by iOS 8.1, even though it’s only usable on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, the iPad Air 2, and iPad Mini 3. Our own Megan Geuss will be diving deeper into Apple Pay next week, but I’ve used the service and know enough to tell you the basics.

Apple Pay lets you scan compatible credit cards into your iPhone or iPad and then use that card to make purchases within apps and at NFC-enabled checkout counters. The credit card is stored locally in your device. It does not sync with iCloud. It is deleted if you wipe the phone. No part of the credit card number is ever available to Apple or to any of the retailers you’re paying. A device ID and a unique per-transaction ID is used to confirm the purchases and charge your card, and once charged, the money you spend racks up rewards points and any other perks just as standard purchases would.

Apple Pay requires two pieces of hardware to work in apps and three pieces of hardware for contactless payments. The first is the TouchID fingerprint sensor, which is used to authenticate. Hold your phone to an NFC-enabled spot (usually something at the register, though I used a vending machine) while holding your finger on the TouchID button and the payment will go through. If TouchID isn’t working, you can also enter your passcode to authenticate, which is just another reason to use longer passcodes if you’re already using TouchID.

The second piece of hardware is what Apple calls the “Secure Element,” a dedicated chip in supported devices. This is what’s responsible for storing and protecting your credit card data—it can apparently be paired with any of Apple’s SoCs, which is why the iPad Mini 3 can use Apple Pay in apps while the iPhone 5S can’t. If you have those two things, the Apple Pay button can be used in apps that support it.

The third piece of hardware is the NFC sensor, exclusive at this point to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. It might have been nice to include NFC in the iPads to account for edge cases, but the decision to exclude it from tablets make sense. People look goofy enough using their tablets as cameras—they don’t need to be waving them around at cash registers too. Retailers using iPads as point-of-sale systems already have plenty of options if they want to enable NFC payments, though it would be neat to have a POS system that supported Apple Pay out of the box.

Apple Pay is great when it works, and using my phone to pay for stuff was one of those “it feels like it’s The Future” moments for me. Using NFC means it’s already compatible with the wireless payment systems already out there, which is why I could snag a Diet Coke from the machine in the mall even though that Coke machine has been sitting there for who knows how long. The problems facing Apple Pay now are the same as the ones facing any mobile payments service—lack of universal availability and other businesses looking out for their own interests.

Apple’s table of providers that support Apple Pay. Hopefully those blank squares and exceptions go away soon.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The lack of ubiquitous contactless payment systems is going to resolve itself eventually, so let’s focus on the second point—check out this Apple-provided matrix of the providers and specific types of accounts that support Apple Pay. To cherry-pick an example, notice that “co-branded” cards (that is, cards serviced by a bank but with another company’s logo on it) are supported by many providers, but “some cards might not be supported in Apple Pay.” A standard card provided by Chase Bank works just great with Apple Pay. An otherwise identical card co-branded by Amazon.com does not.

This is the same kind of corporate backbiting that has hampered Google Wallet. US cell carriers like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile have united behind Softcard (née Isis, changed for obvious reasons), yet another contactless payment system. Their desire to boost Softcard has been a brick wall for Google Wallet. All companies involved protect their best interest, and the customers are caught in the middle.

Apple Pay has a lot of promise, but where you live and shop will have a lot to do with whether it becomes a reliable staple or an “ooh look at this” party trick, at least in the beginning. On Apple’s end, at least, the service appears to work exactly as intended. As Apple’s list of partner banks and retailers grows, it will hopefully begin to work as intended for more people.

SMS passthrough and Instant Hotspot

Instant Hotspot makes your phone show up as a network option on iOS 8.1 and OS X Yosemite devices signed into your iCloud account.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

iOS 8.1 enables the last pieces of Continuity, the collection of features meant to help iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite devices work better together. iOS 8 already included Handoff for apps, passing phone calls to other devices, and AirDrop. iOS 8.1 adds support for passing on SMS messages and the Instant Hotspot feature.

Like the rest of Continuity, your iCloud account is the glue that binds your devices together. The first step is signing every iDevice and Mac into the same account. Instant Hotspot pairing should happen automatically as long as one of those paired devices is an iPhone with the Personal Hotspot feature enabled. The phone will automatically show up in the Wi-Fi network list on your OS X Yosemite Macs and iOS 8.1 iPads.

To enable SMS Handoff, additional steps are required. On your iPhone, go to the Settings app and then go to Messages and then to Text Message Forwarding. All devices signed into your iCloud account show up in this list. If you want SMS messages to show up on those devices, toggle them on, and then enter the code displayed on that device into your phone. From that point on, text messages are passed on through the Messages apps in iOS and OS X, much like iMessages.

Text Message Forwarding is found in the settings for Messages.

Andrew Cunningham

Text Message Forwarding is found in the settings for Messages. Andrew Cunningham

All devices signed into your iCloud account will appear here, disabled by default.

Andrew Cunningham

All devices signed into your iCloud account will appear here, disabled by default. Andrew Cunningham

A confirmation notification in iOS.

Andrew Cunningham

A confirmation notification in iOS. Andrew Cunningham

All devices signed into your iCloud account will appear here, disabled by default. Andrew Cunningham

A confirmation notification in iOS. Andrew Cunningham

A confirmation notification in OS X.

Enter the code on your phone to enable text forwarding.

Andrew Cunningham

Two criticisms about the way SMS passthrough works. First, when writing messages from a Mac to people using older dumbphones, I occasionally ran into what I suspect are Unicode-related problems. OS X will occasionally change quotation marks and apostrophes to “smart quotes,” which have an aesthetically pleasing curve to them but don’t display properly on some of these older devices. When I sent messages with any characters at all that these dumbphones couldn’t understand—emoji, quotes, apostrophes, even when mixed in with normal text—those messages would come through on the other end as a sequence of squares like the ones you’d see if you were missing characters. It shouldn’t be a problem for newer phones and your mileage may vary, but it was the only time when it didn’t work as intended for us.

Second, as others have pointed out, if you have two-factor authentication set up to send confirmation messages to your phone, those messages are also going to come through to your iPads and Macs that receive your texts. You may want to limit the number of devices you enable for SMS forwarding. You’ll want to make sure those devices are secured with passcodes and passwords, that they don’t display the full text of notifications on their lock screens, and that they’re enrolled in Find My Mac and Find My iPhone so they can be remotely wiped in case of theft.

Camera Roll and the iCloud Photo Library beta

Hey, the camera roll is back!

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The Camera Roll isn’t a new feature but an old one making a comeback. iOS 8 put all of your phone’s local photos into a big “Recently Added” album along with all your other photos from all of your other devices. In iOS 8.1, the Camera Roll returns, keeping your local photos separate from the ones in your Photo Stream.

That is, unless you turn the iCloud Photo Library feature on. This beta feature was already included in iOS 8.0, though Apple chose to focus on it as an iOS 8.1 feature for some reason (maybe it’s just less beta than before). Enabling it on devices renders the idea of a “Camera Roll” moot because it uses your iCloud account to store the “canonical,” full-resolution versions of all your pictures from all your devices. Pictures or screenshots taken on one device are uploaded to iCloud and downloaded by other devices, and changes made on one device are automatically reflected across all others.

The one new feature Apple rolled out alongside iOS 8.1 is the ability to view, download, favorite, and delete these photos from the iCloud.com site in your browser. This appears to be the only way to get to these pictures from a PC or a Mac, since existing applications like iPhoto don’t seem to be aware of the iCloud Photo Library. A Mac version of the iOS Photos app will be out at some point early next year, at which point we’d expect the service to lose its “beta” label.

The downsides here are that syncing all those photos will rapidly fill up your available storage space, both on your device and in the cloud. On your device, you have the option to “Optimize Storage,” which will save lower-res versions of the photos to your devices and keep the originals up in iCloud. If you run out of cloud space, though, your only option is to buy more storage. Apple’s free 5GB won’t last you long if you’re also syncing other data and backing up iDevices. While Apple’s lower-capacity tiers are relatively reasonable ($1 a month for 20GB of storage, $4 a month for 200GB), the upper tiers aren’t as competitive with services like OneDrive and Dropbox ($10 a month for 500GB and $20 for 1TB).