Hacker News Reader

Comment by nlawalker | Hacker News Reader

I don't usually opt into these early, but have been looking forward to AirTag sharing.

To be fair, it's not really all that early if you're doing the public release. I've been on iOS17 for months as part of the beta, and I'm not even using the developer beta, just the public beta.

Oh thank heavens. That alone's worth the upgrade.

It's so insane it wasn't a feature from the beginning, it's as if Apple didn't know people might live together and share things.

I agree. I understand the privacy concerns, but my wife and I already share our locations in Find My Friends. If I use her keys to drive to the store, I don't need a warning that her AirTag is following me. I know. And I'm 100% OK with that.

I'd already opted in to share my phone's and watch's location. It was beyond annoying that I couldn't opt in to share a specific AirTag's location, too.

I don’t think this was so much a privacy concern as it was a bit challenging in terms of revoking keys and they, like they often do, opted for a basic implementation first to be refined later.

During the beta the 16 AirTag limit was still enforced with every shared AirTag counting towards it (and individual AirPods as well).

I’m glad to see that they’ve seemed to upped the limit or don’t count the shared AirTags against that limit anymore.

16 seems like a lot, but if you’re traveling with a couple of items you want to track and share with your party as backup, you start hitting it pretty fast.

Only potential problem (at least when I checked on the state of the beta) is that the person you share it with has to be on iOS 17 too. This was the reason I didn't bother with the beta (although it was the feature I needed asap) since the person I was going to share with wasn't going to use the beta.

The most annoying new thing over the last few months for me was that my Android phone started giving privacy alerts for my physical key chain which has an AirTag which is registered to my wife (a present from her to me).

I've had Apple alert me about my own AirTag, registered to me and I don't know how that happened.

It was a rough public beta. Would suggest keeping this plan.

Any anecdotes you can share? This is the first bit of warning I’ve seen for iOS 17 so far with most people saying it’s been smooth

Those people have been misleading you :-)

Mostly the usual battery/heat issues, the frequent app crashes (1st and 3rd) and the annoying hidden keyboard bugs that lasted through several public beta releases that required force quitting and restarting apps before it would show up again.

Rather than re-hash, /r/iosbeta is a good indicated of the tribulations of each release.

https://old.reddit.com/r/iOSBeta/top/?sort=top&t=month

I was on the developer beta from day 1, then switched to the public beta when that opened up. I haven't encountered any bugs significant enough that I remember details about them.

I'm not saying it was bugfree, just that the apps I use most were in decent shape from the start. (But I still acknowledge that you or anyone else might've had a very different experience from mine.)

AFAIK, the disappearing keyboard bug affected everyone on the betas with recent iPhones. And it happened basically all the time.

which doesn't seem to work if the other user doesn't have an apple device even if they have an apple id. Really lost opportunity here

Reply on news.ycombinator.com