It seems as though iOS 7 was inordinately buggy when it shipped. With iOS 6, apps would crash multiple times per day, but iOS 7 is an entirely new level of buggy-ness. Springboard crashes regularly. My lock button stopped working after upgrading (I've researched this, and apparently this is an issue that has been known about since Beta 2. Evidently, Apple never got around to fixing it.) The phone routinely becomes unresponsive. The Apple TV version of iOS 7 was bricking devices and had to be withdrawn by Apple. This is not a functional operating system.
iOS 7 is a complete and utter embarrassment for Apple. It was nowhere near ready to ship, and it's become apparent that Apple's hardware release schedule dictated the iOS 7 ship date, and compelled Apple to release iOS 7 prematurely.
Although I've long been a fan of the iPhone due to its superior app ecosystem, I simply can't take my chances with another Apple mobile product. Apple has forced me into a situation whereby I can either elect to continue using a phone that does not turn on and off and crashes perpetually, or use a functional Android device with an inferior ecosystem. Basically any sane person would chose the latter.
iOS 7 was in no way ready to ship, and is still a major regression from iOS 6 even after several subsequent minor releases. The fact that Apple released such an incomplete OS to millions of users really makes me question their judgement.
This will be fixed I am sure - it's just a result of Apple's hit and miss QA. The real problem is updates. When Apple encourages everyone to upgrade to latest iOS and even forbids rolling back to earlier versions - they should really really get the updates right. We've seen this with iPhone 3G/iOS 4 and now we are seeing it again with iPhone 4/4S and iPad 2/3 on iOS7.
I think that's what has the biggest potential to hurt. I personally know couple friends who jumped ship after the iOS 4 update made their iPhone unusable and they've stuck with Android ever after. My iPad 3 was a stellar device until iOS 7 when it became very unpleasant to use. Luckily I was able to roll back to 6.1.x on the day when they were still allowing it. That's unnecessary pain inflicted on users - and people remember that kind of thing for a long time.
I think part of debugging large, complicated software is shipping it to customers and continually releasing updates. There's no way you can catch every bug a user could possibly run into without releasing...
iOS 7 is a complete and utter embarrassment for Apple. It was nowhere near ready to ship, and it's become apparent that Apple's hardware release schedule dictated the iOS 7 ship date, and compelled Apple to release iOS 7 prematurely.
Although I've long been a fan of the iPhone due to its superior app ecosystem, I simply can't take my chances with another Apple mobile product. Apple has forced me into a situation whereby I can either elect to continue using a phone that does not turn on and off and crashes perpetually, or use a functional Android device with an inferior ecosystem. Basically any sane person would chose the latter.
iOS 7 was in no way ready to ship, and is still a major regression from iOS 6 even after several subsequent minor releases. The fact that Apple released such an incomplete OS to millions of users really makes me question their judgement.