I’ve experienced most of these; by far the most annoying are the absurdly long “backup” syncs and the sloooooooow text input.

As for the apps mysteriously reappearing on your phone — have you deleted them from iTunes?

It doesn’t strike me as very Apple-like, but in order to delete an app off the device, you have to remove it from the iPhone and also from within iTunes (under Library > Apps).

Otherwise, it will just be reinstalled the next time you sync.

I’ve noticed a lot of these too, but I’m surprised that the ridiculously-slow Contacts app wasn’t mentioned. Once I tap “Contacts” either on the home screen or in the phone app, it takes about ten seconds before I can do anything. I am using the MobileMe “push,” so there might be a correlation there, but…I only have around fifty contacts. iPhone 1.x Contacts.app wasn’t nearly that slow.

The re-appearing apps seem to be poor design in the way the iPhone is synced: iTunes installs all of the apps that are checked under the Applications tab of the iPhone page in iTunes. If you delete an app on your phone, it’s not unchecked from iTunes on your next sync, so it’s reinstalled during that sync.

But at least we can have OmniFocus in our Dock! Makes it all worth it to me.

…that I haven’t seen discussed more widely is the phone erroneously wiping out an apps data.

I don’t know what causes the problem, but it’s happening to many people. It happened to me, and it doesn’t seem to be limited to any particular app. Ken Case of OmniGroup even twittered about it:

http://twitter.com/kcase/statuses/864815730

Thankfully this has only happened to me with game apps, and not with more valuable data like in OmniFocus. I had all of my game data in MotionX Poker wiped. I was playing the game, closed out of it, opened Twitterific, which resulted in a full machine crash. After rebooting, going back into MXP showed that I was basically starting the game afresh. Super annoying.

It’s to the point where I’m actually afraid to use the iPhone, for fear of actually losing anything more valuable.

Not good.

I’ve noticed that turning off the keyboard clicking sound seems to speed up the keyboard. It can still be slow, but the worst lagginess is significantly reduced.

So, I will grant you there are some problems with the 2.0 software that Apple can solve: In there own apps. But the problems with speed, or glitchy 3rd party apps is hardly their issue.

Let me backup. The iPhone/iPod Touch (the device) has 128MB of RAM. Part of this goes to the system, part of this goes to a fake virtual memory block (that’s right boys and girls there is no virtual memory on the device). All told you are looking at about 70MB to play with as a developer. This goes down if the user then tries to play music while using your app. If the device runs out of RAM, it kills the app or in some cases reboots. There is a memory warning system that tries to free up memory by deallocating objects when it is critically low, which is why you sometimes see periods of slowness or stalls.

While the device is running OS X, it is NOT a desktop. But the majority of iPhone developers are desktop programmers. The majority of whom I think really understand this distinction. But some don’t. First, there is no garbage collection (and shouldn’t be - I won’t get into why) on the device. But there is on OS X. Secondly, while there is autorealease pools on both, they should be released far sooner on the device then on the desktop (actually you should try to avoid them as much as possible on the device).

This is all to say that developing on a mobile device is hard and you are going to see some terrible apps along with a few good ones. None of which is Apple’s fault.

This (slightly ranty comment) is not directed at the folks who originally wrote this article (because they didn’t participate in the media fiesta I’m about to describe), but I’ve seen this elsewhere on the web, mostly from the media. The same media that lost it’s mind when they found out there wouldn’t be background apps (now that you’ve read the above paragraphs, does anyone think that’s a good idea?). The same media that bashed them for not having 3rd party apps a year ago. And the same media that (I’ll admit, not as much as the first two) who had doubts about the whole App Store thing.

This is what happens when people who don’t know what they are talking about become the primary commenters on a product. Macworld, Mac blogs and others like them are completely unqualified to say “boo” about an SDK (unless they are a developer), but yet their voice was so loud that (my hunch is) it effected product development. Now their complaining?

This is not to say there aren’t problems in 2.0 that Apple needs to address; but if your primary problem is crashes. Blame the right people.