Those release notes are intended for their developer audience, not the general end user base. Parent was pointing out that the actual release notes Apple shows you on the device you're about to upgrade did not mention APFS.
The general audience doesn't even know that its phone has a file system, let alone care whether it's HFS, HPFS, APFS, or CP/M. You're complaining that Apple didn't disclose something that only developers care about to the masses.
Then at least we can agree that a fairly major operation such as converting the entire disk between file systems in a "minor" update wasn't disclosed to the masses, and I think that fact (and that it worked out quite well, apparently, besides the normalization shenanigans) is interesting it its own right.
I think it's important to distinguish a major change from an impactful one. The APFS change is major, but not necessarily impactful in any meaningful sense to users. Apple's not the kind of company that's going to emphasize non-impactful changes to its customer base.
0x0 (since this thread has hit the reply depth limit): The filesystem on iOS isn’t exposed to users, so I would guess that Apple considers it a strictly developer-facing change.
To stop flame wars (or slow them down) the deeper you get in a thread the longer it takes the reply link to show on the deepest comment. So if we get 20 levels deep in 30 minutes, the reply link may take tens of minutes to show up.
That's not necessarily true. It's easy to build an app where you prompt for the user's text input to construct a filename for saving a document/picture for example. NSDocumentDirectory is very much still the recommended place to store persistent user data on iOS. Imagine any non-English speaking person entering a non-ascii name for their document.
As another example, imagine Dropbox.app syncing files from the dropbox cloud reusing explicit filenames into the app's sandboxed Application Support/Library/Documents folders. I have no if they do this but if they do this could spell trouble.
Or simply any app supporting iTunes File Sharing, allowing users to drag files from their mac into the app container's NSDocumentDirectory directly.
Edit: Interested in hearing counterarguments instead of downvotes, thanks? :-/
>Imagine any non-English speaking person entering a non-ascii name for their document
You mean there are people in Europe, China, Japan, India running into widespread problems when they create filenames in their own language in iOS 10.3+ ?
The clearest explanation is in one of the updates on that page:
"The most obvious problems arose with iOS users who transferred files from Windows (which prefers a different normalisation form to HFS+) which were named using Korean and other character sets, although this even included European languages with accented characters like ñ and é. There’s a chilling series of messages on the Apple Developer Forums in which an iOS app developer details how users running iOS 10.3 were transferring files using iTunes for Windows, but could not access those files once they were on an iOS device."
The "chilling series of messages" takes you to a link which details how File sharing through iTunes on Windows specifically was affected and that a similar file transfer product on Windows iMazing was able to fix to fix it by simply normalizing before transferring.
( The "bag of bytes" response from Apple asks developers to do exactly that btw )
That begs the question that why iTunes itself ( on Windows ) wasn't able to do the same thing as iMazing ?
Anyway that's moot now - As mentioned earlier in this thread iOS 10.3.3 and iOS 11 are changing behaviour w.r.t. this.
I'm not sure I agree with that, obviously this seems to cause trouble if you have file names with non-ascii characters in them already, and who knows what else could have gone awry. But let's agree to disagree in that case :)
This makes sense to me - why would the user care what kind of filesystem their phones have - developers might - but when you cant choose the filesystem anyhow, what does it matter if the default changes.
Are you suggesting Apple didn't disclose APFS was coming to 10.3? There was plenty of media coverage ahead of time (e.g. https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/21/what-is-apples-upcoming-apfs-...), and it's specifically mentioned in the 10.3 release notes.