The new iOS 7 fade-in animation that occurs when turning on the device seemed slow to me, or at least slower than in iOS 6. So, I wanted to run a pseudo-scientific experiment to see if my perception was correct (“pseudo-scientific” due to the small sample size). I compared my iPhone 4S with iOS 7 to my wife’s iPhone 4S with iOS 6 in terms of “time to home screen”, which I defined as the time between pressing the power button, unlocking the screen, and waiting for the icons to come into place on the home screen.

For iOS 6, 5 runs: 2.11, 2.2, 2.07, 2.12, 2.06 (measured in seconds), with an average of 2.11 seconds.

For iOS 7, 5 runs: 2.3, 2.33, 2.51, 2.54, 2.47 (measured in seconds), with an average of 2.43 seconds. 

The difference comes out to .32 seconds of extra time waiting on animations before getting to the home screen in iOS 7. Now, that’s not a whole lot of time; it’s not even a full second. However, this is a task that users will do several times a day, perhaps even several times an hour, and that means extra fractions of a second wasted over millions of people. When a user interface has a major update, it should take less of our time to use it, not more.