Microsoft, Google, Palm, and now Apple all seem to have agreed that there’s one right way to handle multitasking. When you double-tap the home button in iOS 7, a menu pops up with icons and screenshots of all your running apps — scroll through until you find the one you want, which pops open. If you want to close an app, just fling its screenshot upward. It’s all a good idea, except the icons and the screenshots move at different speeds, the screenshots are only updated when you open the app, and it’s all a little slow and stuttery right now. It’s a big improvement, sure, but that’s faint praise here; this still isn’t a great multitasking interface.

There’s more happening in the background you don’t notice, though. Apps can finally, mercifully update without being open, which means when you open your email or Twitter you’ll have an actually current view. No more clicking on notifications, then waiting while new stuff downloads.

You can choose which apps can update in the background, but iOS handles the timing automatically: if you open the New York Times every morning at 8:00, it’ll learn to update at 7:59. Few apps currently support this process yet, but I imagine it’ll be adopted in short order. It makes iOS feel alive and connected, rather than like a series of levers you have to pull to make anything happen.

The new Today screen, Siri, and the background updating lay a base for what could be great new features, but for now Control Center is the only thing that actually affects how you’ll use your device. Everything else is at best invisible, and at worst affectation — like AirDrop, theoretically a nice tool for sharing pictures and notes but so clumsy that I quickly stopped even trying to use it.

If Facetime Audio were like iMessage, working perfectly for Apple users and failing gracefully to make phone calls for everyone else, I’d love it, but it doesn’t, so I eventually gave up on it too. In so many places in iOS 7, it feels like Apple sketched out the right blueprints for an interconnected, clever, advanced operating system — and then didn’t have time to finish connecting all the pieces.

iOS 6’s cartoonlike visuals may have been dated, but the system felt tight, consistent, and fluid. iOS 7 feels like a bunch of ideas hastily built together in a way that doesn’t always make sense. The sharing menu is expanded, but only slightly; good luck sharing to most of the apps you want or even choosing the apps in your list. The right-to-left "back" gesture works in some apps, but not all of them. Sometimes a word is a menu, other times it’s navigation.

Prettier notifications don’t mean better notifications; more visual multitasking doesn’t mean better multitasking. Until Apple figures out how to use its developers and its ecosystem to bring these features into a cohesive whole, many of these new ideas count as feature creep over refinement.

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