As an Android user, I am completely blown away by two things: #1 iPhones got this only in 2020, when Android had this since the first version, #2 iPhone owners are willing to spend $28 for a icon pack, a very nice one, but still an icon pack.
Technically it's still not available to iPhone users. The actual method of changing the icons is a really nasty workaround that needs to be performed for each and every application. Instructions: https://icons.tr.af/how
Don't get me wrong, I do love my iPhone, but this isn't something most people (myself included) will have the patience to do.
It also slows down the launch of every app because you're launching an app to launch your app. The idea that people would pay money, do a bunch of extra work and make their device slower just to change the appearance of their home screen because a handful of people on social media popularize it blows my mind.
> The idea that people would pay money, do a bunch of extra work and make their device slower just to change the appearance of their home screen because a handful of people on social media popularize it blows my mind.
I'm surprised you find that surprising because customisation isn't exactly a new phenomenon. I mean is it really any different to techies slapping stickers on their laptop? Or car enthusiasts modding their vehical? Or home owners decorating their house? Maybe you consider this different because it is software rather than physical stuff; but people do also change their ring tones and wallpaper images too, people customise their avatars on MMO games and profile pictures on social networks. Heck, I even have an alternative coloured border on HN. So while this particular workaround will undoubtedly be more work than most people are willing to take I do still get why some people might want to customise their home screen.
Devil's advocate: this is true. The people buying this icon pack, and the people who spend time on software customization in general, are a negligible subset of iPhone users. If you're making an app that aims for the lowest common denominator, options should be a low priority and well hidden once they're added.
If you're targeting a segment that likes options it's a different story.
I think this opinion is similar to the opinion that people don't value their privacy: it is a very convenient viewpoint to have when it comes to a company's bottom line.
Sure, if you approach the average person about an obscure topic like their privacy on the internet, they probably don't have strong opinions about it because that is outside of their wheelhouse, and they probably haven't given it much thought. If you couch privacy in terms that they are familiar with, such as drawing parallels to Supreme Court cases regarding surveillance and privacy, suddenly they care about whether or not they're being stalked online by corporations and governments.
For example, right to repair is something that most people don't think about. However, if you press the average person about whether they think they have the right to repair their own vehicle, suddenly everyone has strong opinions about it. People assume they have the right to use their hardware as they see fit, and aren't afraid of such options.
I find weird that there's a whole market of plastic stuff with lots of colors and designs for the exterior of the phone, but somehow it's given that stuff inside the screen is different.
Maybe the subset of people who spend time on software customization is small because software customization tends to be low priority and well hidden?
I'm convinced the poster above is only surprised because of the combination in this case:
It costs (a lot of) money to buy this set. It requires a lot of manual work to add the custom icons. And - most importantly - it slows down every app start.
While I myself don't really like to change defaults, I can very well see the benefit of customization for other people. But at the expense of performance this becomes very questionable.
It's like the cost of eating lunch out three times in a big city.
Given the amount of work put into drawing icons, I'd say it's fair. I'm absolutely thrilled someone found a way to charge for something that is a personal project and not backed by some big corporate marketing buck.
Yes. A lot of.
I value the work the designer put into it. But you have to also consider all the variables:
1. This is not a one and done deal. If he had a single client paying that for 80 icons, of course it wouldn't be fair. But since it's a product that is created once and sold multiple times, the price shouldn't be decided by the hours of work or craft put into it.
2. These icons are minimalistic. There certainly is a craft behind this design choice, but compared to more realistic icon depictions (comparing to macOS icons for example), it takes far less effort to design these.
3. A lot of them have already been established. If you can simply take a pre-existing pattern and adapt it to your style, there's not much for you to do. Official logos of other companies and adaptions of app icons.
Don't take this the wrong way. I'm happy for the designer to have been so successful. I'm merely pointing out that the price is relatively steep in comparison with other icon kits of the same craft. But good for him that he was so bold to go with the price and get rewarded for it!
Not sure if you've used shortcuts on iOS but a lot of those customizations don't change the performance of anything. The shortcuts on an iphone add a half second each time you use the app, because the icon has to open the shortcuts app THEN open the app the shortcut is linked to.
If adding a sticker to your laptop increased the boot time a fraction of a second some people would still do it, but many would it find it maddening!
"A delay of less than 100 milliseconds feels instant to a user, but a delay between 100 and 300 milliseconds is perceptible. A delay between 300 and 1,000 milliseconds makes the user feel like a machine is working, but if the delay is above 1,000 milliseconds, your user will likely start to mentally context-switch."
I've seen people mod their car in ways that are detrimental to it's performance. I've also known people who have intentionally bought inferior hardware because it looked nicer. In fact I've seen some people wear shoes that has give them blisters but done so because those shoes were pretty.
You'd be surprised at the lengths of inconvenience some people will endure for the sake of aesthetics.
> I mean is it really any different to techies slapping stickers on their laptop? Or car enthusiasts modding their vehical?
Stickers take a trivial amount of effort and don't impair performance. Car mods take time and money, but often make things functionally better. The icon app takes time and money to setup and the only functional change is for the worse. I think the icons are just enough different/worse than most other customizations that it's reasonable to be surprised at their popularity.
I've seen people mod their car in ways that are detrimental to it's performance (and intentionally too). So yes, some of those examples can sometimes affect the product negatively.
Digital life is taking over. It's the equivalent of putting some plant trees in your living room. As we spend more time (most of our time?) on our digital devices, the aesthetic is switching from real life to digital life.
It's so common to open apps from the search bar (and the app drawer now, I imagine), that it probably becomes less of a burden. Might even make people use those other patterns more, who knows.
> iPhones got this only in 2020, when Android had this since the first version
It's not a technical achievement(that took Apple 10 years to do), it's a design choice(that Apple made then and now). It can have multiple motivations that we can speculate on, would have been great to have someone from Apple to give us some perspective.
>iPhone owners are willing to spend $28 for a icon pack, a very nice one, but still an icon pack.
There are multiple games that make billions of $ by simply selling cosmetic items, this is very similar. It also has a a version in the physical world, people pay a premium for stuff with a special visual design and no functional advantage all the time. Handbags, clothes, cars, jewellery, movie merchandise(like Darth Vader helmets etc), houses, paint, books, computers - you name it, people actually pay for design.
Take two apps and switch their icons without the owner knowing it. Or put the same icon for every app. Make the icon even offensive. Then it becomes a bug.
Is the average iPhone owner willing to spend $28 on an icon pack? Probably not.
Can you find 3626 iPhone owners willing to spend $28 on an icon pack? Sure you can. In fact I bet you can find 3626 Android owners willing to part with $28 too.
the key to his success is honing his craft via side projects, sharing these ideas often, having a quick and easy tooling to publish ideas, pushing to prod and sharing these ideas. thats the key to success. the MKBHD pickup is just the recognition of the skill honed through this process.
No, you underestimate that. Being prepared is increasing your chances. There's one thing to be lucky as "1 in a billion" chance, and there's another to be lucky as "1 in 100"; the odds are always stacked against you, but with preparation & many attempts, your odds start looking better, and "luck" starts happening. (or not; some people are indeed unlucky, despite doing everything right. But that's less common than the other extreme - people that get lucky despite not doing anything rights).
No, the key to success is skill, with effort (grit?) thrown in there as well. Luck can sometimes play a significant factor, all else being equal. But the idea that everyone is equally "good" at things, or put in the same effort, and that it's mere chance that success happens to someone is...pessimistic to say the least.
Academic studies have repeatedly found that one of the single biggest determinants in success of just about any kind is luck. It is a very common misconception that hard work results in success, or that talent results in success, but that's looking at the successful from the wrong end.
It is rare to find someone very lazy or completely talentless among the most successful, so it must be hard work and talent, right? No, because it's easy to find very hard-working and talented people who are not successful. In fact, according to research[0], the most successful are usually not the most talented, but those of mediocre talent and a lot of luck.
They're not keys, they are requirements. And soft requirements, on top of that.
But luck is a huge component in getting wealthy. Plenty of people with equal skills, equal expertise, and equal hard work never succeed because they don't get the magical conjunction of right time at the right place.
Look at Facebook. When it was released there were a hundred products like it, but the specific combination of things Facebook did made it super popular. I cannot believe that was due to skill.
There is no need to assume that everyone is equally good at things, or puts in the same effort. Some people are much better than others at many things, and yet luck is the biggest determinant of success.
That being said, it doesn't mean that one shouldn't hone their skills and try to be successful. It's just that it's not likely that you will have such meteoric success no matter the skill or effort you put in.
Luck doesn't just play a significant factor, luck almost always plays the biggest factor. But being skillful and putting in effort is the only thing you can change and definitely does help too.
MKBHD picking it up had nothing to do with his journey or level of skill.
MKBHD could have picked up something much less refined and it would have been popular, a different designer dabbling with no prior mobile icon interest could have come up with something appealing to others as well.
Being there and getting an influencer is what made this story, and can be repeated by anyone. OP is conflating the rest of it with his own trials and tribulations.
> The market will decide a huge part of what comes after sharing something, so continually increase your odds by building, publishing, then repeating.
All the people here decrying everything he had done up until this point and proclaiming any degree of success is attributable only to luck is amazing. It's not the same as stumbling on a winning lotto ticking on the street (unless you have spent years scouring the streets looking for winning lotto tickets).
If by "amazing" you mean "embarrassing and enraging", yes.
It's one of those things that makes me want to scream at Hacker News regularly.
Even if you think it's about "luck", how are you modelling it?
MKBHD did a fair coin toss between all of his options?
Nah, doesn't seem realistic.
Some options are probably more likely than others.
Based on what? Oh well, the quality of the product, the buzz around it (which itself is probably based on the quality of the product, how it matches the zeitgeist's aesthetic (which means good understanding of trends, marketing, psychology, etc.)), the original reputation of the person creating the product, and so on.
Hacker News's take: it's just luck, it could have been any other icon set with the same probability.
#2 A few thousands iPhone owners out of 900 millions willing to pay $28 for a icon pack. Not that mind blowing for me.
Compare that to the billions of $ users spend on loot boxes.
Off topic, but I really like that I don't have to customize my iPhone much at all. It works great right off the bat, I don't need to download another camera app, another gallery app, or have to root it so I can fix my CPU settings so the phone won't melt just in my pocket (happened on my LG android back in 2015 which made me switch to iOS and never look back).
In fairness, I don't have to do any of that to my Google Pixel either. It all just works great off the bat. I can if I want to, but I don't. I do appreciate being able to install my own fully open source web browser of choice (Firefox) and my own fully open source ad blocker of choice (uBlock) instead of being stuck using skins over Safari's engine.
Oh yeah for sure! I'm developing mobile apps now, and I'm excited to get my hands on a pixel device some time. It's too tempting after using simulator :)
My iPhone 7 is a tool. It does its job, I don't feel any need to hack it, mod it or change it or upgrade every year. I text people, call people, take pics, browse the web, install other apps for things like ordering food, maybe play a game, etc.
In my opinion, most features that have come out in recent years for smart phones don't really matter to users. They are marketing checklists.
My 4 year old Apple phone continues to work great, while every Android phone I've used would get progressively slower and less capable with each Android update.
Also there was a plethora of Android features to support local advertising that I considered very invasive of my privacy. One example was an ad campaign for a children's clothing store called "Charming Charlie" which would pop up on my phone whenever I walked past their store at the mall regardless of whether Bluetooth and Wifi were on or off.
Finally, I can actually talk to a live human when I'm having problems with my Apple phone.
I dont know, for me the phone with just one button (no physical back button like on android) is incredibly clunky.
You constantly hover your finger over the top left (?) of the screen because the options are there.
Meanwhile android has 3 nice buttons at the bottom that are there always.
That's subjective. Many people prefer iPhones. They may find the features of iPhone more desirable or some other aspect about it like the Apple ecosystem.
I'm referring to features that were in Android and later implemented on iOS - presumably those are desired features, and at some point Android had it and iOS didn't. There's likely features that Android has today that will at some point be implemented in iOS in the future. Yet those features aren't enough to encourage switching.
(For context, I'm writing this not as an Android fanboy, but as an 11-year iPhone user, though I've often had a secondary current gen Android for testing, etc, and have constantly evaluated switching and never found a compelling reason for doing so, despite some of those attractive line-items)
This is true, but for the most part the Android features come earlier but are very poorly thought out and usually have usability issues which prevent people from using them effectively. In contrast Apple usually waits a couple of years and ends up releasing something that solves the problem in a usable way.
Let's talk about cameras specifically. Samsung has this "burst mode" feature which lets you take 100 or 200 shots in rapid succession. This was linked to a long press of the "take picture" button, so when I would use my wife's phone if I paused for a moment with my finger on the button it would fill up the memory card with hundreds of identical JPEG images that she would then have to sort through and delete individually.
Contrast this with Apple's "Live Photo" feature which takes a short 2 or 3 second video around the moment when you take your picture. You can still sort through each individual frame and pick the best one but it doesn't completely fill up the device's memory with hundreds of identical JPEGs. And it gives you this cool video of the moment for every picture.
Being first to market doesn't matter if the feature isn't actually usable.
Different people value different things. What's desirable is not the same for everyone.
Also, never underestimate the magnitude of inertia. There's a point many of us reach where we're more interested in your tools being consistent and predictable, rather than bleeding edge. We dread OS updates rather than look forward to them, because it means we'll need to allocate brain cycles to something that's changed and that's just not that important.
We'd rather be allocating those brain cycles to a project that we consider interesting and maybe even important, rather than adding fancy stuff to our phone's home screen layout.
My Galaxy S7 is 4 years old. It's still very fast (never had to reset it) and still gets security updates (last one in August) although no more OS updates.
If I played AAA games on my smartphone, I might want an upgrade, but I do my gaming on PCs. Otherwise newer models don't really have that much appeal, except for the better camera (although I am not impressed by the fake bokeh effect). However, even for the camera, it always feels like a compromise whenever I use it, in that I put up with lower quality in exchange for convenience.
They last longer physically. Apple supports them with updates and security fixes for absurd lengths of time (like 5 years or something). So if you take care of your phone it's better for the environment.
This is anecdotal of course. But I was an Android user since the first Galaxy S until the Galaxy S7 (with Nexus and some others in between).
I don’t know if this is still the case but every single time I had one of the big updates my phone just started getting slower and slower, most of my phones got a crack in the screen, battery started draining really quickly. I couldn’t spend more than 1.5 years with the same phone without wanting a new one really bad.
Then I got my first iPhone almost three years ago, and I still have the same phone and I don’t feel a need to get a new one. After several major updates my phone still works perfectly (even better I would say). Battery is in 85% and still lasts a whole day.
Do I miss some features? of course, but the same would be true if I switched to Android, I would miss Shortcuts, Airdrop and other small features, plus at present time I can’t think of a big feature I’m missing from Android.
If you want your phone to last forever, you need to take control of it yourself. Get a Lineage OS compatible phone and ditch the play store. Not only will it be faster, the battery life will quadruple.
They were fined for not telling people that they were slowing down older phones. It's a subtle difference. I'm not saying the fine was unjust, only that it doesn't reflect on the performance or quality of the product. Instead now we know that a simple battery change will restore the speed.
There are very few things in my life where I’ve purchased the highest-features version. I have a regular Medeco lock on my house instead of a Smart Lock. I didn’t give my TV internet access so it acts as a “dumb TV.” I own two kitchen knives instead of a set with a knife for every single scenario. Instead of the fancy closet organizers I have a regular bar and a set of shelves. Phones are no different — I rarely prefer the one with the most “stuff,” I like the thing that has the best execution on the stuff it has.
Not even that but, you can't change icons. What you can do is create a siri shortcut, assign an icon to that, and make the shortcut just open an app. Everytime you click it, it'll load siri, then siri loads the app, visibly and with a delay.
It's painful to use and look at, all of which was described in the video, and people paid $28 for it. Pretty insane.
Yeah. On the other hand we had 1/10 less mallware, faster UIs, updates for older devices up to several years, and other small things since day one which Android still doesn't have :-)
Don't get me wrong, I do love my iPhone, but this isn't something most people (myself included) will have the patience to do.