[mzmzmzm]

I recently switched to iPhone for network reasons, and some UI/UX things are really shocking. There is no way to toggle location services without going into settings. The alarms are tricky to set and don't have niceties like telling you the time until your morning alarm. There is no clipboard history. They want you to use swipe gestures so much, the touch targets to exit fullscreen media are barely functional. If you use browser extensions and a browser other than Safari, to change their settings you don't open the app that bundles the extension; you don't look in the menus of your browser or Safari; you dig several layers into Safari's app preferences to find the extension's settings. After such praise, there are so many rough edges I can't believe iOS users just put up with.

[mikepurvis]

I recently switched the other direction and one rough edge I was surprised to hit on Android is the state of copy and paste for images; on iOS I would copy from Google photos and paste in WhatsApp, now that's just gone and the only option is either Google photos share-to or WhatsApp insert-from. There seems to be pseudo image clipboard support but it's mostly limited to pasting between Chrome tabs afaict.

My switching was due to a build up of minor frictions and frustrations with feeling like a second class citizen on iOS because I use largely gsuite apps rather than being bought into the Apple way for everything, with the last straw being the limitations on Pebble functionality.

[Gander5739]

I've been a lifelong Android user and still find this a glaring omission. As far as I can tell, copying an image in a browser and then pasting it elsewhere results in a character.

[jama211]

That’s ridiculous, that would drive me insane

[jama211]

Some of these are design decisions, not rough edges. There’s pros and cons. Eg, centralising settings makes it simpler min some ways and more convoluted in others.

That being said clipboard history would be a nice addition. However I never want to see how long until my morning alarm, that’s one thing from android I don’t miss, it would give me immediate anxiety.

Regardless when you’re used to something it often doesn’t feel like “putting up with it”, and when you’re not used to something things that are totally fine can feel like you’re putting up with an annoyance. This works both ways.

Take any iphone user and put an android phone in their hands and within the first two months there will be a lot of things they’ll say “how do android users put up with this stuff” about too.

It’s fine. They’re both fine, it’s about what you’re used to more than anything.

[mzmzmzm]

There are some things that are hugely better on the iPhone, like accessibility setting that can be set on a per-app basis. Overall though, I expect the whole UX feeling to differ, but I am surprised that both camps have sort of given up on feature parity. Back in the days when "pull down to refresh" was novel it seems like iOS and Android meticulously copied each other's innovations.

[jama211]

Yeah, there’s been a culture of stability as the platforms mature I suppose

[bjoli]

They dont enforce the centralised settings. That is why it is maddening. Some apps have the settings in the settings app. Some do not.

[jama211]

Ehh, there’s a style guide for what should be in each, you get used to it, but I’ll admit it’s not ideal.

[BobMontgomeryJr]

They're both emphatically not fine from any erudite informed perspective of what has been better in the past.

I've used small-form factor DOS luggable-bricks, miniature Windows7 7" diagonal laptops (Fuji B112, B2131) obsessively since the epoch, also exotics like Fakespace NDOF dataGloves, yada~ and my usual combination of trackball magicMouse and 3D connextion SpaceNavigator on my desktops. Now I've got an Android tablet and an iPhone which are decidedly not 50 years better.

Neglecting the exotics, UX experience in DOS sometimes was better than, e.g. explicitly touching (yes DOS could do that) somewhere in the middle of a paragraph only to have the cursor leap to the beginning, end, select the entire paragraph (iOS18 or so..) or invoke some unintended 'gesture', and then require twenty more touches of adjustments to getthe selection right.

Using external near-fullsize BT keyboards which actually make typing tolerable on my iPh and DroidTab, I'm constantly taken 'aback' (to memories of the past) by having to remove a finger from the keyboard to the screen to accomplish some cursor positioning that might just as well be done with less trouble with a keyboard touchpad or mouse. I do use a tiny tactile feedback BT keyboard with it's own tiny thumb-trackPad which works nominally better than on-screen keybooards when I'm crunched for space and can't use near fullsize kbs.

  Oh.. there's speech-to-text these days. Something about my present set of afflictions is holding me back from venturing forth into that void. 

  Auto-spell correct, anything that interrupts the cadence of typing, because  waiting for CPU cycles or accomodating network delays - none of those 'helpful' things 'intruded' into UXs historically. These Gaffes could be easily wiped away by local high-priority code executing on handhelds which actually pays attention to the people trying to use devices these days, andm actually, timely respons to that.   

 One can see this pathologically simply by repurposing some old, deprecated thing like a Nexus4 phone not as a thermostat but as a Web client for music steaming. The Nex4 actually has a 1/8" mini audio-out jack!! Web pages are so hopelessly loaded down these days the Nex4 struggles, rendering them only slowly. Button presses may go completely unacknowledged for seconds until the button glyph actually changes. Almost like delays in auto-correct!!

  In an epoch of no tactile feedback on glass (maybe audio clicks..) Devs, frameworks, dn toolkits largely ignore all except 'the most recent browser' on 'the latest hardware' case, doing nothing and likely relying entirely on someone/thing esle (is there an acronym ofr this, like DNRY? It's someone ele's problem? >>ISEP<< to acomplish 'low level' requisite confirmations real humans depend on and use to see they've done something that affects the UI, and can continue on, e.g. type-ahead as was the case as of old. Gesture forward!, perhaps.. the UI will catch up. 

Yeah. What I'm used to. All those big keyboards, redundant left AND right handed mice, trackballs, ouch-tablets, and 46" diagonal screens that are still not big enough to not have annoying piles of windows scattered across half-dozen virtual screenspaces each filled with windows still obscuring one another .. while I'm confusedly and involuntarily warped back and forth between unrelated workspaces when all I 'intend' is to open yet aother window of some app like textEdit to use in/with whaterver I'm working on _in the screen I'm working in_. (OSX/MacOS are you listenting?)

  MacOS (as of Monterey, haven't gotten fa/urther) yet - has that 'application' (read: not _user_, nor _context_, nor _task_ centered behavior, _by design_. all AAPL genius, I'm sure. Yes I really want to see *all* my textEdit windows in Spaces. That makes a lot of sense when I have half dozen different unrelated tasks going on and need only another textedit window. Sure, hide *ALL* an applications windows when I hide only a single one. Like I don't exist and it won't take me half hour to find the one I need again. Forget that in X-Windows omg that's _dead_, Jim!! one could push a single window to the bottom of the window stack to get it out of the way and not have to minimize it to go search for it later in a micro-dock stripe with only enough room for half-dozen minimized (oh and fully descriptive)  window icons beside all those appicons. 

  The iPh sub-oops automagic rearrangements of screenfulls of colorful bouncing icons is particulay visceral insanity, All rearranging unpredictably when one is stuck amongst others, like some kind of entertaining visualization of a cocktail party. Android tries to rise to this level with some obscure thing in settings which completely obliterates perhaps tens of minutes of careful arrangement of multiple screenfulls of icons- all gone!  with what of course what is de-regeur in mobile smart-space now, no hint of 'back' or 'undo', anywhere. 
 
   If you want a summary, put an iPh1 next to a Droid, neglect the fact they absolutely will not talk to one another without multiple intervening clouds and laborious and error-prone interactive shovelling of 'takeouts' and exports of data involving visting dozens of WebPges, and likely only though some full sized PC/Mac intermediary, and simply contemplate how wildly baroquely different they are.

  Before I actually got one, I literally was incapable of using an iPh1, despite years of experience with Android and dozens and dozens of prior systems. I could say I'm yet pretty incapable now, a year on. a dozen years of OSX time doesn't help either. So many colorful icons I _NEVER_ use, filling my tiny little screen, glaring at me like they are hoping to induce a seizure. 

  Most glaring - what is abjectly absent with both Android and iOS. 'Messages' well there are different Icons, who wrote the App? Is that Meta's, or Apple's, or Google's, or someone else's messages? Oh my phone buzzed; some notification appears then disappears, irretrievably. Does one have to go the the AppStore, Play, or 'settings' to find out these things in the middle of trying to figure which app to use to reach someone?? 


  No 'info' hover-over (no hover over ever, I guess for touch, yet an uninvented 'gesture') Obscure and infuriating and undocumented (guess one has to buy the book, or read the mags, and fawn for a while) things like the phone UI changing such that the button to hang up a call, even the entire phone UI disappeared over on some other appView perhaps.. That one might search and find three identical names in contacts, none which can be edited with all the data of all the others still visible. None which can usuall be edited _AT ALL_ unless one is deep within the bowels of 'Contacts'. A name but no a phone number displayed. Which of that persons phones am I calling?

  DNRY - a mantra of devs, seriously the bane of UX. forced modeful dives into app ratholes when something is right in front of you and you don't have ten minutes to go into its' 'responsible' app to fix it. And Certaianly *NO WAY* can you edit it right then and there.  No one ever would think some magic invocation might be possible to enable doing literally anything which is possible to to with something that's right in front of you, displayed on your device. Sort of the non-authentication triple-A: anywhere, anytmie, anyplace.

   I've used some remarkably baroque UIs  - seems every single CAD package of any sort has it's own. Some like Blender resembling the empty bridge of the NC1701 Enterprise void of helpful crewmembers. Want to know hoa to use something? Nothings' 'idempotent' anymore - gotta go Google it.

Evolved over decades, CAD UIs takes years - longer than the replacement cycles of smartPhones - to become proficient at using them (and zillions in edu-industry tuition fees) Gamers it seems build stuff today with apparent intent that products they produce are 'affectively' challenging, archetype of a game. Perhaps this is intentional? After all the more attention,good or bad, or the money you have to pay to learn how to use something, the more ingratiated you are to continuing to use it, damn all the competition. Forget that like most all affective coding, cognitively burdens conseqently corrodes your abilities to acompplish higher-order objectives unrelated to navigating UIs to accomplsh your intentions.

No drag-and-drop, have to thumbsType everything character by character. Copy/cut/Paste selections when not impossible, barely controllable. Time is displayed but not the date. <eyes wander, sees clock at top of screen>

Gotta go.

[jama211]

That’s a lot of words to say “if I don’t like something it’s objectively wrong” - also your wild rant went on so long and on so many tangents surely I’m not supposed to take you seriously.

[kakamadafuka]

This reads like a person trying to imitate a broken LLM that is on a hallucinatory rant. An actual LLM wouldn't be this coherent, though.

[jama211]

Yeah I’ve run into a few of these recently. I can’t work out if there’s just a few unhinged individuals on here or this is some kind of hyper-specific to HN trolling. Maybe a bit of both.

[ASalazarMX]

It's even deeper than that. You know the fancy side button that is designed to be used as a camera shortcut? You don't need that shortcut? Guess that button is unusable for you, because you won't be able to assign it to anything else.

Meanwhile the lock button long-press was hijacked for Siri, so now you have to click it five times if you want to turn off the phone.

And don't get me started on the useless back tap, which now displays a popup randomly, trying to seduce you into using it instead of a physical button, but the detection is so flaky I doubt anyone actually uses it.

[ntoskrnl_exe]

Do you mean that new action button thingy above the volume controls? You can reassign to perform something else in the settings. Only a few options to choose from, but it's totally possible.

As for powering off, you can tap the ⏻ symbol in the upper right-hand side corner of the control center.

[gabeio]

No they are talking about the new camera button on the same side as the power/siri button. Which is semi-ironic considering the volume buttons still work fine as camera buttons they just don’t also handle zoom (you can slide your finger on the button to adjust zoom). I honestly am more annoyed at the button than enjoy it, yet another button I accidentally press when I nearly drop my phone and now have the camera app open.

[ASalazarMX]

You have to long-press that icon, not just tap it. Granted, it enables lockdown too, which is what the physical button used to do. As other have pointed, you can also do that by long-pressing lock + volume up.

It is still ludicrous how Apple had to work around its own decision to not use the camera button for anything else, since allowing us to move Siri to the camera button would leave the lock button for the easy duress gesture it traditionally has been.

[fizwidget]

You can assign the action button to run a shortcut, which opens up thousands of possibilities for what it can do.

[mzmzmzm]

I find the shortcuts extremely powerful all over different parts of the system, but I wish the contours of what it can and can't do were less opaque. Feels like a lot of time-wasting trial and error to discover what is or isn't possible on an iPhone.

[childofhedgehog]

If you long press the lock button and volume increase at the same time you can turn the new iPhone off. I can’t imagine doing 5 clicks to do this!

[ASalazarMX]

Which is not great considering it's a gesture you're supposed to do in duress, and should be easily done blindly with one hand. At least for my hands, that's too complex of an incantation.

[mastercheif]

Back tap is an accessibility feature, not intended for general public use.

[lynndotpy]

Accessibility features are intended for general public use and they should work.

[ASalazarMX]

Specially on Apple devices, where common customization features are tucked away in the Accessibility menu.

[gabeio]

I use it all of the time! I actually love it but I use it for grayscale mode, nothing actually critical. And yeah it triggers randomly but I am never upset to be without color.

[pidge]

I’m curious and suffering from a failure of imagination—why toggle location services regularly?

[avidiax]

Why is the toggle allowed at all? Presumably, sometimes we don't want apps to know where we are and record/share that to the highest bidder.

International travellers will know that some apps will alter behavior or refuse to work based on your location, if it's provided. If I use a VPN, I want the app or website to use only the IP location*, not the radio location.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

If you are not actively benefitting from GPS, why let the man get a constant lock on your location? Make them suffer with cellphone tower pings.

I too keep GPS off unless I am navigating.

[AlotOfReading]

Increased privacy and decreased battery use when disabled, presumably.