15 ms·

iOS First Impressions (2018)

90 points by luu 7y ago

Nextgrid 7y ago
It's a shame they discovered iOS's UX when it's in my opinion at an all times low. I wonder how their experience would've been with the UX of iOS 6 or 7, before it all went downhill.
- fitech 7y ago
  Just curious: What, specifically, do you dislike about the iOS UX? where would you make changes?
- dmlittle 7y ago
  Some things are arguably better[1]. If you have an iPhone without a home button you can swipe left on the bottom of the screen to switch between your apps (or back right if you passed it) without having to open the app deck (not sure what the name is, previously you would double tap the home button). [1] Yes, this is my opinion and not everyone might agree with me.
  - sah2ed 7y ago
    > (not sure what the name is, previously you would double tap the home button). The SpringBoard? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpringBoard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpringBoard
  - lorenzhs 7y ago
    On the phones that have a home button and 3d touch, you can switch to the previous app or bring up the app switcher with a force touch swipe from the left edge, fyi.
    - dmlittle 7y ago
      I had forgotten about that! While this is true, I find it a lot more difficult than the new mechanic since it's a lot slower.
- aksss 7y ago
  As complexity increases (it does more than every now), it's a lot less intuitive than it was many versions ago. It used to be that we'd all be amazed that we could hand an iphone to a 70 year old new user and watch them be productive quickly. Now iOS has so many arcane corners in both the configuration and usability that the learning curve of use is much higher. Still love it and it's just a fact of life that, like Python, as it gains capability it becomes less simple.
- mortenjorck 7y ago
  It took a sharp dip in iOS 7 when Jony Ive took over for Scott Forstall, but it's more than recovered. The gesture navigation on home-buttonless iPhones is a revelation, and makes the original, button-based system look clumsy in comparison (it's no surprise Google more or less copied it wholesale in Android 9). And it's almost physically painful to go back to a phone without the universal back gesture, despite it never having existed in early versions of iOS.
anotheryou 7y ago
What's going on with the file system though? If you work like to work with files (opposed to having everything isolated in apps expect for the share functionality) you'll be lost. It's as if most apps are sandboxed in to their own folder or something.
- fctorial 7y ago
  > It's as if most apps are sandboxed in to their own folder or something Isn't that a good thing?
  - Macha 7y ago
    I dislike the way it discourages data portability. e.g. * I want to be able to have syncthing pull down my keepass database and have keepass2android open the current version in launch without having to navigate a file picker every time. * I want to use my browser to download rpg rulebooks from drivethrurpg then open them in my PDF viewer without either of those two having to specifically integrate with each other. It would then be nice if that pdf reader could display a list of recent files on launch rather than reopen a picker. They're mostly my gripes with Android 10's lockdown but iOS doesn't even want the filesystem exposed. I won't deny there's security advantages to this model, but it should have an out as it just encourages your app to own your data and only use it in ways they foresaw rather than giving control to users.
    - blitmap 7y ago
      I like that each app has its own filesystem, but i do wish i could 'get at' anything from the Files app. I want to plug in my iPhone and see the filesystem for the Files app. I want to be able to "share" any file from any app into Files. This would either be "Save to Files" or simply exposing it to files. I wish Apple made this easy, and just stopped doing whatever they're doing with iTunes. I hate needing it to upload photos.
      - ascagnel_ 7y ago
        > I like that each app has its own filesystem, but i do wish i could 'get at' anything from the Files app. If the developer takes the time to set it up, this is exactly how the Files app works -- each app will appear either as a folder or as a provider. > I want to plug in my iPhone and see the filesystem for the Files app. This is how it works currently on macOS; word is that this will be coming to Windows once they finish splitting up that version of iTunes. > I want to be able to "share" any file from any app into Files. This would either be "Save to Files" or simply exposing it to files. Again, this is up to the app developer to implement. On apps that support it, there's literally a "Save to Files" option on the share sheet.
harrisonjackson 7y ago
The point that resonates most with me is the smoothness and how pervasive this is in all the top ios apps. As a developer, I know where this is built-in (many gestures and navigation components) and where other developers have spent extra time and attention on the details. Jumping back and forth between xcode and android studio - it is SO SO SO much more enjoyable to develop iOS apps than Android apps. I cannot stand the emulators and the whole android development experience. If anyone out there disagrees and can point to resources to improve Android studio and emulator setup I would love a link.
- tasogare 7y ago
  At some point Microsoft had an Android emulator for Windows based on AOSP which was way faster and nicer than the SDK one. I suppose it still exists but don’t know how up to date the available images are.
- bschwindHN 7y ago
  Google maps pans so much smoother on my iPhone SE than on a lot of the flagship Android phones from the past few years. I think most recently I compared it with a pixel 2. It was dropping so many frames compared to the iOS version which is really pathetic for a google app running on a google os running on a google phone.
  - bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
    Weird, on my SE Google maps pans like crap, at least compared to Apple Maps (not that this contradicts your comparison). Google maps is hitting, I’d guess, 10FPS, whereas Apple Maps is getting something high enough to be indistinguishable from 60FPS (to me). I wonder why Google maps has such bad pan performance.
    - sjwright 7y ago
      Maybe Google “fixed” the problem of google maps having better pan performance on iOS.
    - 7y ago
kick 7y ago
Or maybe Apple just patented all of it. Assholes. Extremely succinct. Apple's the only company possible that could get a patent for turning a page in a book. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/apple-now-owns-the-page-turn/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/apple-now-owns-the...
- dylan604 7y ago
  This isn't just an Apple thing as this isn't the most ridiculous sounding patent (it is ridiculous) that has been posted here. There are so many patents that take an existing concept but add the phrase "on a computer" or "digitally" or some such. Is it an example of one company being an asshole or yet another example of how the patent system is patently broken?
  - kick 7y ago
    Why can't it be both? It's both.
  - crooked-v 7y ago
    With company-being-an-asshole complaints, there's also game theory issues to keep in mind: because obviously stupid and invalid patents get approved all the time, not patenting something could mean being issued with patent troll lawsuits from a different company that does. That doesn't necessarily excuse it, but there's definitely more of a motivation than 'because we can' behind what these big companies do, especially considering that most of these patents never get used for anything inherently money-making and so are just cash tossed down the drain in filing fees and time spent.
  - threeseed 7y ago
    > There are so many patents that take an existing concept but add the phrase "on a computer" or "digitally" or some such Please show us just one example of this. Because it's a myth that gets perpetuated that this is how patents work. You patent a specific implementation of a concept not the concept itself. If you implement a concept in a different way it won't infringe the patent.
ryukafalz 7y ago
>That color discrimination runs deeper than you think, man. The last company I worked at the full time employees had blue badges. The contractors's badges? Green. Hah, the badges had this color scheme in a job I interned at years ago. Never thought to make that connection. :)
ccheney 7y ago
That damned notch is why I still have an iPhone 8 in clutch
- olivil 7y ago
  Considering I was in the same position and recently switched to an 11 Pro, I now find the extra screen real estate to be nicer than the negatives of the notch. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the notch is a nice solution, but as it is either 1. part of the menu bar or 2. hidden in the black bars when watching 16:9 videos, it's not so bad.
gorpomon 7y ago
What a fun surprise to find that this website is Lisa's writings. I was lucky enough to attend Recurse Center while they were a facilitator there. Working with Lisa was a real joy and I learned a ton from her and James (the other facilitator). I can't recommend Recurse Center enough, if you're looking for a unique way to grow as a developer, hacker, computer scientist, or whatever label you prefer, it's an environment that really can't be beat.
wklauss 7y ago
> Project Fi isn't supposed to work with Apple phones. Turns out that it does work, somewhat. I hear there's limitations (it only uses the T-Mobile network, none of the international data works) I have been using Google Fi on iPhone since they allowed it. Supposedly still in beta but works great. It's true that it's limited to T-Mobile (sadly) but it does include international data, same as in Android. Still one of the main reasons to stick with Fi, honestly.
- slimsag 7y ago
  Unfortunately no support for the Apple Watch, though.
- GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
  I recently switched to iPhone + Fi. Was able to get data in London
klik99 7y ago
Regarding the smoothness, some of that is animation, but a lot is just in the accuracy/feel/refresh rate/special sauce of the touchscreen and multi-touch.
- ajconway 7y ago
  In my opinion iOS nowadays has a lot more lags than Android (even in the native apps), but Apple keeps beating everyone else in terms of input latency.
  - klik99 7y ago
    This is my experience too, esp if you aren't on the latest hardware, but are on the latest os If I wasn't a developer, I would never upgrade the os and just keep using an older phone
gok 7y ago
It's too bad how many people are running into the usability catastrophe that is Signal.
ProfessorLayton 7y ago
Interesting comment about the blue iMessage bubbles. I've definitely heard of it, and have seen the memes on the internet, but have never actually met anyone that cared about the _color_. In my experience people do, however, care about iMessage being green insofar as the loss of functionality is concerned. Specifically with group messaging, a mix of iOS + Android users will result in weird quirks that aren't experienced "when everyone is blue". For example I've been in a mixed thread where the android user would receive a reply individually by every participant, while iOS users would not. Reactions, et al are unavailable in a mixed environment etc. I'm not convinced it's a superiority complex, but rather the loss of extras that are lost when texting outside of Apple's ecosystem.
- cglong 7y ago
  I'll never forget the day I saw someone write, "If they have green bubbles they're not even worth talking to."
  - Twisell 7y ago
    Some teenagers are really mean and some people never grow up. Also : Some boomers believe they know everything because of their experience and some know better.
- theshrike79 7y ago
  Group texts are some arcane crap that seems to be very heavily an US specific problem. The rest of the world uses WhatsApp or Telegram or something similar for group messages (and pretty much ALL messages).
- zelos 7y ago
  Doesn't everyone just use WhatsApp anyway?
  - jedieaston 7y ago
    Not in the US. Everyone just uses what comes on their phone, and a select few use Facebook Messenger.
kccqzy 7y ago
> Luckily, apps seem to have a really good memory of where you left off This is something I have some gripes about. In the old days before backgrounding, pressing the home button literally ends the process. So implementing state preservation and restoration is a must for any non-toy apps. With backgrounding, apps can linger in the background for a while before being killed. And now many iOS apps don't implement state restoration at all, including built-in apps like Photos. Quick experiment to verify: I open a particular photo, quit the app, reopen the app, and I don't see that photo any more. Instead I see the general timeline view or album view. I hate this and wish more iOS devs would implement these things correctly. Docs here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/view_controllers/preserving_your_app_s_ui_across_launches https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/view_control...
- layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
  +1 particularly upsetting for apps like YouTube.
  - Lammy 7y ago
    It’s a paid feature for YouTube. They want you to pay up for background playback, so they won’t risk the free version being too convenient.
    - theshrike79 7y ago
      I've resorted to using YouTube with Safari when I want to watch a video in Picture-in-Picture mode. I'm NOT paying a monthly fee for a feature that basic.
      - Tagbert 7y ago
        You're not paying for the feature, it is a hostage situation and you would be paying to get a proper user experience.
    - The_rationalist 7y ago
_bxg1 7y ago
I switched a year ago and the only thing that is truly, fundamentally, worse about the experience is notifications. Somehow iOS notifications (swiping away, interacting, everything) are just incredibly clunky compared to Android. Throw in the baffling decision to separate the state of the "Notification Center" from what appears on the lock screen and it makes for a terrible experience. I don't regret the decision, it's just frustrating that this one thing is so far behind everything else.
- nottorp 7y ago
  However, on iOS you can turn off all notifications easily from the control center. Or more exactly, each app has to ask for permission to send you notifications on first start and you can just deny them there. If you don't want notifications, iOS is much better.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    You can do that on Android too. I believe you can also do things like "mute subsequent notifications from a particular app if they come in at a certain rate after the first one". So for a string of messages you'd only get buzzed once. To be fair, Android's do-not-disturb/prioritized messages system is way too complicated.
notlukesky 7y ago
I like the way he puts it on the baffling share icon: “ I'm still pretty confused with what that arrow out of a box even means.” To me that sums up the era when Jony Ive and the anti-skeuomorphic crowd took over the asylum. There are so many UX flaws since iOS 6. Luckily for Apple, Google and the Android crowd came out with Material Design that is a bad imitation of what went wrong with Apple instead of copying what went right during Steve Jobs era. Skeuomorphic design is a great enabler for Human Computer Interaction and allows the layman to quickly grasp things. And why is Airdrop and the toggle for the Hotspot hidden in the control center of the lock screen when you can fit umpteen icons onto the real estate? I have had to show that feature to multiple friends who have always been iOS users. Function has to come before “prettiness.” And the notch is not pretty by any measure. I prefer fingerprint on the screen or behind the phone like Google did with the Nexuses.
- wruza 7y ago
  It is not “share icon” though, it is a general action button that contains everything you can do with the object presented.
  - leadingthenet 7y ago
    Well ... now it is. It didn't use to be like this a few years ago.
- skohan 7y ago
  > Skeuomorphic design is a great enabler for Human Computer Interaction and allows the layman to quickly grasp things. It was a lot of fun working on apps during the Skeuomorphic design era, but I'm not sorry we've moved on. For one thing, we used to have to ship apps with a lot more image assets, which increase the bundle size substantially, but only really serve to delight the user the first few times they open the app and become invisible after that. Also skeuomorphism was a lot easier to achieve when there was exactly one screen resolution to target. We used to really count pixels when designing screen layouts, and it pains me to think how many different asset versions we would need now to support all devices cleanly. Ultimately I think it was a useful metaphor when touch screens were new, since it gave people useful information about how interacting in this format differed from a PC or laptop screen. But the thing which is really unique about touchscreen interactions is how the content can move and react to a user's touch, and it's much easier and less costly to do interesting things in that realm with simple lines and colors than with fully textured surfaces.
Poiesis 7y ago
> anything that lets you into my phone when I'm dead or otherwise incapacitated is generally off limits. I don't know if the gaze detection can be fooled by a corpse with its eyes open, but supposedly Face ID checks for body temperature as well.
- Tomte 7y ago
  Apple says that FaceID checks for saccades.
  - bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
    Do you have a source for that?
mikelpr 7y ago
I've only heard about message bubble color discrimination from the US and I think it's some real bullshit.
- xnyan 7y ago
  When an iOS user texts with a android user we lose all our nifty Messages featurea. I’m sort of convinced this is not completely unintentional on Apple's part (or at least, they would never do anything to make it otherwise ) because even though I completely understand that this has nothing to do with the android user I find myself getting annoyed that they "took" all my cool iMessage stuff.
- pwinnski 7y ago
  The color itself isn't the thing really. It's what the color represents: all of the features that iMessage provides don't work with SMS. Instead of little icon reactions, there are long messages ("pwinnski liked 'Okay, see you there'"), location-sharing is ugly, URL-previews are wonky, etc, etc. It's a diminished experience because SMS is a terrible protocol, the color just lets us know what to expect.
  - mikelpr 7y ago
    definitely. it's just that WhatsApp took over the rest of the world but the US still uses SMS
Snetry 7y ago
> Discovering Which of Your Friends Are Discriminating Assholes It's sad how something as simple as a different color can get the worst out of people
- mellavora 7y ago
  fortunately they only apply it to text bubbles, not skin color.
parski 7y ago
A "hidden feature" I absolutely loathed not having when I was on Android for a month is tap clock to scroll to top. Resorting to two-thumb screen jogging is such a drag.
- Darkstryder 7y ago
  That is a really hidden feature indeed, as I've been using iOS daily for ten years and was not aware of that. Thanks for the tip! I wonder how much undiscoverable features like this one I'm still missing.
  - kiliankoe 7y ago
    I tried collecting a few unknown tidbits here, feel free to open a PR if you know of more. https://github.com/kiliankoe/iOS-tidbits https://github.com/kiliankoe/iOS-tidbits
  - dmitriid 7y ago
    Once you discover it (I discovered it by accident a few years back in Safari), you can't live without it :) And apps that break this behaviour (I've found that Telegram is really inconsistent in this regard in chat lists) seem broken as a whole :)
- mercer 7y ago
  It's baffling that Android doesn't do this yet. I did a quick search to check if maybe it's patented by Apple, but this doesn't seem to be the case..
vnpc1 7y ago
iOS has been such a better experience than any version of Android that I've tried but I'm really not a fan of the newer iPhone models. Hopefully by the time my SE dies there will another iPhone which has 1) a small body; 2) touch id instead of face id; 3) a headphone jack.
- nizmow 7y ago
  Rumour is that's coming in March, but it's likely to be iPhone 6 sized rather than iPhone 5 sized, which is a pity.
- oblio 7y ago
  > 3) a headphone jack. Wireless headphones are a $8 billion/year business for Apple. Headphone jacks are dead forever.
0ld 7y ago
Unfortunately Apple "OSes" are ridden with small-ish but nasty bugs and inconveniences which affect only an "insignificant" part of their customers, and in the Apple garden world it means they are never ever going to be fixed. And not only that, new bugs are getting introduced and the old features removed with every OS release forcing me to look for workarounds, mostly to find out there are none, and eventually the only option is to get used to live with that I've been using Apple products for 5 years now, but by now I've really grown tired of being forced to "think different" every now and then, and I believe the Apple products I currently own (this includes MBPs, iPhones and ATV) are the last I ever buy

90 points by luu 7y ago

It's a shame they discovered iOS's UX when it's in my opinion at an all times low. I wonder how their experience would've been with the UX of iOS 6 or 7, before it all went downhill.

fitech 7y ago
Just curious: What, specifically, do you dislike about the iOS UX? where would you make changes?
dmlittle 7y ago
Some things are arguably better[1]. If you have an iPhone without a home button you can swipe left on the bottom of the screen to switch between your apps (or back right if you passed it) without having to open the app deck (not sure what the name is, previously you would double tap the home button). [1] Yes, this is my opinion and not everyone might agree with me.
- sah2ed 7y ago
  > (not sure what the name is, previously you would double tap the home button). The SpringBoard? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpringBoard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpringBoard
- lorenzhs 7y ago
  On the phones that have a home button and 3d touch, you can switch to the previous app or bring up the app switcher with a force touch swipe from the left edge, fyi.
  - dmlittle 7y ago
    I had forgotten about that! While this is true, I find it a lot more difficult than the new mechanic since it's a lot slower.
aksss 7y ago
As complexity increases (it does more than every now), it's a lot less intuitive than it was many versions ago. It used to be that we'd all be amazed that we could hand an iphone to a 70 year old new user and watch them be productive quickly. Now iOS has so many arcane corners in both the configuration and usability that the learning curve of use is much higher. Still love it and it's just a fact of life that, like Python, as it gains capability it becomes less simple.
mortenjorck 7y ago
It took a sharp dip in iOS 7 when Jony Ive took over for Scott Forstall, but it's more than recovered. The gesture navigation on home-buttonless iPhones is a revelation, and makes the original, button-based system look clumsy in comparison (it's no surprise Google more or less copied it wholesale in Android 9). And it's almost physically painful to go back to a phone without the universal back gesture, despite it never having existed in early versions of iOS.

anotheryou 7y ago

What's going on with the file system though? If you work like to work with files (opposed to having everything isolated in apps expect for the share functionality) you'll be lost. It's as if most apps are sandboxed in to their own folder or something.

fctorial 7y ago
> It's as if most apps are sandboxed in to their own folder or something Isn't that a good thing?
- Macha 7y ago
  I dislike the way it discourages data portability. e.g. * I want to be able to have syncthing pull down my keepass database and have keepass2android open the current version in launch without having to navigate a file picker every time. * I want to use my browser to download rpg rulebooks from drivethrurpg then open them in my PDF viewer without either of those two having to specifically integrate with each other. It would then be nice if that pdf reader could display a list of recent files on launch rather than reopen a picker. They're mostly my gripes with Android 10's lockdown but iOS doesn't even want the filesystem exposed. I won't deny there's security advantages to this model, but it should have an out as it just encourages your app to own your data and only use it in ways they foresaw rather than giving control to users.
  - blitmap 7y ago
    I like that each app has its own filesystem, but i do wish i could 'get at' anything from the Files app. I want to plug in my iPhone and see the filesystem for the Files app. I want to be able to "share" any file from any app into Files. This would either be "Save to Files" or simply exposing it to files. I wish Apple made this easy, and just stopped doing whatever they're doing with iTunes. I hate needing it to upload photos.
    - ascagnel_ 7y ago
      > I like that each app has its own filesystem, but i do wish i could 'get at' anything from the Files app. If the developer takes the time to set it up, this is exactly how the Files app works -- each app will appear either as a folder or as a provider. > I want to plug in my iPhone and see the filesystem for the Files app. This is how it works currently on macOS; word is that this will be coming to Windows once they finish splitting up that version of iTunes. > I want to be able to "share" any file from any app into Files. This would either be "Save to Files" or simply exposing it to files. Again, this is up to the app developer to implement. On apps that support it, there's literally a "Save to Files" option on the share sheet.

harrisonjackson 7y ago

The point that resonates most with me is the smoothness and how pervasive this is in all the top ios apps. As a developer, I know where this is built-in (many gestures and navigation components) and where other developers have spent extra time and attention on the details. Jumping back and forth between xcode and android studio - it is SO SO SO much more enjoyable to develop iOS apps than Android apps. I cannot stand the emulators and the whole android development experience. If anyone out there disagrees and can point to resources to improve Android studio and emulator setup I would love a link.

tasogare 7y ago
At some point Microsoft had an Android emulator for Windows based on AOSP which was way faster and nicer than the SDK one. I suppose it still exists but don’t know how up to date the available images are.
bschwindHN 7y ago
Google maps pans so much smoother on my iPhone SE than on a lot of the flagship Android phones from the past few years. I think most recently I compared it with a pixel 2. It was dropping so many frames compared to the iOS version which is really pathetic for a google app running on a google os running on a google phone.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
  Weird, on my SE Google maps pans like crap, at least compared to Apple Maps (not that this contradicts your comparison). Google maps is hitting, I’d guess, 10FPS, whereas Apple Maps is getting something high enough to be indistinguishable from 60FPS (to me). I wonder why Google maps has such bad pan performance.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    Maybe Google “fixed” the problem of google maps having better pan performance on iOS.
  - 7y ago

kick 7y ago

Or maybe Apple just patented all of it. Assholes. Extremely succinct. Apple's the only company possible that could get a patent for turning a page in a book. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/apple-now-owns-the-page-turn/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/apple-now-owns-the...

dylan604 7y ago
This isn't just an Apple thing as this isn't the most ridiculous sounding patent (it is ridiculous) that has been posted here. There are so many patents that take an existing concept but add the phrase "on a computer" or "digitally" or some such. Is it an example of one company being an asshole or yet another example of how the patent system is patently broken?
- kick 7y ago
  Why can't it be both? It's both.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  With company-being-an-asshole complaints, there's also game theory issues to keep in mind: because obviously stupid and invalid patents get approved all the time, not patenting something could mean being issued with patent troll lawsuits from a different company that does. That doesn't necessarily excuse it, but there's definitely more of a motivation than 'because we can' behind what these big companies do, especially considering that most of these patents never get used for anything inherently money-making and so are just cash tossed down the drain in filing fees and time spent.
- threeseed 7y ago
  > There are so many patents that take an existing concept but add the phrase "on a computer" or "digitally" or some such Please show us just one example of this. Because it's a myth that gets perpetuated that this is how patents work. You patent a specific implementation of a concept not the concept itself. If you implement a concept in a different way it won't infringe the patent.

ryukafalz 7y ago

>That color discrimination runs deeper than you think, man. The last company I worked at the full time employees had blue badges. The contractors's badges? Green. Hah, the badges had this color scheme in a job I interned at years ago. Never thought to make that connection. :)

ccheney 7y ago

That damned notch is why I still have an iPhone 8 in clutch

olivil 7y ago
Considering I was in the same position and recently switched to an 11 Pro, I now find the extra screen real estate to be nicer than the negatives of the notch. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the notch is a nice solution, but as it is either 1. part of the menu bar or 2. hidden in the black bars when watching 16:9 videos, it's not so bad.

gorpomon 7y ago

What a fun surprise to find that this website is Lisa's writings. I was lucky enough to attend Recurse Center while they were a facilitator there. Working with Lisa was a real joy and I learned a ton from her and James (the other facilitator). I can't recommend Recurse Center enough, if you're looking for a unique way to grow as a developer, hacker, computer scientist, or whatever label you prefer, it's an environment that really can't be beat.

wklauss 7y ago

> Project Fi isn't supposed to work with Apple phones. Turns out that it does work, somewhat. I hear there's limitations (it only uses the T-Mobile network, none of the international data works) I have been using Google Fi on iPhone since they allowed it. Supposedly still in beta but works great. It's true that it's limited to T-Mobile (sadly) but it does include international data, same as in Android. Still one of the main reasons to stick with Fi, honestly.

slimsag 7y ago
Unfortunately no support for the Apple Watch, though.
GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
I recently switched to iPhone + Fi. Was able to get data in London

klik99 7y ago

Regarding the smoothness, some of that is animation, but a lot is just in the accuracy/feel/refresh rate/special sauce of the touchscreen and multi-touch.

ajconway 7y ago
In my opinion iOS nowadays has a lot more lags than Android (even in the native apps), but Apple keeps beating everyone else in terms of input latency.
- klik99 7y ago
  This is my experience too, esp if you aren't on the latest hardware, but are on the latest os If I wasn't a developer, I would never upgrade the os and just keep using an older phone

gok 7y ago

It's too bad how many people are running into the usability catastrophe that is Signal.

ProfessorLayton 7y ago

Interesting comment about the blue iMessage bubbles. I've definitely heard of it, and have seen the memes on the internet, but have never actually met anyone that cared about the _color_. In my experience people do, however, care about iMessage being green insofar as the loss of functionality is concerned. Specifically with group messaging, a mix of iOS + Android users will result in weird quirks that aren't experienced "when everyone is blue". For example I've been in a mixed thread where the android user would receive a reply individually by every participant, while iOS users would not. Reactions, et al are unavailable in a mixed environment etc. I'm not convinced it's a superiority complex, but rather the loss of extras that are lost when texting outside of Apple's ecosystem.

cglong 7y ago
I'll never forget the day I saw someone write, "If they have green bubbles they're not even worth talking to."
- Twisell 7y ago
  Some teenagers are really mean and some people never grow up. Also : Some boomers believe they know everything because of their experience and some know better.
theshrike79 7y ago
Group texts are some arcane crap that seems to be very heavily an US specific problem. The rest of the world uses WhatsApp or Telegram or something similar for group messages (and pretty much ALL messages).
zelos 7y ago
Doesn't everyone just use WhatsApp anyway?
- jedieaston 7y ago
  Not in the US. Everyone just uses what comes on their phone, and a select few use Facebook Messenger.

kccqzy 7y ago

> Luckily, apps seem to have a really good memory of where you left off This is something I have some gripes about. In the old days before backgrounding, pressing the home button literally ends the process. So implementing state preservation and restoration is a must for any non-toy apps. With backgrounding, apps can linger in the background for a while before being killed. And now many iOS apps don't implement state restoration at all, including built-in apps like Photos. Quick experiment to verify: I open a particular photo, quit the app, reopen the app, and I don't see that photo any more. Instead I see the general timeline view or album view. I hate this and wish more iOS devs would implement these things correctly. Docs here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/view_controllers/preserving_your_app_s_ui_across_launches https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/view_control...

layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
+1 particularly upsetting for apps like YouTube.
- Lammy 7y ago
  It’s a paid feature for YouTube. They want you to pay up for background playback, so they won’t risk the free version being too convenient.
  - theshrike79 7y ago
    I've resorted to using YouTube with Safari when I want to watch a video in Picture-in-Picture mode. I'm NOT paying a monthly fee for a feature that basic.
    - Tagbert 7y ago
      You're not paying for the feature, it is a hostage situation and you would be paying to get a proper user experience.
  - The_rationalist 7y ago

_bxg1 7y ago

I switched a year ago and the only thing that is truly, fundamentally, worse about the experience is notifications. Somehow iOS notifications (swiping away, interacting, everything) are just incredibly clunky compared to Android. Throw in the baffling decision to separate the state of the "Notification Center" from what appears on the lock screen and it makes for a terrible experience. I don't regret the decision, it's just frustrating that this one thing is so far behind everything else.

nottorp 7y ago
However, on iOS you can turn off all notifications easily from the control center. Or more exactly, each app has to ask for permission to send you notifications on first start and you can just deny them there. If you don't want notifications, iOS is much better.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  You can do that on Android too. I believe you can also do things like "mute subsequent notifications from a particular app if they come in at a certain rate after the first one". So for a string of messages you'd only get buzzed once. To be fair, Android's do-not-disturb/prioritized messages system is way too complicated.

notlukesky 7y ago

I like the way he puts it on the baffling share icon: “ I'm still pretty confused with what that arrow out of a box even means.” To me that sums up the era when Jony Ive and the anti-skeuomorphic crowd took over the asylum. There are so many UX flaws since iOS 6. Luckily for Apple, Google and the Android crowd came out with Material Design that is a bad imitation of what went wrong with Apple instead of copying what went right during Steve Jobs era. Skeuomorphic design is a great enabler for Human Computer Interaction and allows the layman to quickly grasp things. And why is Airdrop and the toggle for the Hotspot hidden in the control center of the lock screen when you can fit umpteen icons onto the real estate? I have had to show that feature to multiple friends who have always been iOS users. Function has to come before “prettiness.” And the notch is not pretty by any measure. I prefer fingerprint on the screen or behind the phone like Google did with the Nexuses.

wruza 7y ago
It is not “share icon” though, it is a general action button that contains everything you can do with the object presented.
- leadingthenet 7y ago
  Well ... now it is. It didn't use to be like this a few years ago.
skohan 7y ago
> Skeuomorphic design is a great enabler for Human Computer Interaction and allows the layman to quickly grasp things. It was a lot of fun working on apps during the Skeuomorphic design era, but I'm not sorry we've moved on. For one thing, we used to have to ship apps with a lot more image assets, which increase the bundle size substantially, but only really serve to delight the user the first few times they open the app and become invisible after that. Also skeuomorphism was a lot easier to achieve when there was exactly one screen resolution to target. We used to really count pixels when designing screen layouts, and it pains me to think how many different asset versions we would need now to support all devices cleanly. Ultimately I think it was a useful metaphor when touch screens were new, since it gave people useful information about how interacting in this format differed from a PC or laptop screen. But the thing which is really unique about touchscreen interactions is how the content can move and react to a user's touch, and it's much easier and less costly to do interesting things in that realm with simple lines and colors than with fully textured surfaces.

Poiesis 7y ago

> anything that lets you into my phone when I'm dead or otherwise incapacitated is generally off limits. I don't know if the gaze detection can be fooled by a corpse with its eyes open, but supposedly Face ID checks for body temperature as well.

Tomte 7y ago
Apple says that FaceID checks for saccades.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
  Do you have a source for that?

mikelpr 7y ago

I've only heard about message bubble color discrimination from the US and I think it's some real bullshit.

xnyan 7y ago
When an iOS user texts with a android user we lose all our nifty Messages featurea. I’m sort of convinced this is not completely unintentional on Apple's part (or at least, they would never do anything to make it otherwise ) because even though I completely understand that this has nothing to do with the android user I find myself getting annoyed that they "took" all my cool iMessage stuff.
pwinnski 7y ago
The color itself isn't the thing really. It's what the color represents: all of the features that iMessage provides don't work with SMS. Instead of little icon reactions, there are long messages ("pwinnski liked 'Okay, see you there'"), location-sharing is ugly, URL-previews are wonky, etc, etc. It's a diminished experience because SMS is a terrible protocol, the color just lets us know what to expect.
- mikelpr 7y ago
  definitely. it's just that WhatsApp took over the rest of the world but the US still uses SMS

Snetry 7y ago

> Discovering Which of Your Friends Are Discriminating Assholes It's sad how something as simple as a different color can get the worst out of people

mellavora 7y ago
fortunately they only apply it to text bubbles, not skin color.

parski 7y ago

A "hidden feature" I absolutely loathed not having when I was on Android for a month is tap clock to scroll to top. Resorting to two-thumb screen jogging is such a drag.

Darkstryder 7y ago
That is a really hidden feature indeed, as I've been using iOS daily for ten years and was not aware of that. Thanks for the tip! I wonder how much undiscoverable features like this one I'm still missing.
- kiliankoe 7y ago
  I tried collecting a few unknown tidbits here, feel free to open a PR if you know of more. https://github.com/kiliankoe/iOS-tidbits https://github.com/kiliankoe/iOS-tidbits
- dmitriid 7y ago
  Once you discover it (I discovered it by accident a few years back in Safari), you can't live without it :) And apps that break this behaviour (I've found that Telegram is really inconsistent in this regard in chat lists) seem broken as a whole :)
mercer 7y ago
It's baffling that Android doesn't do this yet. I did a quick search to check if maybe it's patented by Apple, but this doesn't seem to be the case..

vnpc1 7y ago

iOS has been such a better experience than any version of Android that I've tried but I'm really not a fan of the newer iPhone models. Hopefully by the time my SE dies there will another iPhone which has 1) a small body; 2) touch id instead of face id; 3) a headphone jack.

nizmow 7y ago
Rumour is that's coming in March, but it's likely to be iPhone 6 sized rather than iPhone 5 sized, which is a pity.
oblio 7y ago
> 3) a headphone jack. Wireless headphones are a $8 billion/year business for Apple. Headphone jacks are dead forever.

0ld 7y ago

Unfortunately Apple "OSes" are ridden with small-ish but nasty bugs and inconveniences which affect only an "insignificant" part of their customers, and in the Apple garden world it means they are never ever going to be fixed. And not only that, new bugs are getting introduced and the old features removed with every OS release forcing me to look for workarounds, mostly to find out there are none, and eventually the only option is to get used to live with that I've been using Apple products for 5 years now, but by now I've really grown tired of being forced to "think different" every now and then, and I believe the Apple products I currently own (this includes MBPs, iPhones and ATV) are the last I ever buy