4 ms·

Apple hates any sort of technical customization in their mass-market products. They always have, and keep stripping them down to the most dumbed-down settings s

Apple hates any sort of technical customization in their mass-market products. They always have, and keep stripping them down to the most dumbed-down settings screens they can figure out while still allowing the bare necessities (which they apparently don't consider adding an alternative search engine to be). I don't like this approach, but it is very consistent in their products, features tend to disappear over time and new ones only pop up if they're very sexy and can be announced on-stage.

nikanj 5y ago
Every customization option means more complaints from some customer who managed to mess up that setting. “My search no longer works!” “Sir you have the search registry key set to ‘turkey bake time’” “Well that’s what I was searching for, and then the search stopped working completely. iPhones are the worst, I’m gonna tell all my friends”
- malwrar 5y ago
  I’m sure Apple’s world-renowned UX team can innovate a way to allow new search engines to be added w/o bricking your phone. I’d rather have that than lack if real, capital-laden competition in search.
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    I’m not sure they can: adding “one more feature” here and there quickly overrides anything a UX team can do to prevent 10s of thousands of confused complaints and returned phones. For example, my family member is a smart woman and I used to teach professionally. I haven’t yet found a way to teach her what a web browser is and isn’t. This is relevant to the things she wants to get done (e.g. shortcuts don’t run in webview, gmail’s native app doesn’t support recipient groups but the web app does, etc) After warmup, examples, Socratic questioning, task assignments, checking understanding and testing (with detailed feedback), it seems she approximately learns what a web browser is and when she is and isn’t in one, but then she doesn’t really understand it a couple days later. She’s otherwise as clever and capable as everybody else or rather more clever. At Apple’s scale, every added feature to a web browser adds thousands of clever people quitting in confusion. That’s why they hide things like search engine selection under menus an average user will never see, even if accidentally pressing 37 not-quite-randomly wrong things during a session. We here have the curse of expertise. The best Apple UX can do for the majority of the population is say no to features more often than yes, and to hide deep under the hood any setting that persists after the device is restarted and could lead to confused angry consumers that can’t figure out what to do and don’t have nearby family members to solve it before they quit.
  - dwaite 5y ago
    It is likely more that the Safari team anticipates non-scrupulous companies taking advantage of an option to add a default search engine inline. Things like modal prompting and site-specified explanatory text are exploited these days. Likely the best bet would be a web extension manifest value to expose a potential search engine. That would mean on iOS that you still need to publish an app for your search engine option to show up.
- beefield 5y ago
  Well, well. I just realized. I think that apple sets by default that IOS Safari can't use location services without going into settings. Which for a really significant chunk (majority?) of iphone users mean that any web app using location services is "broken"[1]. Which of course means that for those folks web apps are not a thing, but they go and buy an app in the app store. Well played. (#ssholes.) [1] Due to circumstances, I have needed to demo a certain location web app to quite a few people. I am not exaggerating.
  - dwaite 5y ago
    Safari is not privileged in terms of location access [1], so the user both has to let Safari have access to location information and let Safari share that location information with a site. If the user rejected Safari's access to location, sites also will also not get location data. However, Safari has asked me for access the first time on several phone installs, so I believe Safari not having location services is still a user choosing to limit platform access at some point during setup or on demand in Safari. Unfortunately the public often does not trust even the platform vendor with location access. I somewhat blame Google for leading the public narrative to that point - but it is admittedly a very easy topic to fearmonger about. (Said as someone who often has to restore location access to Apple and Google maps on family members' phones as part of troubleshooting issues)
konschubert 5y ago
Not to take away from your overall correct point, but... Let me introduce you to focus modes....
hetspookjee 5y ago
I don't agree entirely. I'm able to control my privacy settings to an, for an Android user's standpoint, absurd level of detail. In addition I can fiddle with so many settings hidden and tucked away quite nicely on my iPhone. In addition, I'm only able to shut down JavaScript in Safari - and more, while not being able to do so in Firefox Focus. Options like that are counter-intuitive if you ask me. This argument is very convenient for any options that are against them. But if they're so consistent, than I wouldn't be able to control my privacy settings to such a degree, because it'll confuse users and can be just as annoying if set incorrectly.
artifact_44 5y ago
One incentive for them doing this is that they have to provide support and if they let everyone use random search engines that deliver malware etc. They end up having to pay their "geniuses" more to un-crud peoples infested machines.

nikanj 5y ago

Every customization option means more complaints from some customer who managed to mess up that setting. “My search no longer works!” “Sir you have the search registry key set to ‘turkey bake time’” “Well that’s what I was searching for, and then the search stopped working completely. iPhones are the worst, I’m gonna tell all my friends”

malwrar 5y ago
I’m sure Apple’s world-renowned UX team can innovate a way to allow new search engines to be added w/o bricking your phone. I’d rather have that than lack if real, capital-laden competition in search.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  I’m not sure they can: adding “one more feature” here and there quickly overrides anything a UX team can do to prevent 10s of thousands of confused complaints and returned phones. For example, my family member is a smart woman and I used to teach professionally. I haven’t yet found a way to teach her what a web browser is and isn’t. This is relevant to the things she wants to get done (e.g. shortcuts don’t run in webview, gmail’s native app doesn’t support recipient groups but the web app does, etc) After warmup, examples, Socratic questioning, task assignments, checking understanding and testing (with detailed feedback), it seems she approximately learns what a web browser is and when she is and isn’t in one, but then she doesn’t really understand it a couple days later. She’s otherwise as clever and capable as everybody else or rather more clever. At Apple’s scale, every added feature to a web browser adds thousands of clever people quitting in confusion. That’s why they hide things like search engine selection under menus an average user will never see, even if accidentally pressing 37 not-quite-randomly wrong things during a session. We here have the curse of expertise. The best Apple UX can do for the majority of the population is say no to features more often than yes, and to hide deep under the hood any setting that persists after the device is restarted and could lead to confused angry consumers that can’t figure out what to do and don’t have nearby family members to solve it before they quit.
- dwaite 5y ago
  It is likely more that the Safari team anticipates non-scrupulous companies taking advantage of an option to add a default search engine inline. Things like modal prompting and site-specified explanatory text are exploited these days. Likely the best bet would be a web extension manifest value to expose a potential search engine. That would mean on iOS that you still need to publish an app for your search engine option to show up.
beefield 5y ago
Well, well. I just realized. I think that apple sets by default that IOS Safari can't use location services without going into settings. Which for a really significant chunk (majority?) of iphone users mean that any web app using location services is "broken"[1]. Which of course means that for those folks web apps are not a thing, but they go and buy an app in the app store. Well played. (#ssholes.) [1] Due to circumstances, I have needed to demo a certain location web app to quite a few people. I am not exaggerating.
- dwaite 5y ago
  Safari is not privileged in terms of location access [1], so the user both has to let Safari have access to location information and let Safari share that location information with a site. If the user rejected Safari's access to location, sites also will also not get location data. However, Safari has asked me for access the first time on several phone installs, so I believe Safari not having location services is still a user choosing to limit platform access at some point during setup or on demand in Safari. Unfortunately the public often does not trust even the platform vendor with location access. I somewhat blame Google for leading the public narrative to that point - but it is admittedly a very easy topic to fearmonger about. (Said as someone who often has to restore location access to Apple and Google maps on family members' phones as part of troubleshooting issues)

konschubert 5y ago

Not to take away from your overall correct point, but... Let me introduce you to focus modes....

hetspookjee 5y ago

I don't agree entirely. I'm able to control my privacy settings to an, for an Android user's standpoint, absurd level of detail. In addition I can fiddle with so many settings hidden and tucked away quite nicely on my iPhone. In addition, I'm only able to shut down JavaScript in Safari - and more, while not being able to do so in Firefox Focus. Options like that are counter-intuitive if you ask me. This argument is very convenient for any options that are against them. But if they're so consistent, than I wouldn't be able to control my privacy settings to such a degree, because it'll confuse users and can be just as annoying if set incorrectly.

artifact_44 5y ago

One incentive for them doing this is that they have to provide support and if they let everyone use random search engines that deliver malware etc. They end up having to pay their "geniuses" more to un-crud peoples infested machines.