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A killer feature for me would be a control that helps my device switch contexts. I fiddle with about 5+ settings whenever I prepare to leave home, board the bu
by Eleison23 4y ago
A killer feature for me would be a control that helps my device switch contexts.
I fiddle with about 5+ settings whenever I prepare to leave home, board the bus, or disembark at my destination. That includes toggling WiFi or finding an SSID nearby, toggling mobile data, Bluetooth, battery saver/brightness, DND/ringer, etc.
Why does a general-purpose smartphone force me to manually press all these buttons in a checklist sequence that's easily forgotten? Why can't I just configure one green button that says "Leaving home" and it executes all those settings on my behalf? Another red button that says "Arrive at church" and it goes silent/off-net/DND?
And why, when I turn the phone's power off and back on, it restarts with all the same settings even if I've switched contexts? If I shut down a noisy connected phone, I can't turn it on at church because it'll gratuitously probe the network, use mobile data, chirp with texts and calendar reminders.
So even better than those aforementioned buttons would be geofencing, that allows me to configure where DND/ringer is on, where BT, WiFi and mobile data are allowed, etc.
If a device is going to feature dozens or hundreds of fiddly gadget preferences, please allow users to create "big knobs" or scriptable actions to simplify them!
- kragen 4y agoI wonder if you can write an app to do this for Android, or if there are API limitations. Obviously hardware buttons for different contexts would be better than something in the pulldown buttonbar, or even better, a hardware knob, with detents. Geofencing and time-of-day auto-profile-switching have the potential problem that they fight with your manual configuration. You turn on notifications to make sure you don't miss news from the hospital about your wife, and then an hour later the geofence turns them back off. That sort of thing has a kind of irreducible complexity and potential for user error.