4 ms·

Being a 70's child, in computing since the mid 80s you made me almost spill my Monday coffee. What a laugh, do you want the examples on Apple's side?

by pjmlp 7mo ago

Iulioh 7mo ago
The evergreen question of "how do you go back and/or close an app on IOS?"
- bayindirh 7mo ago
  It's still easier than Windows CE though.
- mckn1ght 7mo ago
  Maybe just the circles I run in but these are not evergreen questions in my experience. I don't even know what "go back" is supposed to mean here, or for that matter what it would mean in a Windows application. Is there a system level "go back" in WinAmp/Excel/SimCity/Photoshop I've never seen before?
  - Iulioh 7mo ago
    I was referring to IOS, not MACOS Androids do have universal back button at the bottom on the phone or the same swipe gesture if you want but iphones do not. Sometimes swipe (the direction and position is a guessing game), sometimes and x (right or left ) and the behavior is inconsistent too (back or close) There are some guidelines but more often than not seems like every app has it's own method and you need to get used to it
    - bayindirh 7mo ago
      In iOS, task manager and closure can't be overridden. You swipe right to return to previous application. You can swipe left for a couple of seconds if you didn't intend to do that. You swipe up and remove the application from the stack, all processes of the application is killed. Background processing has strict limits, and you need permissions to run longer than that, and for some use cases, there are no recourse. OS swaps you out or freezes the app. If you want an app to work in the background, don't kill it, period. Push notifications are handled by the OS and is not hindered by this.
      - Iulioh 7mo ago
        What about going "back" INSIDE an application? Think for example reddit, you open a thread, how do you go back? You open the "reply window, now ho you ho back? Maybe close it directly? I Android this is all handled by the same function and is often ranked as the most frustrating design choice in IOS
        bayindirh 7mo ago
        I'm not using Reddit in any capacity since they have started giving their content for LLM training, so I can't help you with that, but looking at 4-5 third party applications right now, they all have a left arrow at top left to go back. They all are very different applications and have very different designs, yet the arrow is there. To be honest, I baffled at your question for a second or so, because I never thought about that, yet the method is so universal that I was not thinking about it at all.
        t-sauer 7mo ago
        There is a common way to go back (swipe from the left edge of the screen). Some apps just don't integrate well and ignore the platform patterns.
        bayindirh 7mo ago
        I believe swiping from left to right is common for both Android and iOS.
        pndy 7mo ago
        Android has both a swipe gesture or a widget that simulates buttons that used to be at the bottom of the screen
        bayindirh 7mo ago
        ...and iOS has both an arrow at the top left and a swipe gesture. I can't see how they are that different.
- teekert 7mo ago
  I feel that some people are just too old to get used to the swipe based ui. I mean friends of mine who just keep buying the only phones with (screen based) back and home buttons.
  - Iulioh 7mo ago
    I'm in that group. It's not "getting used to", I feel like that gesture is less practical. It involves or using the "circle" to assist on how to use the gesture (creating a black void on the screen that you need to plan your use of the phone around) or having the swipe that 1) is not as reliable in my opinion and 2) can be triggered accidentally For me is like claiming that touch screens on cars are the future and people are too old to get used to it.
    - teekert 7mo ago
      Maybe saying "too old" is disrespectful indeed, what I meant was more that my kids grow up with swiping everywhere but we grew up with (hardware, then touchscreen) buttons and the older we get the harder it is to get used to new use paradigms. Swipes are of course nice because they allow for the same interactions without taking any screen real-estate. And I have to say it quite consistent across the iOS apps I use.
  - justsomehnguy 7mo ago
    I feel that some people are just forgetting what the reason it's easy for them is because they learned that "swipe based UI" ages ago. When I get handed iPhone I have no clue on how to even open an additional tab in Safari and any finger gestures do not do the things what I expect nor there is a lick of indication on how to do something. It's all just a memorized magical incantations at this point. But hey you are familiar with them so it's easy to bash on everyone who is not in yours eco-system.
  - alpaca128 7mo ago
    I could get used to touch gestures if they were more consistent and tolerant enough for wrong inputs. It may work in one app but not another. One app expects me to swipe from left to right to go back, another wants me to swipe from top to bottom for the same thing. It may mark an email as unread if I start the swipe a pixel too far away from the screen edge. On Android swipe gestures may vary even on different phones from the same brand. In iOS, tapping the top edge of the screen means scroll to the top. Except in the Photo app, where it means "scroll to the top of the current section, or almost the top, or do nothing and make the user guess if they just tapped the wrong way". Meanwhile when there's an X button or arrow to the left I always know what it's going to do aside from one or two overly creative Android apps.
- cloud-oak 7mo ago
  This one caught me completely off guard when opening YouTube the first time on an iPad: Accidentally clicked on a wrong button and got stuck in a "please subscribe to premium" modal. No amount of swiping or tapping outside the popup would help, only thing left was killing the entire app. This experience put a major dent in my perception of the "Apple has the most intuitive UI" narrative.
  - simonask 7mo ago
    How is bad UX in the YouTube app Apple's fault? You can mess up Android's back button as well.
    - justsomehnguy 7mo ago
      If Ah, yes, problems with the UI on the OS which for 99% consists of modals is not the OS vendor problem, noted.
    - Iulioh 7mo ago
      Because Apple does not enforce uniformity
  - atombender 7mo ago
    The YouTube app has non-standard and nonsensical UX on every platform. It's Google's fault, nothing to do with Apple. Case in point: The YouTube app for Apple TV. Everything (pausing, playing, changing subtitles) has been done opposite to the standard player found in every other app. You cannot use the main button to pause and resume, for example. Recently they broke swiping. Normally, you swipe the remote to navigate between UI elements such as squares in a grid or in lists with a light touch. It's very fluid, like a touch screen. But the YT app has added severe "inertia" to touch gestures, and you now have to "fling" your finger on the remote trackpad to navigate. Everything feels syrupy and stuck. YouTube and Amazon's Prime TV app are the two worst apps I've ever used on Apple TV. I believe they both use some non-native UI toolkit that doesn't respect native OS conventions and doesn't even try to. Pretty incredible given the size and budgets of these companies.
  - 7mo ago
- robertoandred 7mo ago
  You swipe backward. Been that way for twenty years.
steve1977 7mo ago
I mean Cocoa and SwiftUI are more consistent in the sense that a lot of stuff automatically adapts when Apple changes styling. And they certainly have less churn and more focus compared to Microsoft. Basically it's been Objective-C and Cocoa since around 2000, later on Swift and then also SwiftUI. That's not too bad for 25 years. And in contrast to MS, you didn't get abandoned when you were sticking to the official frameworks. Quite contrary, you basically got the switches from PowerPC to x86 to ARM almost for free for example. Apple is not perfect by any means, but in this regard I truly think they are ahead of Microsoft.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  Sure, if we ignore the stuff and bugs they still have, the missing features in SwiftUI and performance regressions, or the iPhonisms brought to macOS with Catalyst. The reboot of frameworks based in OpenGL with the Metal rewrite. And many other things I am not bothering with since all those OS System N releases, A/UX UI framework, Teligent based documents,....
  - noodletheworld 7mo ago
    Come on, you think SwiftUI has more bugs than the ten different Microsoft frameworks? There are just more people encountering them because the developers are concentrated on using one thing. It’s not perfect, but a compared to Microsoft, calling Apple out for having bugs is a little rich isn't it? I pose to you, if the Microsoft offerings are so compelling, why are the serious players using 3rd party wrappers like QT and Avalonia? It’s because the first party offerings are not compelling. They’re a disaster dumpster fire. And buggy.
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      If Apple products are so compelling why are so many devs using Electron, React Native and Flutter on macOS, to the point it deserved being mentioned at WWDC 2025 State of the Nation Keynote? My point was don't throw stones when having a big glass roof as well. Apple isn't the perfection you make out to be, also has a rich history of failures, and only did not went bankrupt due to sheer luck of doing the right decision when there were not many remaining to take.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

Being a 70's child, in computing since the mid 80s you made me almost spill my Monday coffee. What a laugh, do you want the examples on Apple's side?

by pjmlp 7mo ago

Being a 70's child, in computing since the mid 80s you made me almost spill my Monday coffee. What a laugh, do you want the examples on Apple's side?

Iulioh 7mo ago

The evergreen question of "how do you go back and/or close an app on IOS?"

bayindirh 7mo ago
It's still easier than Windows CE though.
mckn1ght 7mo ago
Maybe just the circles I run in but these are not evergreen questions in my experience. I don't even know what "go back" is supposed to mean here, or for that matter what it would mean in a Windows application. Is there a system level "go back" in WinAmp/Excel/SimCity/Photoshop I've never seen before?
- Iulioh 7mo ago
  I was referring to IOS, not MACOS Androids do have universal back button at the bottom on the phone or the same swipe gesture if you want but iphones do not. Sometimes swipe (the direction and position is a guessing game), sometimes and x (right or left ) and the behavior is inconsistent too (back or close) There are some guidelines but more often than not seems like every app has it's own method and you need to get used to it
  - bayindirh 7mo ago
    In iOS, task manager and closure can't be overridden. You swipe right to return to previous application. You can swipe left for a couple of seconds if you didn't intend to do that. You swipe up and remove the application from the stack, all processes of the application is killed. Background processing has strict limits, and you need permissions to run longer than that, and for some use cases, there are no recourse. OS swaps you out or freezes the app. If you want an app to work in the background, don't kill it, period. Push notifications are handled by the OS and is not hindered by this.
    - Iulioh 7mo ago
      What about going "back" INSIDE an application? Think for example reddit, you open a thread, how do you go back? You open the "reply window, now ho you ho back? Maybe close it directly? I Android this is all handled by the same function and is often ranked as the most frustrating design choice in IOS
      - bayindirh 7mo ago
        I'm not using Reddit in any capacity since they have started giving their content for LLM training, so I can't help you with that, but looking at 4-5 third party applications right now, they all have a left arrow at top left to go back. They all are very different applications and have very different designs, yet the arrow is there. To be honest, I baffled at your question for a second or so, because I never thought about that, yet the method is so universal that I was not thinking about it at all.
      - t-sauer 7mo ago
        There is a common way to go back (swipe from the left edge of the screen). Some apps just don't integrate well and ignore the platform patterns.
        bayindirh 7mo ago
        I believe swiping from left to right is common for both Android and iOS.
        pndy 7mo ago
        Android has both a swipe gesture or a widget that simulates buttons that used to be at the bottom of the screen
        bayindirh 7mo ago
        ...and iOS has both an arrow at the top left and a swipe gesture. I can't see how they are that different.
teekert 7mo ago
I feel that some people are just too old to get used to the swipe based ui. I mean friends of mine who just keep buying the only phones with (screen based) back and home buttons.
- Iulioh 7mo ago
  I'm in that group. It's not "getting used to", I feel like that gesture is less practical. It involves or using the "circle" to assist on how to use the gesture (creating a black void on the screen that you need to plan your use of the phone around) or having the swipe that 1) is not as reliable in my opinion and 2) can be triggered accidentally For me is like claiming that touch screens on cars are the future and people are too old to get used to it.
  - teekert 7mo ago
    Maybe saying "too old" is disrespectful indeed, what I meant was more that my kids grow up with swiping everywhere but we grew up with (hardware, then touchscreen) buttons and the older we get the harder it is to get used to new use paradigms. Swipes are of course nice because they allow for the same interactions without taking any screen real-estate. And I have to say it quite consistent across the iOS apps I use.
- justsomehnguy 7mo ago
  I feel that some people are just forgetting what the reason it's easy for them is because they learned that "swipe based UI" ages ago. When I get handed iPhone I have no clue on how to even open an additional tab in Safari and any finger gestures do not do the things what I expect nor there is a lick of indication on how to do something. It's all just a memorized magical incantations at this point. But hey you are familiar with them so it's easy to bash on everyone who is not in yours eco-system.
- alpaca128 7mo ago
  I could get used to touch gestures if they were more consistent and tolerant enough for wrong inputs. It may work in one app but not another. One app expects me to swipe from left to right to go back, another wants me to swipe from top to bottom for the same thing. It may mark an email as unread if I start the swipe a pixel too far away from the screen edge. On Android swipe gestures may vary even on different phones from the same brand. In iOS, tapping the top edge of the screen means scroll to the top. Except in the Photo app, where it means "scroll to the top of the current section, or almost the top, or do nothing and make the user guess if they just tapped the wrong way". Meanwhile when there's an X button or arrow to the left I always know what it's going to do aside from one or two overly creative Android apps.
cloud-oak 7mo ago
This one caught me completely off guard when opening YouTube the first time on an iPad: Accidentally clicked on a wrong button and got stuck in a "please subscribe to premium" modal. No amount of swiping or tapping outside the popup would help, only thing left was killing the entire app. This experience put a major dent in my perception of the "Apple has the most intuitive UI" narrative.
- simonask 7mo ago
  How is bad UX in the YouTube app Apple's fault? You can mess up Android's back button as well.
  - justsomehnguy 7mo ago
    If Ah, yes, problems with the UI on the OS which for 99% consists of modals is not the OS vendor problem, noted.
  - Iulioh 7mo ago
    Because Apple does not enforce uniformity
- atombender 7mo ago
  The YouTube app has non-standard and nonsensical UX on every platform. It's Google's fault, nothing to do with Apple. Case in point: The YouTube app for Apple TV. Everything (pausing, playing, changing subtitles) has been done opposite to the standard player found in every other app. You cannot use the main button to pause and resume, for example. Recently they broke swiping. Normally, you swipe the remote to navigate between UI elements such as squares in a grid or in lists with a light touch. It's very fluid, like a touch screen. But the YT app has added severe "inertia" to touch gestures, and you now have to "fling" your finger on the remote trackpad to navigate. Everything feels syrupy and stuck. YouTube and Amazon's Prime TV app are the two worst apps I've ever used on Apple TV. I believe they both use some non-native UI toolkit that doesn't respect native OS conventions and doesn't even try to. Pretty incredible given the size and budgets of these companies.
- 7mo ago
robertoandred 7mo ago
You swipe backward. Been that way for twenty years.

steve1977 7mo ago

I mean Cocoa and SwiftUI are more consistent in the sense that a lot of stuff automatically adapts when Apple changes styling. And they certainly have less churn and more focus compared to Microsoft. Basically it's been Objective-C and Cocoa since around 2000, later on Swift and then also SwiftUI. That's not too bad for 25 years. And in contrast to MS, you didn't get abandoned when you were sticking to the official frameworks. Quite contrary, you basically got the switches from PowerPC to x86 to ARM almost for free for example. Apple is not perfect by any means, but in this regard I truly think they are ahead of Microsoft.

pjmlp 7mo ago
Sure, if we ignore the stuff and bugs they still have, the missing features in SwiftUI and performance regressions, or the iPhonisms brought to macOS with Catalyst. The reboot of frameworks based in OpenGL with the Metal rewrite. And many other things I am not bothering with since all those OS System N releases, A/UX UI framework, Teligent based documents,....
- noodletheworld 7mo ago
  Come on, you think SwiftUI has more bugs than the ten different Microsoft frameworks? There are just more people encountering them because the developers are concentrated on using one thing. It’s not perfect, but a compared to Microsoft, calling Apple out for having bugs is a little rich isn't it? I pose to you, if the Microsoft offerings are so compelling, why are the serious players using 3rd party wrappers like QT and Avalonia? It’s because the first party offerings are not compelling. They’re a disaster dumpster fire. And buggy.
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    If Apple products are so compelling why are so many devs using Electron, React Native and Flutter on macOS, to the point it deserved being mentioned at WWDC 2025 State of the Nation Keynote? My point was don't throw stones when having a big glass roof as well. Apple isn't the perfection you make out to be, also has a rich history of failures, and only did not went bankrupt due to sheer luck of doing the right decision when there were not many remaining to take.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]