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.

Their software quality really went downhill in recent years, really hope whoever comes in after Cook treats it as priority

And to be clear 'do anything to fix them yourself' is as simple as install a third-party keyboard from the official Play Store, if you had such an issue as this with the default 'GBoard'.

Long-time iOS user here. My motivation for iPhone has always been "you pay more for fewer features and customization, but the UX is more polished." For the past 5-ish years, the UX has consistently gotten considerably worse. Not just the usual things like the horrible keyboard and atrocious Siri capabilities, it's all the stuff that used to just work. Nothing deal-breaking by itself, but all together feels like death by a thousand cuts. I'm at the point where I'm seriously considering Android.

Anecdote but I've never had issues with the keyboard, or with Siri mishearing me (just to touch on another common pain point that people talk about re: Apple tech). I've always interpreted stories like this as the people who are most affected by it being vocal and speaking out (as they should), while the majority who aren't just have nothing to say because it all works fine.

> Worse, it seems that proprietary means you can't do anything to fix them yourself.

We can install third-party keyboards on iOS, so I'm not sure why that's not being considered here.

I am an android and windows user but i have an ipad and i listen to an apple-centric podcast and I'm amazed at the things that don't work. I've been using swiftkey on android since before MS bought it so I kept using it on ipad. The ipad reverts to the apple keyboard all the time.

On macos there was a post a day or two ago about window arrangement which seems very inferior to windows. I was in the mac lab at school and was surprised that there's no multi item clipboard built in. The answer seems to be use a 3rd party app for these but it seems odd that such basic things aren't built in.

More like, "everything is proprietary, so you get locked in".

I also had that idea before I tried to use Apple products to help friends... I really was amazed at the hoops you had to jump through for things which should have been really simple. That was a long time ago.

Apple’s implementation of desktops/workspaces is maddening.

In the US Apple is the

"Use it or your social group will not want to interact with you"

option.

Outside of tech circles (where apparently people easily get their entire family and friend network on signal), people want to use imessage and only want to use imessage. Android phones can't support imessage because they are poor low quality phones that cannot handle imessage. So you need a high quality phone like iphone so you can use imessage and easily communicate with your friends and family.

This strategy of leveraging friends and family to pressure people into getting iPhones was intentional and came out in the Epic trial lawsuit.

I shit you not there is a large percentage of people in the US that think Android phones are not capable of sending pcitures and videos.