alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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I recently switched the other direction and one rough edge I was surprised to hit on Android is the state of copy and paste for images; on iOS I would copy from Google photos and paste in WhatsApp, now that's just gone and the only option is either Google photos share-to or WhatsApp insert-from. There seems to be pseudo image clipboard support but it's mostly limited to pasting between Chrome tabs afaict.
My switching was due to a build up of minor frictions and frustrations with feeling like a second class citizen on iOS because I use largely gsuite apps rather than being bought into the Apple way for everything, with the last straw being the limitations on Pebble functionality.
It's even deeper than that. You know the fancy side button that is designed to be used as a camera shortcut? You don't need that shortcut? Guess that button is unusable for you, because you won't be able to assign it to anything else.
Meanwhile the lock button long-press was hijacked for Siri, so now you have to click it five times if you want to turn off the phone.
And don't get me started on the useless back tap, which now displays a popup randomly, trying to seduce you into using it instead of a physical button, but the detection is so flaky I doubt anyone actually uses it.
I’m curious and suffering from a failure of imagination—why toggle location services regularly?
Some of these are design decisions, not rough edges. There’s pros and cons. Eg, centralising settings makes it simpler min some ways and more convoluted in others.
That being said clipboard history would be a nice addition. However I never want to see how long until my morning alarm, that’s one thing from android I don’t miss, it would give me immediate anxiety.
Regardless when you’re used to something it often doesn’t feel like “putting up with it”, and when you’re not used to something things that are totally fine can feel like you’re putting up with an annoyance. This works both ways.
Take any iphone user and put an android phone in their hands and within the first two months there will be a lot of things they’ll say “how do android users put up with this stuff” about too.
It’s fine. They’re both fine, it’s about what you’re used to more than anything.