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.
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.
I've used small-form factor DOS luggable-bricks, miniature Windows7 7" diagonal laptops (Fuji B112, B2131) obsessively since the epoch, also exotics like Fakespace NDOF dataGloves, yada~ and my usual combination of trackball magicMouse and 3D connextion SpaceNavigator on my desktops. Now I've got an Android tablet and an iPhone which are decidedly not 50 years better.
Neglecting the exotics, UX experience in DOS sometimes was better than, e.g. explicitly touching (yes DOS could do that) somewhere in the middle of a paragraph only to have the cursor leap to the beginning, end, select the entire paragraph (iOS18 or so..) or invoke some unintended 'gesture', and then require twenty more touches of adjustments to getthe selection right.
Using external near-fullsize BT keyboards which actually make typing tolerable on my iPh and DroidTab, I'm constantly taken 'aback' (to memories of the past) by having to remove a finger from the keyboard to the screen to accomplish some cursor positioning that might just as well be done with less trouble with a keyboard touchpad or mouse. I do use a tiny tactile feedback BT keyboard with it's own tiny thumb-trackPad which works nominally better than on-screen keybooards when I'm crunched for space and can't use near fullsize kbs.
Oh.. there's speech-to-text these days. Something about my present set of afflictions is holding me back from venturing forth into that void.
Auto-spell correct, anything that interrupts the cadence of typing, because waiting for CPU cycles or accomodating network delays - none of those 'helpful' things 'intruded' into UXs historically. These Gaffes could be easily wiped away by local high-priority code executing on handhelds which actually pays attention to the people trying to use devices these days, andm actually, timely respons to that.
One can see this pathologically simply by repurposing some old, deprecated thing like a Nexus4 phone not as a thermostat but as a Web client for music steaming. The Nex4 actually has a 1/8" mini audio-out jack!! Web pages are so hopelessly loaded down these days the Nex4 struggles, rendering them only slowly. Button presses may go completely unacknowledged for seconds until the button glyph actually changes. Almost like delays in auto-correct!!
In an epoch of no tactile feedback on glass (maybe audio clicks..) Devs, frameworks, dn toolkits largely ignore all except 'the most recent browser' on 'the latest hardware' case, doing nothing and likely relying entirely on someone/thing esle (is there an acronym ofr this, like DNRY? It's someone ele's problem? >>ISEP<< to acomplish 'low level' requisite confirmations real humans depend on and use to see they've done something that affects the UI, and can continue on, e.g. type-ahead as was the case as of old. Gesture forward!, perhaps.. the UI will catch up.
MacOS (as of Monterey, haven't gotten fa/urther) yet - has that 'application' (read: not _user_, nor _context_, nor _task_ centered behavior, _by design_. all AAPL genius, I'm sure. Yes I really want to see *all* my textEdit windows in Spaces. That makes a lot of sense when I have half dozen different unrelated tasks going on and need only another textedit window. Sure, hide *ALL* an applications windows when I hide only a single one. Like I don't exist and it won't take me half hour to find the one I need again. Forget that in X-Windows omg that's _dead_, Jim!! one could push a single window to the bottom of the window stack to get it out of the way and not have to minimize it to go search for it later in a micro-dock stripe with only enough room for half-dozen minimized (oh and fully descriptive) window icons beside all those appicons.
The iPh sub-oops automagic rearrangements of screenfulls of colorful bouncing icons is particulay visceral insanity, All rearranging unpredictably when one is stuck amongst others, like some kind of entertaining visualization of a cocktail party. Android tries to rise to this level with some obscure thing in settings which completely obliterates perhaps tens of minutes of careful arrangement of multiple screenfulls of icons- all gone! with what of course what is de-regeur in mobile smart-space now, no hint of 'back' or 'undo', anywhere.
If you want a summary, put an iPh1 next to a Droid, neglect the fact they absolutely will not talk to one another without multiple intervening clouds and laborious and error-prone interactive shovelling of 'takeouts' and exports of data involving visting dozens of WebPges, and likely only though some full sized PC/Mac intermediary, and simply contemplate how wildly baroquely different they are.
Before I actually got one, I literally was incapable of using an iPh1, despite years of experience with Android and dozens and dozens of prior systems. I could say I'm yet pretty incapable now, a year on. a dozen years of OSX time doesn't help either. So many colorful icons I _NEVER_ use, filling my tiny little screen, glaring at me like they are hoping to induce a seizure.
Most glaring - what is abjectly absent with both Android and iOS. 'Messages' well there are different Icons, who wrote the App? Is that Meta's, or Apple's, or Google's, or someone else's messages? Oh my phone buzzed; some notification appears then disappears, irretrievably. Does one have to go the the AppStore, Play, or 'settings' to find out these things in the middle of trying to figure which app to use to reach someone??
No 'info' hover-over (no hover over ever, I guess for touch, yet an uninvented 'gesture') Obscure and infuriating and undocumented (guess one has to buy the book, or read the mags, and fawn for a while) things like the phone UI changing such that the button to hang up a call, even the entire phone UI disappeared over on some other appView perhaps.. That one might search and find three identical names in contacts, none which can be edited with all the data of all the others still visible. None which can usuall be edited _AT ALL_ unless one is deep within the bowels of 'Contacts'. A name but no a phone number displayed. Which of that persons phones am I calling?
DNRY - a mantra of devs, seriously the bane of UX. forced modeful dives into app ratholes when something is right in front of you and you don't have ten minutes to go into its' 'responsible' app to fix it. And Certaianly *NO WAY* can you edit it right then and there. No one ever would think some magic invocation might be possible to enable doing literally anything which is possible to to with something that's right in front of you, displayed on your device. Sort of the non-authentication triple-A: anywhere, anytmie, anyplace.
I've used some remarkably baroque UIs - seems every single CAD package of any sort has it's own. Some like Blender resembling the empty bridge of the NC1701 Enterprise void of helpful crewmembers. Want to know hoa to use something? Nothings' 'idempotent' anymore - gotta go Google it.
No drag-and-drop, have to thumbsType everything character by character. Copy/cut/Paste selections when not impossible, barely controllable. Time is displayed but not the date. <eyes wander, sees clock at top of screen>
Gotta go.
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.
As for powering off, you can tap the ⏻ symbol in the upper right-hand side corner of the control center.
International travellers will know that some apps will alter behavior or refuse to work based on your location, if it's provided. If I use a VPN, I want the app or website to use only the IP location*, not the radio location.
I too keep GPS off unless I am navigating.
Please correct me if I'm wrong - it is after all just a feeling.
The problem is that software design as a discipline has changed fundamentally in terms of core values. “Old school” designers had a bit more of a human factors training and would think about things like discoverability, information hierarchy, error recovery, etc. And the software from that era tended to be stable for many years in terms of design, in no small part because it shipped in boxes.
Current day designers work almost exclusively from a visual bling/marketing angle - what’s going to look good in a 5 second sizzle reel? And because software can be updated 5 times a day if you want, design is much more subject to the whims of a random exec/PM wanting to push their feature/whatever AB test is popular that week rather than stable, proven foundations.
The web, rather than desktop, being the primarily delivery vehicle for software also changes what kind of design gets built.
And with more and more software being AI designed in the years to come, this won’t get much better I’m afraid.
I'm not saying it's dead, not by far, but it has become stale. The biggest innovation it has made in 10+ years was using their mobile processors in laptops.
Someone who deeply understands how to qualify the product.
But with enough political sway to tell entire orgs of 1000s employees to shred their timelines and planning docs and go back to the lab until it’s right.
Without those two pieces, the problem is that individual devs and leaders know that there’s a problem. But the KPIs and timelines must lurch onwards!
They should stick to Claude Code, like everyone else.
They have been last to get Widgets. They don't have apps I use (terminals, emulators, pulse wave generators). Not to mention Gemini AI is actually really nice for scanning a screen and doing actions with it.
Apple is always 2nd place or worse. Except marketing, they are #1.
I had to downgrade to Mojave so the wheels likely came off internally around then.
Even siri got worse, when I say call <nickname of my gitfriend> now it does some location based search, and calls sonebody, when near home it is a doctor, when on the other side of the river it is a flower shop, at othe rplaces other random non-contacts, with a contact having the sting it used for search, as her nickname is always part of the called person… It used to work flawlessly as expected…
I would be fine with Siri actually if if could handle simple fixed phrase based task, no AI, as it could a few years ago.
I’m lonely and really want a gitfriend to push and merge with! Please tell the story of how you got one!
/s for the /s impaired
Apple has shifted from working to produce quality to working to maximize profit ... when it comes to software.
The only thing that would change this would be a new CEO or Apple hemorrhaging money with more people buy alternative solutions.
To be fair ... Microsoft is in the same down hill spiral in quality and the IT industry staying with them allows form the to do this.
This is a way that Tim has been failing Apple and its customers. The quality just isn't there any more. "It [doesnt] just work". And the UX is increasingly terrible.
I have also been considering switching to Android. The Apple tax is decreasingly worth it when it don't buy quality.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1l2gg3r/thirdparty_ios...
tl;dr: gatekeeping by Apple. Yes, it would probably be embarassing to Apple if someone built a way better touch keyboard.
This way you have to keep the default one anyway and make even more typos when yet another app forces you to get back to Apple’s keyboard.
I can’t even search stuff in my local delivery with SwiftKey
> 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.
This is a bad way to go through life with this reasoning. It is pretty well understood that in normal situations the vast majority of people are not vocal even if they feel the same way about things the vocal people are saying. As an example I use a lot, congress critters use a formula to get the pulse of the constituents. If they receive a hand written letter (yes, I learned about the formula when people did that), they'd multiply that by some factor knowing that if one person felt strongly enough to send in a letter that others also felt that way. Phone calls were the same, but with a smaller multiplier as it was easier to make a call that write a letter followed by emails with yet a smaller mult. This was all well before social media, but I'd imagine searching tweets would give a pretty good indicator as well now. A single tweet would be worth something, but tweets with lots of retweets and heavy comment activity would be something else. Even if a tweet is something done pretty much on a whim with little thought behind it like that letter.
The silent majority is called that for a reason. It doesn't mean they are happy or content. Ignore that reality at your own peril.
This is an extremely popular bit of apocrypha that's repeated ad nauseam across reddit. It's more like a political truism than an observation on the behaviors of the silent majority re: Apple users.
> The silent majority is called that for a reason. It doesn't mean they are happy or content. Ignore that reality at your own peril.
It doesn't mean they're discontent either.
Sidenote: please Apple, if I type the same misspelled (but not) thing two times in a row, just leave it be. And no, I did not mean "what the he'll". And why is selecting text so hard.
…or with Siri mishearing…
I just want a small set of commands that are easy to differentiate from each other, and a readback before executing the command. This is what phones did back in the days of Symbian, and I could reliably use one from a motorcycle helmet intercom without ever touching my phone. It's what air traffic controllers do, because even people can't reliably understand each other.
We've had decades of Apple and Google pretending that their voice recognition is so flawless it can understand anything and execute it immediately, but for petty much everyone except yourself they can't, so I can no longer use a hands-free phone. I'm glad I'm not blind.
I think I'm just #blessed with the specific American accent (or "no accent") they must have trained it on lol. On the other hand, Siri frequently mishears my wife who's from California but doesn't have what I would call an accent any different from mine, so who knows.
So consider the possibility that many people are affected but haven't reached the threshold of writing something about it.
Dear Tim Apple, I meant exactly what I typed please stop changing it because your product manager doesn't think I know English.
'therefore, the majority of people probably agree with me'.
Lots of people say they love in India, and that is not true for new. That doesn't make the likeliest fact that a majority of the world lives in the UK and, while India is an oddly vocal 'minority'.
If you want to edit it, you have to open the notes app, paste it, edit it and paste it back into the caller.
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.
"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.
Android phones can't use iMessage because Apple never opened it up, contrary to what Steve Jobs was hinting at back when it was released.
Nowadays I believe you can get a blue bubble when chatting from an Android with an iPhone user by using RCS / JOYN.
Maybe your "social group". If your friends refuse to talk to you because of the cell phone brand you use, I have bad news for you: They might not really be great friends.
If you're not an American younger than 35, this is probably something you don't understand because you didn't experience first-hand.
It's not a scenario where "your friends refuse to talk to you", it's "there are so many people to talk to, and there is a lot of friction around talking to this one person". You don't get the chance to become their friends in the first place.
If you can't get on iMessage, you can't be in iMessage group chats.
Similarly, if you don't have a cell phone, you can't text. If you don't have a landline, people can't call you. If you don't have the internet, you can't get on chatrooms. You wouldn't expect a teenager in the 90s to give up a landline in favor of living exclusively by handwritten letter.
You are missing the /s right?
The hard to tell part is I'm also crossing carriers to message them, so that might have been the issue as well.
I see this in middle and lower-middle class people.
But in the upper-middle class, this is a non issue. We know how Apple manipulates people who struggle to spend $50/mo on a phone.
Source? Would love to read this one lol