It's a shame they discovered iOS's UX when it's in my opinion at an all times low. I wonder how their experience would've been with the UX of iOS 6 or 7, before it all went downhill.
Some things are arguably better[1]. If you have an iPhone without a home button you can swipe left on the bottom of the screen to switch between your apps (or back right if you passed it) without having to open the app deck (not sure what the name is, previously you would double tap the home button).
[1] Yes, this is my opinion and not everyone might agree with me.
On the phones that have a home button and 3d touch, you can switch to the previous app or bring up the app switcher with a force touch swipe from the left edge, fyi.
As complexity increases (it does more than every now), it's a lot less intuitive than it was many versions ago. It used to be that we'd all be amazed that we could hand an iphone to a 70 year old new user and watch them be productive quickly. Now iOS has so many arcane corners in both the configuration and usability that the learning curve of use is much higher. Still love it and it's just a fact of life that, like Python, as it gains capability it becomes less simple.
It took a sharp dip in iOS 7 when Jony Ive took over for Scott Forstall, but it's more than recovered. The gesture navigation on home-buttonless iPhones is a revelation, and makes the original, button-based system look clumsy in comparison (it's no surprise Google more or less copied it wholesale in Android 9). And it's almost physically painful to go back to a phone without the universal back gesture, despite it never having existed in early versions of iOS.
What's going on with the file system though? If you work like to work with files (opposed to having everything isolated in apps expect for the share functionality) you'll be lost. It's as if most apps are sandboxed in to their own folder or something.
I dislike the way it discourages data portability.
e.g.
* I want to be able to have syncthing pull down my keepass database and have keepass2android open the current version in launch without having to navigate a file picker every time.
* I want to use my browser to download rpg rulebooks from drivethrurpg then open them in my PDF viewer without either of those two having to specifically integrate with each other. It would then be nice if that pdf reader could display a list of recent files on launch rather than reopen a picker.
They're mostly my gripes with Android 10's lockdown but iOS doesn't even want the filesystem exposed. I won't deny there's security advantages to this model, but it should have an out as it just encourages your app to own your data and only use it in ways they foresaw rather than giving control to users.
I like that each app has its own filesystem, but i do wish i could 'get at' anything from the Files app. I want to plug in my iPhone and see the filesystem for the Files app. I want to be able to "share" any file from any app into Files. This would either be "Save to Files" or simply exposing it to files.
I wish Apple made this easy, and just stopped doing whatever they're doing with iTunes. I hate needing it to upload photos.
Unless I'm missing something obvious, all of the functionality you described is totally doable in iOS today using shared Documents folders. None of the apps need to know about each other for it to work.
I use a password manager app on IOS and MacOS. It stores the pw file in a Dropbox folder and is synced between the devices. If never had to manually open files or copy file between them. I might be able to use iClouds shared files, too, but I started using Dropbox for the syncing years ago and am not ready to switch that,yet.
My solution to this has been to simply not use my phone for anything reasonable. I browse the internet, play games, capture media that get sync’d to dropbox, and I use VPN/VNC + ssh to do work on other machines. iPhone has potential to be more, but it isn’t. By Apple’s design, the most powerful thing it can do is be an access point to more capable machines.
Everything is going great, actually. Apps are able to expose exactly the files and folders they want to. Those don’t even have to be real files, they can be downloaded as needed.
The point that resonates most with me is the smoothness and how pervasive this is in all the top ios apps.
As a developer, I know where this is built-in (many gestures and navigation components) and where other developers have spent extra time and attention on the details.
Jumping back and forth between xcode and android studio - it is SO SO SO much more enjoyable to develop iOS apps than Android apps. I cannot stand the emulators and the whole android development experience. If anyone out there disagrees and can point to resources to improve Android studio and emulator setup I would love a link.
At some point Microsoft had an Android emulator for Windows based on AOSP which was way faster and nicer than the SDK one. I suppose it still exists but don’t know how up to date the available images are.
Google maps pans so much smoother on my iPhone SE than on a lot of the flagship Android phones from the past few years.
I think most recently I compared it with a pixel 2. It was dropping so many frames compared to the iOS version which is really pathetic for a google app running on a google os running on a google phone.
Weird, on my SE Google maps pans like crap, at least compared to Apple Maps (not that this contradicts your comparison). Google maps is hitting, I’d guess, 10FPS, whereas Apple Maps is getting something high enough to be indistinguishable from 60FPS (to me). I wonder why Google maps has such bad pan performance.
Yeah apple maps still pans better. I tried again and google maps has some jank and goes down to around 30-45 fps. Still better when I compared to an android phone running the same thing.
when I finally realized that I could just mount my phone on my desk like I do in my car my quality of life as an iOS dev changed completely. just having it there next to my magic trackpad is soo much smoother than trying to work the simulator.
Yeah, I do Android dev like 25% of my time and I don't use the emulator. The downside is my desk is cluttered with Android devices for testing.
Now IntelliJ... well, I think they only develop on NVMe SSDs. Android Studio works fine on my mbpro with the insanely fast proprietary SSD, but on my desktop with a SATA SSD the code completion takes ages to show up. Usually after I'm done typing whatever I needed completed.
Never got around to learning iOS development so I can't talk about their tools. In spite of my personal phone being iOS :)
I've been an Android user and developer for 10 years. THIS is the thing. Smoothness. Android claims it's equal between an iPhone and a flagship Android device but it's not even close.
It seems Android just is not willing/able to admit this is a huge gap and address it.
While I agree with your premise I think Google does want to address it. As early as 2012 there were efforts like Project Butter[0]. Whether or not these efforts are continued, is another question.
I remember how bad this was in the early days. The first time I started working on an Android app after a half a year of iOS development, it almost seemed like a joke. If I'm not mistaken back then GC pauses were even a big factor in UI performance, which led to unpredictable hitches in responsiveness.
I agree it's something Android should prioritize, but it also shouldn't be understated how big of a task this will be. Apple has invested a huge amount in this specific competency since the advent of OSX (and just look at the difference between mac os 10.0 and comparable versions of windows in terms of UI smoothness).
Ask a game developer: making computer graphics workloads perform predictably is a very difficult task which requires art as well as science. Building a UI stack which enables that, as well as having a nice front-end to work with for developers, and integrating well with arbitrary application logic is more than just optimizing some systems here and there.
It would also help if many made proper use of UI render threads as well, which I admit following best practices on Android is a task on itself given how often they change.
The developing experience I don't agree with. I find Android Studio (being essentially IntelliJ) so much better than xcode. I only use the built in emulator for smaller projects but what do you dislike about it?
The things I miss in xcode are mainly command clicking everywhere to easily find call sites and follow application logic. xcode also feels less snappy. When I used it last you could not refactor swift code but I think that's been added now?
Compared to iOS Simulator, the android emulator is very slow and clunky. But on the other hand, unlike iOS Simulator, android emulator fully emulates a real phone with real hardware (camera, mic, etc), while iOS Simulator only simulates basic functionality and doesn't simulate many hardware api like camera access.
The idea was that simulator was for fast-as-possible turnaround for most stuff, but you’d just use a real device wherever specific hardware behaviours are being developed.
I get the appeal of a more “complete” emulator, but such things are never perfect anyway—best to not even pretend that they are.
You can get a lot of that smoothness by going to developer settings (on your Android phone) and setting animation speed to 0.75x or even 0.5x; When I still used Android that was the first thing I did and it instantly made Android feel much smoother.
I find Android Studio and the emulator the possibly only good things about Android development. My setup is simple, Linux, Ryzen 3600, 970evo SSD and 32 gigs of RAM. Not sure if the Linux part is relevant, but RAM definitely is; the experience on an 8 gig XPS13 is sluggish as hell.
The default emulator performance is bad compared to iOS simulator, but fortunately there are plenty 3rd party emulators that can be used for android development (e.g. Nox, GenyMotion, BlueStack, Visual Studio Emulator), though recent version of official android emulator is supposed to be as fast as those 3rd party emulator. Maybe try to lower the emulator's resolution to speed it up.
Interesting to hear, I've only recently tried out Android Development and the Emulator that comes with Android Studio worked like a charm at full speeds
To me, nothing on Android seems to work on full speed, ever and I am seriously wondering if I have developed some strange and unreasonable cognitive bias (which would be scary).
You can go into a store 1 day after <XYZ> flagship release, try the hardware and have it stutter through menus like a Walmart PC trying to run Crysis 10 years ago.
Huawei phones seem to be the only ones getting Android to feel somewhat smooth, much better than "vanilla". Not going to buy Chinese telco phones though.
I like Android for some things but performance and feel isnt one of them.
HTC U11 had the smoothest Android experience I've ever encountered. I "upgraded" to a Pixel 3XL, and it has been worse. (I've also had the HTC One and Nexus 6P)
I just bought an iPad (regular, not pro) because I wanted a tablet and got tired of waiting for a good Android one.
It's been infuriating to see just how smooth everything is on iOS compared to Android.
Honestly, this alone is probably why laypeople prefer iPhones. They're not more intuitive anymore, they're not simpler or easier than Android. The Android back button is a game changer, and multi-tasking is better designed.
iOS provides a simulator for development while Android SDK provides an emulator. Because of the added overhead of virtualization, an emulator is always going to be slower than a simulator.
Take care if you use a 3rd party build service, like with phonegap (may it die in a fire). The arm packages you get from that won't work in the iOS simulator, which needs a special x86 build.
The end-user experience is definitely better on iOS. Gestures are ideally suited for navigating a touch device, especially as phone sizes continue to grow. It's a shame that Android cannot implement swipe-to-go-back because it conflicts with the navigation drawer UI.
But the development experience is not as impressive for Xcode. It is far slower than Android.
Deploying an app to the Play Store is ridiculously fast and frictionless while deploying to the App Store feels like installing Windows XP
Fortunately, we automate all our deployments to the app store and playstore with fastlane.
Reading through this thread it sounds like there are probably some config options to improve the emulator, but I cannot find a way to speed up studio vs xcode.
It takes < 3 seconds to launch xcode and open a source file. Studio takes 15 seconds to open and even then it takes another 5-10 seconds before the UI actually unlocks.
iOS is smooth but not as smooth as I would like. The input-to-render latency matters a lot when dragging things and you can really feel it even though you probably wouldn’t notice the difference between 50 and 10ms of latency for something like a key press. See this video demonstrating what 1ms of latency looks like (and where they optimistically aim to have it in 10 years by 2022):
This isn't just an Apple thing as this isn't the most ridiculous sounding patent (it is ridiculous) that has been posted here. There are so many patents that take an existing concept but add the phrase "on a computer" or "digitally" or some such. Is it an example of one company being an asshole or yet another example of how the patent system is patently broken?
With company-being-an-asshole complaints, there's also game theory issues to keep in mind: because obviously stupid and invalid patents get approved all the time, not patenting something could mean being issued with patent troll lawsuits from a different company that does.
That doesn't necessarily excuse it, but there's definitely more of a motivation than 'because we can' behind what these big companies do, especially considering that most of these patents never get used for anything inherently money-making and so are just cash tossed down the drain in filing fees and time spent.
> There are so many patents that take an existing concept but add the phrase "on a computer" or "digitally" or some such
Please show us just one example of this.
Because it's a myth that gets perpetuated that this is how patents work. You patent a specific implementation of a concept not the concept itself. If you implement a concept in a different way it won't infringe the patent.
How about the patents at issue in Alice v. CLS Bank? Or any of the “hundreds” of patents, according to Wikipedia, that have been found invalid by lower courts in decisions citing Alice.
I don’t like when patents get used by big companies against small ones, but I also don’t see why a company of Google’s size should be able to just freeload on Apple’s meticulously designed interactions (that the author praises effusively) instead of designing their own.
Apple got their start by copying Xerox, so it's only fair that other people should be able to copy Apple without repercussions. Besides, most of the most memorable gestures and interactions of iOS were under the direction of people who were fired after Jobs died.
Every other history piece I've read said Xerox got a good chunk of Apple shares in exchange for them using their research. Perhaps they decided it isn't enough when they saw Apple was successful and sued for more money?
Apple didn't get their start by copying Xerox. They got their start by building and selling the Apple 1/2/3/Lisa. Xerox only came into the picture during the development of the Mac. And there is this myth that Xerox invented all of the GUI metaphors we know today. But actually about half came from Apple e.g drag & drop file manipulation, multiple file system views, drop down menus, clipboard.
Also only one person was fired from Apple and that was Scott Forstall. After whom quite a number of memorable iOS gestures were invented i.e. when the click button disappeared.
Because it's not actually in the interests of users/consumers (woohoo! over here! remember us?) for everyone to have to "design their own" interaction model.
Well if you believe in the “promote the useful arts” logic (I do, to an extent) then having exclusive rights to things like “butter” smooth animations makes companies like Apple more willing to invest in them, which is in the consumer’s interest.
Companies aren't people, and people will always be more important than an abstraction. So let's reduce the abstraction here a bit.
80,000 Apple employees.
~330,171,224 residents of the United States of America.
330,171,224
- 80,000
------------
330,091,224
Would you say that 330,091,224 is more than 80,000?
I would.
And really, optimizing for the rights of the consumer helps everyone, including all Apple employees. And this helps the producer, too, because it allows them to ignore software patents as well.
Software patents weren't for the good of anyone but executives and legislators when legislators first forced them on everyone against the protests of software devs everywhere decades ago, they aren't suddenly for the good of the common man, now, either.
It's a design patent. It's for specifically how it looks not for the actual functionality. And they are basically just given out like candy to anyone that applies since they are only useful in situations where companies do an exact 1-1 copy. Otherwise it doesn't infringe.
So feel free to create your own iBook clone knowing you won't infringe on this.
Also, you're either completely wrong or completely misleading, and I can't tell which (maybe both) because of HN's history with completely misinterpreting patent law. They've gotten other software patents before (on things no more based on functionality as the above patent), and utilized them to sue opponents.
Companies should be encouraged to innovate on a design and arrive at their own implementation. Otherwise you would see large companies simply duplicate en masse the works of smaller ones.
Utility patents like "slide to unlock" are obviously more about protecting an idea by patenting the most common implementation. But again in this case it was trivial to workaround since we've seen many unique phone unlock mechanisms come from the Android ecosystem.
Design patents are why Apple sued Samsung, and won, over the Fascinate (the Verizon-branded version of the original Galaxy that was pretty naked in its attempt to clone the look & feel of iOS in that era).
I remember when multi-finger gestures were still patented by apple so android couldn't implement despite the hardware capable of doing so [1]. Not sure what happened but the feature eventually land on android 2.x.
>That color discrimination runs deeper than you think, man. The last company I worked at the full time employees had blue badges. The contractors's badges? Green.
Hah, the badges had this color scheme in a job I interned at years ago. Never thought to make that connection. :)
Considering I was in the same position and recently switched to an 11 Pro, I now find the extra screen real estate to be nicer than the negatives of the notch. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the notch is a nice solution, but as it is either 1. part of the menu bar or 2. hidden in the black bars when watching 16:9 videos, it's not so bad.
What a fun surprise to find that this website is Lisa's writings. I was lucky enough to attend Recurse Center while they were a facilitator there. Working with Lisa was a real joy and I learned a ton from her and James (the other facilitator). I can't recommend Recurse Center enough, if you're looking for a unique way to grow as a developer, hacker, computer scientist, or whatever label you prefer, it's an environment that really can't be beat.
> Project Fi isn't supposed to work with Apple phones. Turns out that it does work, somewhat. I hear there's limitations (it only uses the T-Mobile network, none of the international data works)
I have been using Google Fi on iPhone since they allowed it. Supposedly still in beta but works great. It's true that it's limited to T-Mobile (sadly) but it does include international data, same as in Android. Still one of the main reasons to stick with Fi, honestly.
Regarding the smoothness, some of that is animation, but a lot is just in the accuracy/feel/refresh rate/special sauce of the touchscreen and multi-touch.
In my opinion iOS nowadays has a lot more lags than Android (even in the native apps), but Apple keeps beating everyone else in terms of input latency.
This is my experience too, esp if you aren't on the latest hardware, but are on the latest os
If I wasn't a developer, I would never upgrade the os and just keep using an older phone
Interesting comment about the blue iMessage bubbles. I've definitely heard of it, and have seen the memes on the internet, but have never actually met anyone that cared about the _color_.
In my experience people do, however, care about iMessage being green insofar as the loss of functionality is concerned. Specifically with group messaging, a mix of iOS + Android users will result in weird quirks that aren't experienced "when everyone is blue". For example I've been in a mixed thread where the android user would receive a reply individually by every participant, while iOS users would not. Reactions, et al are unavailable in a mixed environment etc.
I'm not convinced it's a superiority complex, but rather the loss of extras that are lost when texting outside of Apple's ecosystem.
Interesting. I wonder what the reason for the difference is. WhatsApp (in the UK at least) is extremely prevalent: every group from parents at a school through to Members of Parliament seems to use it.
> Interesting comment about the blue iMessage bubbles. I've definitely heard of it, and have seen the memes on the internet, but have never actually met anyone that cared about the _color_.
The color is used as a proxy to discuss the functionality. "Chatting blue" is more about the features that come with it than the actual bubble color, though the latter is easier to mention quickly.
Personally I've been surprised what an impact even just a now-typing indicator has on the conversation and find "green" conversations can feel a lot more disjointed.
> Luckily, apps seem to have a really good memory of where you left off
This is something I have some gripes about. In the old days before backgrounding, pressing the home button literally ends the process. So implementing state preservation and restoration is a must for any non-toy apps.
With backgrounding, apps can linger in the background for a while before being killed. And now many iOS apps don't implement state restoration at all, including built-in apps like Photos. Quick experiment to verify: I open a particular photo, quit the app, reopen the app, and I don't see that photo any more. Instead I see the general timeline view or album view.
Every 3rd open is a "want to try premium?" popover, like some beggar on the street. Closing a video requires 2 precisely positioned and executed swipes. Everything looks like an Android app, like all Googles apps for iOS.
Well I agree that there’s a lot to hate about the app but if it means YouTube can move to a business model that doesn’t rely on surveillance and advertising then I think I can’t really complain too much
Even if you pay for Premium, it will forget what video you were looking on if the video was paused when you put it in the background. Especially infuriating if you're double-checking something on the web to reply to a comment
First there was no background playback on iOS because Google needed to show how bad iOS was at multi-tasking, even with all of the relevant API's for background media already in place. Now they degraded the Android user experience to match that so they can sell what could have been possible from almost the beginning as an upgrade.
I guess YouTube finally smothered all the competition with unlimited free money from Google and can now start to squeeze it's userbase.
I think YouTube app is user-hostile on purpose and has similar behavior on Android. I mean, My biggest pain point with it is that after switching to another video, you can’t go back to the previous one without visiting account history. At least I couldn’t find a way to do that, and when I asked a friend who I knew was spending few hours a day in that app, he didn’t even know that there was such a problem (why would you ever want to navigate back?).
I’ve been using Ivory for iOS as NewPipe replacement, but it’s still much inferior, especially when it comes to updates (for example, it cannot play videos right now due to YouTube API change, and past experiences taught me it will take at least a week before developer fixes it).
I find that more often than not, this doesn't work. I've not quite figured out the 'rules' to it, but it's so inconsistent that I usually don't even bother trying.
Yeah, "force quitting" apps in that way is the only way a user can force-reset the app's case if they it a bug or if the app starts behaving unpredictably.
If you quit an app, open something else, and then come back to it, it should maintain state.
What happens if you go back to photos via the task switcher instead of home screen icon? (I don't use iOS so I can't check)
Personally, I'd prefer that going back via the task switcher maintains state but going back via home screen doesn't. i.e. task switcher is how you get back to what you were doing, home screen is starting fresh.
If I open the photos app on my phone, I don't necessarily want it to automatically bring up the last photo I was looking at 6 hours ago or whatever. At the very least, if it's going to resume from where I was, there should be some visual indicator IMO (e.g. on Windows taskbar, it's icons are highlighted to show that a window of that application is open & clicking will bring that up instead of a new instance - plus there's the option to middle click & bring up a new instance regardless)
Behavior for home screen vs. task switcher is the same. But you do make a good point that state restoration isn't necessarily something that should always be implemented. The user may not necessarily want to go back to exactly where they were when they last used the app 2 days ago.
As always, experiences may vary. I actually prefer that Photos does not save state as I have never opened the app looking for the same photo twice in a row.
Note that this behavior changed with the new force-quit gestures. When you quit from the app switcher it was decided that the user explicitly wanted to reset UI state, so the UI state restoration data gets wiped. So that behavior you're describing for Photos is expected.
I switched a year ago and the only thing that is truly, fundamentally, worse about the experience is notifications. Somehow iOS notifications (swiping away, interacting, everything) are just incredibly clunky compared to Android. Throw in the baffling decision to separate the state of the "Notification Center" from what appears on the lock screen and it makes for a terrible experience.
I don't regret the decision, it's just frustrating that this one thing is so far behind everything else.
However, on iOS you can turn off all notifications easily from the control center. Or more exactly, each app has to ask for permission to send you notifications on first start and you can just deny them there.
If you don't want notifications, iOS is much better.
You can do that on Android too. I believe you can also do things like "mute subsequent notifications from a particular app if they come in at a certain rate after the first one". So for a string of messages you'd only get buzzed once.
To be fair, Android's do-not-disturb/prioritized messages system is way too complicated.
I like the way he puts it on the baffling share icon: “ I'm still pretty confused with what that arrow out of a box even means.”
To me that sums up the era when Jony Ive and the anti-skeuomorphic crowd took over the asylum. There are so many UX flaws since iOS 6. Luckily for Apple, Google and the Android crowd came out with Material Design that is a bad imitation of what went wrong with Apple instead of copying what went right during Steve Jobs era.
Skeuomorphic design is a great enabler for Human Computer Interaction and allows the layman to quickly grasp things.
And why is Airdrop and the toggle for the Hotspot hidden in the control center of the lock screen when you can fit umpteen icons onto the real estate? I have had to show that feature to multiple friends who have always been iOS users. Function has to come before “prettiness.”
And the notch is not pretty by any measure. I prefer fingerprint on the screen or behind the phone like Google did with the Nexuses.
> Skeuomorphic design is a great enabler for Human Computer Interaction and allows the layman to quickly grasp things.
It was a lot of fun working on apps during the Skeuomorphic design era, but I'm not sorry we've moved on. For one thing, we used to have to ship apps with a lot more image assets, which increase the bundle size substantially, but only really serve to delight the user the first few times they open the app and become invisible after that.
Also skeuomorphism was a lot easier to achieve when there was exactly one screen resolution to target. We used to really count pixels when designing screen layouts, and it pains me to think how many different asset versions we would need now to support all devices cleanly.
Ultimately I think it was a useful metaphor when touch screens were new, since it gave people useful information about how interacting in this format differed from a PC or laptop screen. But the thing which is really unique about touchscreen interactions is how the content can move and react to a user's touch, and it's much easier and less costly to do interesting things in that realm with simple lines and colors than with fully textured surfaces.
Also I do not understand the criticism. The box represents your phone; the arrow pointing outside represents sharing/sending something from your phone to outside it (to Twitter, to another person etc.)
The only valid criticism IMHO is that the share button is often used to do stuff that isn't sharing.
> The box represents your phone; the arrow pointing outside represents sharing/sending something from your phone to outside it (to Twitter, to another person etc.)
More specifically, the box represents the app running on the phone, and it shares content outside of the app. For example, you can "share" a picture from Safari into the Photos or Files apps to save it for later.
It's a very, very leaky and ill-defined abstraction.
When an iOS user texts with a android user we lose all our nifty Messages featurea. I’m sort of convinced this is not completely unintentional on Apple's part (or at least, they would never do anything to make it otherwise ) because even though I completely understand that this has nothing to do with the android user I find myself getting annoyed that they "took" all my cool iMessage stuff.
The color itself isn't the thing really. It's what the color represents: all of the features that iMessage provides don't work with SMS. Instead of little icon reactions, there are long messages ("pwinnski liked 'Okay, see you there'"), location-sharing is ugly, URL-previews are wonky, etc, etc.
It's a diminished experience because SMS is a terrible protocol, the color just lets us know what to expect.
A "hidden feature" I absolutely loathed not having when I was on Android for a month is tap clock to scroll to top. Resorting to two-thumb screen jogging is such a drag.
Once you discover it (I discovered it by accident a few years back in Safari), you can't live without it :) And apps that break this behaviour (I've found that Telegram is really inconsistent in this regard in chat lists) seem broken as a whole :)
iOS has been such a better experience than any version of Android that I've tried but I'm really not a fan of the newer iPhone models. Hopefully by the time my SE dies there will another iPhone which has 1) a small body; 2) touch id instead of face id; 3) a headphone jack.
Unfortunately Apple "OSes" are ridden with small-ish but nasty bugs and inconveniences which affect only an "insignificant" part of their customers, and in the Apple garden world it means they are never ever going to be fixed.
And not only that, new bugs are getting introduced and the old features removed with every OS release forcing me to look for workarounds, mostly to find out there are none, and eventually the only option is to get used to live with that
I've been using Apple products for 5 years now, but by now I've really grown tired of being forced to "think different" every now and then, and I believe the Apple products I currently own (this includes MBPs, iPhones and ATV) are the last I ever buy
150 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] thread[1] Yes, this is my opinion and not everyone might agree with me.
The SpringBoard?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpringBoard
Isn't that a good thing?
e.g.
* I want to be able to have syncthing pull down my keepass database and have keepass2android open the current version in launch without having to navigate a file picker every time.
* I want to use my browser to download rpg rulebooks from drivethrurpg then open them in my PDF viewer without either of those two having to specifically integrate with each other. It would then be nice if that pdf reader could display a list of recent files on launch rather than reopen a picker.
They're mostly my gripes with Android 10's lockdown but iOS doesn't even want the filesystem exposed. I won't deny there's security advantages to this model, but it should have an out as it just encourages your app to own your data and only use it in ways they foresaw rather than giving control to users.
I wish Apple made this easy, and just stopped doing whatever they're doing with iTunes. I hate needing it to upload photos.
If the developer takes the time to set it up, this is exactly how the Files app works -- each app will appear either as a folder or as a provider.
> I want to plug in my iPhone and see the filesystem for the Files app.
This is how it works currently on macOS; word is that this will be coming to Windows once they finish splitting up that version of iTunes.
> I want to be able to "share" any file from any app into Files. This would either be "Save to Files" or simply exposing it to files.
Again, this is up to the app developer to implement. On apps that support it, there's literally a "Save to Files" option on the share sheet.
On the other hand, Microsoft didn't get a say about LibreOffice being able to read it's files.
But if you want to share files, you can now with the Files app.
As a developer, I know where this is built-in (many gestures and navigation components) and where other developers have spent extra time and attention on the details.
Jumping back and forth between xcode and android studio - it is SO SO SO much more enjoyable to develop iOS apps than Android apps. I cannot stand the emulators and the whole android development experience. If anyone out there disagrees and can point to resources to improve Android studio and emulator setup I would love a link.
I think most recently I compared it with a pixel 2. It was dropping so many frames compared to the iOS version which is really pathetic for a google app running on a google os running on a google phone.
Now IntelliJ... well, I think they only develop on NVMe SSDs. Android Studio works fine on my mbpro with the insanely fast proprietary SSD, but on my desktop with a SATA SSD the code completion takes ages to show up. Usually after I'm done typing whatever I needed completed.
Never got around to learning iOS development so I can't talk about their tools. In spite of my personal phone being iOS :)
It seems Android just is not willing/able to admit this is a huge gap and address it.
[0]: https://www.androidpolice.com/2012/07/12/getting-to-know-and...
I agree it's something Android should prioritize, but it also shouldn't be understated how big of a task this will be. Apple has invested a huge amount in this specific competency since the advent of OSX (and just look at the difference between mac os 10.0 and comparable versions of windows in terms of UI smoothness).
Ask a game developer: making computer graphics workloads perform predictably is a very difficult task which requires art as well as science. Building a UI stack which enables that, as well as having a nice front-end to work with for developers, and integrating well with arbitrary application logic is more than just optimizing some systems here and there.
The things I miss in xcode are mainly command clicking everywhere to easily find call sites and follow application logic. xcode also feels less snappy. When I used it last you could not refactor swift code but I think that's been added now?
I get the appeal of a more “complete” emulator, but such things are never perfect anyway—best to not even pretend that they are.
Not as intuitive but it's there: ⌘+Ctrl+Shift+H
> xcode also feels less snappy
Not sure what you're doing in Xcode but as long as you evade using automatically updating live UI views it should be pretty snappy.
> When I used it last you could not refactor swift code but I think that's been added now?
Well there's a small handful of things now but Objective-C never had a ton either.
You can go into a store 1 day after <XYZ> flagship release, try the hardware and have it stutter through menus like a Walmart PC trying to run Crysis 10 years ago.
Huawei phones seem to be the only ones getting Android to feel somewhat smooth, much better than "vanilla". Not going to buy Chinese telco phones though.
I like Android for some things but performance and feel isnt one of them.
I just bought an iPad (regular, not pro) because I wanted a tablet and got tired of waiting for a good Android one.
It's been infuriating to see just how smooth everything is on iOS compared to Android.
Honestly, this alone is probably why laypeople prefer iPhones. They're not more intuitive anymore, they're not simpler or easier than Android. The Android back button is a game changer, and multi-tasking is better designed.
But the butter smoothness...fuck.
But the development experience is not as impressive for Xcode. It is far slower than Android.
Deploying an app to the Play Store is ridiculously fast and frictionless while deploying to the App Store feels like installing Windows XP
Reading through this thread it sounds like there are probably some config options to improve the emulator, but I cannot find a way to speed up studio vs xcode.
It takes < 3 seconds to launch xcode and open a source file. Studio takes 15 seconds to open and even then it takes another 5-10 seconds before the UI actually unlocks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4
Extremely succinct. Apple's the only company possible that could get a patent for turning a page in a book.
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/apple-now-owns-the...
That doesn't necessarily excuse it, but there's definitely more of a motivation than 'because we can' behind what these big companies do, especially considering that most of these patents never get used for anything inherently money-making and so are just cash tossed down the drain in filing fees and time spent.
Please show us just one example of this.
Because it's a myth that gets perpetuated that this is how patents work. You patent a specific implementation of a concept not the concept itself. If you implement a concept in a different way it won't infringe the patent.
How about the patents at issue in Alice v. CLS Bank? Or any of the “hundreds” of patents, according to Wikipedia, that have been found invalid by lower courts in decisions citing Alice.
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xer...
Every other history piece I've read said Xerox got a good chunk of Apple shares in exchange for them using their research. Perhaps they decided it isn't enough when they saw Apple was successful and sued for more money?
Apple didn't get their start by copying Xerox. They got their start by building and selling the Apple 1/2/3/Lisa. Xerox only came into the picture during the development of the Mac. And there is this myth that Xerox invented all of the GUI metaphors we know today. But actually about half came from Apple e.g drag & drop file manipulation, multiple file system views, drop down menus, clipboard.
Also only one person was fired from Apple and that was Scott Forstall. After whom quite a number of memorable iOS gestures were invented i.e. when the click button disappeared.
"got their start" was obviously intended to mean "in GUIs."
Frankly, yes, regulations should exist to serve consumers not companies.
80,000 Apple employees.
~330,171,224 residents of the United States of America.
Would you say that 330,091,224 is more than 80,000?I would.
And really, optimizing for the rights of the consumer helps everyone, including all Apple employees. And this helps the producer, too, because it allows them to ignore software patents as well.
Software patents weren't for the good of anyone but executives and legislators when legislators first forced them on everyone against the protests of software devs everywhere decades ago, they aren't suddenly for the good of the common man, now, either.
This article explains far more elegantly than I will as to why software patents don't make sense.
It's a design patent. It's for specifically how it looks not for the actual functionality. And they are basically just given out like candy to anyone that applies since they are only useful in situations where companies do an exact 1-1 copy. Otherwise it doesn't infringe.
So feel free to create your own iBook clone knowing you won't infringe on this.
Also, you're either completely wrong or completely misleading, and I can't tell which (maybe both) because of HN's history with completely misinterpreting patent law. They've gotten other software patents before (on things no more based on functionality as the above patent), and utilized them to sue opponents.
"Slide to Unlock" comes to mind.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/2/5676776/samsung-found-to-i...
Companies should be encouraged to innovate on a design and arrive at their own implementation. Otherwise you would see large companies simply duplicate en masse the works of smaller ones.
Utility patents like "slide to unlock" are obviously more about protecting an idea by patenting the most common implementation. But again in this case it was trivial to workaround since we've seen many unique phone unlock mechanisms come from the Android ecosystem.
[1] https://androidcommunity.com/google-axed-android-multitouch-...
Hah, the badges had this color scheme in a job I interned at years ago. Never thought to make that connection. :)
I have been using Google Fi on iPhone since they allowed it. Supposedly still in beta but works great. It's true that it's limited to T-Mobile (sadly) but it does include international data, same as in Android. Still one of the main reasons to stick with Fi, honestly.
In my experience people do, however, care about iMessage being green insofar as the loss of functionality is concerned. Specifically with group messaging, a mix of iOS + Android users will result in weird quirks that aren't experienced "when everyone is blue". For example I've been in a mixed thread where the android user would receive a reply individually by every participant, while iOS users would not. Reactions, et al are unavailable in a mixed environment etc.
I'm not convinced it's a superiority complex, but rather the loss of extras that are lost when texting outside of Apple's ecosystem.
Also : Some boomers believe they know everything because of their experience and some know better.
The rest of the world uses WhatsApp or Telegram or something similar for group messages (and pretty much ALL messages).
And that's part of why.
The color is used as a proxy to discuss the functionality. "Chatting blue" is more about the features that come with it than the actual bubble color, though the latter is easier to mention quickly.
Personally I've been surprised what an impact even just a now-typing indicator has on the conversation and find "green" conversations can feel a lot more disjointed.
This is something I have some gripes about. In the old days before backgrounding, pressing the home button literally ends the process. So implementing state preservation and restoration is a must for any non-toy apps.
With backgrounding, apps can linger in the background for a while before being killed. And now many iOS apps don't implement state restoration at all, including built-in apps like Photos. Quick experiment to verify: I open a particular photo, quit the app, reopen the app, and I don't see that photo any more. Instead I see the general timeline view or album view.
I hate this and wish more iOS devs would implement these things correctly. Docs here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/view_control...
I'm NOT paying a monthly fee for a feature that basic.
Every 3rd open is a "want to try premium?" popover, like some beggar on the street. Closing a video requires 2 precisely positioned and executed swipes. Everything looks like an Android app, like all Googles apps for iOS.
Just terrible.
I guess YouTube finally smothered all the competition with unlimited free money from Google and can now start to squeeze it's userbase.
I’ve been using Ivory for iOS as NewPipe replacement, but it’s still much inferior, especially when it comes to updates (for example, it cannot play videos right now due to YouTube API change, and past experiences taught me it will take at least a week before developer fixes it).
If you quit an app, open something else, and then come back to it, it should maintain state.
Personally, I'd prefer that going back via the task switcher maintains state but going back via home screen doesn't. i.e. task switcher is how you get back to what you were doing, home screen is starting fresh.
If I open the photos app on my phone, I don't necessarily want it to automatically bring up the last photo I was looking at 6 hours ago or whatever. At the very least, if it's going to resume from where I was, there should be some visual indicator IMO (e.g. on Windows taskbar, it's icons are highlighted to show that a window of that application is open & clicking will bring that up instead of a new instance - plus there's the option to middle click & bring up a new instance regardless)
I don't regret the decision, it's just frustrating that this one thing is so far behind everything else.
If you don't want notifications, iOS is much better.
To be fair, Android's do-not-disturb/prioritized messages system is way too complicated.
To me that sums up the era when Jony Ive and the anti-skeuomorphic crowd took over the asylum. There are so many UX flaws since iOS 6. Luckily for Apple, Google and the Android crowd came out with Material Design that is a bad imitation of what went wrong with Apple instead of copying what went right during Steve Jobs era.
Skeuomorphic design is a great enabler for Human Computer Interaction and allows the layman to quickly grasp things.
And why is Airdrop and the toggle for the Hotspot hidden in the control center of the lock screen when you can fit umpteen icons onto the real estate? I have had to show that feature to multiple friends who have always been iOS users. Function has to come before “prettiness.”
And the notch is not pretty by any measure. I prefer fingerprint on the screen or behind the phone like Google did with the Nexuses.
It was a lot of fun working on apps during the Skeuomorphic design era, but I'm not sorry we've moved on. For one thing, we used to have to ship apps with a lot more image assets, which increase the bundle size substantially, but only really serve to delight the user the first few times they open the app and become invisible after that.
Also skeuomorphism was a lot easier to achieve when there was exactly one screen resolution to target. We used to really count pixels when designing screen layouts, and it pains me to think how many different asset versions we would need now to support all devices cleanly.
Ultimately I think it was a useful metaphor when touch screens were new, since it gave people useful information about how interacting in this format differed from a PC or laptop screen. But the thing which is really unique about touchscreen interactions is how the content can move and react to a user's touch, and it's much easier and less costly to do interesting things in that realm with simple lines and colors than with fully textured surfaces.
https://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/p...
Also I do not understand the criticism. The box represents your phone; the arrow pointing outside represents sharing/sending something from your phone to outside it (to Twitter, to another person etc.)
The only valid criticism IMHO is that the share button is often used to do stuff that isn't sharing.
More specifically, the box represents the app running on the phone, and it shares content outside of the app. For example, you can "share" a picture from Safari into the Photos or Files apps to save it for later.
It's a very, very leaky and ill-defined abstraction.
I don't know if the gaze detection can be fooled by a corpse with its eyes open, but supposedly Face ID checks for body temperature as well.
It's a diminished experience because SMS is a terrible protocol, the color just lets us know what to expect.
It's sad how something as simple as a different color can get the worst out of people
I wonder how much undiscoverable features like this one I'm still missing.
https://github.com/kiliankoe/iOS-tidbits
Wireless headphones are a $8 billion/year business for Apple. Headphone jacks are dead forever.
And not only that, new bugs are getting introduced and the old features removed with every OS release forcing me to look for workarounds, mostly to find out there are none, and eventually the only option is to get used to live with that
I've been using Apple products for 5 years now, but by now I've really grown tired of being forced to "think different" every now and then, and I believe the Apple products I currently own (this includes MBPs, iPhones and ATV) are the last I ever buy