[Liftyee]

As a lifelong Android user (in the EU, where Apple hegemony is not as strong) I always saw Apple as the "pay more for more polished ecosystem UX" option. So it always surprises me when things that are trivial on Android/Linux are sticking points on iOS/macOS. Worse, it seems that proprietary means you can't do anything to fix them yourself.

[mzmzmzm]

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.

[mikepurvis]

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.

[jama211]

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.

[ASalazarMX]

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.

[pidge]

I’m curious and suffering from a failure of imagination—why toggle location services regularly?

[inferniac]

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

[lysace]

I'm getting a strong feeling that the first generation of really, really talented people who built iOS in the 2000s have now to a substantial degree moved on/retired. Similar feeling with OS X/macOS.

Please correct me if I'm wrong - it is after all just a feeling.

[realo]

Maybe they started to use some internal "Siri Code" tool ...

They should stick to Claude Code, like everyone else.

[PlatoIsADisease]

Recent?

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.

[MichaelZuo]

I would say Catalina in 2019 already had enormous issues, there were hard faults in Console pretty much daily that Apple never bothered to fix. (Plus hundreds of minor faults per day)

I had to downgrade to Mojave so the wheels likely came off internally around then.

[wilkystyle]

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.

[fodkodrasz]

Also add Liquid Glass, it strains the eyes.

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.

[yndoendo]

From an outsider that used their products years ago.

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.

[sleight42]

Steve would've never let this shit happen.

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.

[OJFord]

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'.

[nozzlegear]

You can install third-party keyboards on iOS too, I'm not sure why that's not considered an option in this case.

[nozzlegear]

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.

[dylan604]

> the majority who aren't just have nothing to say because it all works fine.

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.

[dlcarrier]

    …or with Siri mishearing…

Sounds like you won the lottery. I've never used a voice recognition engine that worked even close to reliably, nor seen anyone else.

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.

[meatmanek]

anecdatum: I've encountered the dumb keyboard behavior and haven't written any scathing blog posts about it, I've just grumbled out loud and upvoted the ones I've seen.

So consider the possibility that many people are affected but haven't reached the threshold of writing something about it.

[unethical_ban]

When I had iPhone for work, the first thing I did was install gboard. Iphone's native keyboard has always been less accurate. I have no idea how to describe it because I haven't researched it.

[DontForgetMe]

'Lots of people say this, but I don't agree' really doesn't logically lead to

'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'.

[Talanes]

I'm part of the silent majority and I'm not speaking up because I have so little trust in Apple to ever fix anything that I'm just riding out my 2nd gen SE on IOS 17 until it physically stops working. At which point I'm going to seriously consider whether I actually need a smart phone at all.

[socalgal2]

Except the OS decides at random times to switch back so you end up having to use a keyboard you're not used to. I get why. I don't agree with that why.

[brynjolf]

One thing that blew my mind in a negative way, was pasting a phonenumber into the caller and not being able to edit it. If you paste a number and want for example to add the country code you simply cannot. You can only remove numbers.

If you want to edit it, you have to open the notes app, paste it, edit it and paste it back into the caller.

[jccalhoun]

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.

[arnoooooo]

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.

[rehevkor5]

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

[metabagel]

Apple’s implementation of desktops/workspaces is maddening.

[WarmWash]

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.

[Tepix]

> Android phones can't support imessage because they are poor low quality phones that cannot handle imessage.

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.

[ryandrake]

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

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.

[kwanbix]

> 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.

You are missing the /s right?

[zdragnar]

Texting images and videos to iPhone users used to be much worse than it is now, but it's gotten better in the past few years if my (Android) experience with my family (iPhones) is any indication.

The hard to tell part is I'm also crossing carriers to message them, so that might have been the issue as well.

[PlatoIsADisease]

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

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.

[bix6]

> 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.

Source? Would love to read this one lol

[swasheck]

i wanted to hate apple so much at the advent of the smartphone era, so when i made the switch from flip to smart, i went with a samsung and gingerbread and it was such a universally awful experience compared to the iphone mobiles my employer issued (before BYOD). i gutted it out through the life of the contract and switched to iphone for my personal as well and have been quite happy up until ios 18. if there is no appreciable change in the next version, i plan to export my curated music library/playlists and walk away from my "sign in with apple id" accounts and set up new ones. liquid glass is just that painful and hostile of a user experience.

[browningstreet]

This feels like 5 year old social media bullshit.. can we let it rest?