This is actually fantastic, I am really happy about this.
Two main reasons
(1) If you disable Wi-Fi its re-enabled when you goto a new location. Very often I disable wifi to temporarily get off a bad network in an area, and then curse when I get home and stream a 1GB video over 3G
(2) Much more user friendly for initiated actions
(3) You can still fully disable it by going into settings, but the quick-off is more like you expect.
> This is actually fantastic, I am really happy about this.
This is not fantastic, my phone is lying to me. I was wondering what the bug was because I turned off Bluetooth and it kept turning back on every damn time I got near my car. I want it on when I want it on and not anytime else.
Icons and OSes that lie to user make it tougher to understand what's going on. I expect the control center to tell the truth and do what I want. There is no indication that the settings and control center are different. This is a user hostile decision.
Cruddy work, Apple... now I get to answer questions about this psychotic crud.
If you force touch the UI, it does say "Not Connected" when you hit the button, not "Disabled."
I can understand the confusion, because they have re-used an old UI element for a new purpose, but there's no reason the button should mean "Disable Radio" rather than "Disconnect." And as cptide mentions, the button now has three states: blue for connected, grey for disconnected, grey with a line through for disabled. Once you know this, I think it makes a lot of sense.
If you want the old behavior, it's still there in settings, where the on-off toggle will turn off the radio itself.
Personally, I much prefer the new system (I far more often just want to disconnect from the current network/devices than disable it entirely), and think the new control center is much improved over the old one.
When you enable airplane mode, you can actually see WiFi and Bluetooth crossed out as opposed to grayed out. So there is a difference in UI, but I agree - this is not intuitive to the user.
> Icons and OSes that lie to user make it tougher to understand what's going on.
Isn't the Apple approach that you just don't have to understand because the OS and their inventors know what's good for you? The main argument I hear from Apple users is that they don't have to care about anything and it works.
If you would really want to understand your mobiles OS, you would surely look towards other OSes.
> (3) You can still fully disable it by going into settings, but the quick-off is more like you expect.
For me, I expect off to be off. What annoys me about this change is that the on\off behaviour is now asymmetric. If I turn off Wi-Fi in Settings, I can turn it back on via Control Centre but I now can't turn it off via Control Centre.
My preference is always to leave Wi-Fi off, turn it on when I want to use it, and then turn it off when I'm finished. This change makes doing that slower and clumsier.
>My preference is always to leave Wi-Fi off, turn it on when I want to use it, and then turn it off when I'm finished. This change makes doing that slower and clumsier.
It's exactly this micro-management that they try to obliterate, similar to this:
I think for the majority of users this is a really insightful change that addresses one of the biggest use cases the switch had (temporarily disable WiFi to get away from a bad connection) and one of the biggest issues it had for that use case (it was easy to turn it off and waste large amounts of relatively expensive wireless data)
>My preference is always to leave Wi-Fi off, turn it on when I want to use it, and then turn it off when I'm finished. This change makes doing that slower and clumsier.
Right!
But the good Apple developers believe that this way your experience will be somehow inferior:
From the article:
>For the best experience on your iOS device, try to keep Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on.
I think iOS needs to be a lot more aggressive with this, in both directions (switching because of poor LTE and because of poor WiFi). If it were better, I don't think I'd never actually need to touch the WiFi toggle.
The problem here is that a lot of people are on limited data plans. So if wifi is poor in one corner of my home, I dont want to accidentally chew up half my monthly data allowance.
iOS won't detect when I'm on a good WiFi connection but its ADSL link has decent ping yet is much much slower (10Mbps/0.6Mbps) than what I would get with LTE (40~80Mbps both ways) at the same location. I'm on a 100GB plan so I could care less about data use, and I have FTTH (300Mbps/100Mbps+sub-10ms ping) at home so I want WiFi there but always forget to toggle it back on. This UI solves it for me, although I wished the 3D Touch UI would allow quick access to the third, disabled state.
Unfortunately this isn't a good option. My Pixel XL on Project fi is supposed to do this. It never does it when it should. Never. I have yet to see a phone handle the tradeoff well.
Sometimes the bad network is my network, for example when I’m standing in my driveway. It’s still close enough to pick up my wifi but it doesn’t actually load anything. Or my office Wi-Fi once I get down to the lobby, but before I leave the building. Good for you if this never happens, but it’s a real problem.
You can tell iOS to not connect automatically to a known network by disabling auto-join for that SSID. I do this so that it doesn't connect to "Free WiFi Secure", which can not be forgotten since it comes from my mobile operator's SIM (authenticates with EAP-SIM).
Sarcasm aside, I hated this feature until I used it a few weeks, but now I'm a fan. I would argue that this UI is empowering users, in the sense that it allows them to do something that they couldn't before (in contrast to Clippy, who usually suggested things you already knew how to do).
For example, on a daily basis, I usually spend my time in one of 4 places:
- A location with good WiFi and good LTE reception (expectation: all services on)
- A location with bad WiFi and good LTE reception (expectation: WiFi off)
- A location with excellent WiFi and atrocious LTE reception (expectation: cellular off)
- A location with bad WiFi and zero LTE reception (expectation: all off)
Previously, I had to manually toggle WiFi, cellular, or airplane mode on or off in these various locations, nearly always forgetting to change it again later. This is mainly a problem with turning things off - if I'm in airplane mode, I might not notice that I'm incommunicado for an hour or more if I'm engrossed in a task, whereas leaving everything on when I'm in the metaphorical dungeon will only cost me a few % of battery, at most.
However, by defaulting services to on after I move locations, my phone reverts to a communication device at the expense of a marginal amount of battery life. Think of it as a 4-square: 1) services on, actively using; 2) services off, actively using; 3) services on, not using; 4) services off, not using.
In cases 1 & 2, I'm actively using it and I don't care what it does as long as it functions (i.e. I can manually disconnect from shitty WiFi myself, so data will load again). In case 3, I lose some battery life for my inattention, but no big deal - I can still easily make it all day on a charge. In case 4, I'm SOL until I remember to turn them on again.
This behavioral change in iOS 11 moves some of my time from case 4 to case 3, which is a tradeoff I am willing to make.
I hope this helps to illustrate the alternative perspective to yours a bit more clearly.
Regardless of this particular implementation, isn't that the whole point of computing? To get the software to be smarter and decide what's better -- all the way to AI assistants.
Not a fan. Off is off simple as that. It’s also really confusing to have two actions one in control centre the other in settings behaving in a different way but no cue to say they do.
Another “feature” irking me on iOS 11 is the disabling of flash or the flashlight/torch below 15% battery. If I want to use the torch or flash then I’ll decide if there’s enough battery left
Not a fan of how this was implemented either, but the cue is the descriptive text under the button. If you do toggle Bluetooth or WiFi off from the settings app, it even uses a different icon in the control center.
Alternative answer: This prevents your phone from completely dying if you turn the light on, forget, and shove it in your pocket/bag. That's a great feature in and of itself. Hell, i've accidentally triggered the flashlight outside in the sun and not noticed before i pocketed the phone before.
For anyone that is running into this. The quickest way to get into settings so you can turn these radios off is to force touch the settings icon. Once you do that, you will see the different radios in the menu. You can simply tap into it and toggle the radio off. This, of course, assumes you have force touch enabled iPhone.
For what it is worth, this is a big privacy violation. I am really surprised you can't at least force touch on the control center and turn these things off. I hope someone at Apple is reading this and adds that back in.
Before: Swipe up for Control Center, tap to toggle WiFi radio, tap or swipe to return to current app.
Now: Switch from current app or close it, Force Touch Settings, tap WiFi, tap on the toggle in Settings.app, switch back to app you were on. The UX here is worse.
If you force touch the settings icon on your home screen, you will see Wifi, Bluetooth, etc. Just tap the menu item to go right to the settings screen.
>what ever happened to the principle of least astonishment?
I dunno, they actually measured real world usage patterns from millions of real users and did usability tests on their own premises, and found that this is the least astonishing for the majority, who doesn't need to wonder why AirDrop doesn't work or why their Apple Watch is not connecting?
I participated in the beta program and I thought of it as a bug first and reported it. Nothing happened except it turned out a feature in the release version. Why didn't they integrate "turn completely off" in the long press sub menu instead? NO, now I need to go all the way to settings and turn it off.
I don't get it.
I wish they’d also fix the problem of Apple Pencil draining when in bag with the iPad - it seems to think it’s being used and is trying to transmit to the iPad. I’ve been turning off Bluetooth to deal with this stupidity, now I have to turn on airplane mode to actually turn it off properly.
Not a proper fix, but a workaround is to turn off Bluetooth then immediately turn it back on. This disconnects the Apple Pencil, which allows it to keep its charge (for weeks in my experience). With the new iOS update it sounds like you'll need to turn airplane mode on then off instead, which is a bit more annoying (but better than leaving airplane mode on the whole time).
I think the functionality makes a lot of sense. But it sure would have been nice to indicate what’s going on in the UI somehow. Maybe not reuse the familiar icons to indicate a new thing? Or, totally crazy idea, labels!
This is a feature I would love. Ideally with a prompt "do you want to forget [current network]?" if you're connected to one because I'm probably turning it off because it's poor quality or I can't be bothered with the sign in process.
As it is, the icons grey out when you “disable” them from control centre, and have a line through them when actually off(which is how they looked before).
I believe this is also a ploy to keep people pinging wifi routers. Can't say for sure, but that was my gut reaction when I discovered this during beta testing.
What would be the point? If it's for tracking, you can do that without actually connecting to the networks, just by monitoring passively, like Android does.
Yes. You must have the modem on. Before it would fully disable WiFi modem. Now it simply looks to be off. Perception is that it’s not connecting but keeps modem on to keep pinging routers passively. But again, that’s why I would do it if I were Apple. Not sure why they are doing it for sure.
This sucks - I keep it off because as I ride a train it's connecting to every station wifi and losing it just as quick, completely breaking connectivity.
Perhaps the new TCP multipath stuff will make WiFi Assist work in these cases but I'm not holding my breath.
Maybe disable automatic joining of random networks? I don't use an iPhone, but I bet it has a setting for that. There's also the security implication of automatically joining unknown networks.
They're not random networks though. Sometimes I do use the station wifi (so it's in my network list), but that's if I'm parked there for 15 minutes waiting for a train and want to stream a YouTube channel or download a podcast. Just not when I'm on the train passing it.
Having read that KB page, I don't really care for Apple's explanation on this, but it's really messy from a UX point of view after being used to the previous way of working. I have the habit of turning off WiFi most of the time to save on battery usage. I know when and where I'm in a place where selected WiFi networks are available, and I don't like having the radio on all the time.
I'm not buying new phones every year or getting batteries replaced - so taking advantage of any and most battery saving techniques (while having the device usable for my needs) is very important to me.
What's even more annoying is this - if I open an app that may need network access but cal also work or open up without that, now the device prompts me with a list of nearby WiFi networks and I have to choose cancel because I'm not going to connect to some random network! This is a serious security issue, IMO. Many people might inadvertently tap on available WiFi networks and suffer through password prompts on protected networks or get connected to some rogue network.
Forcing users to go to Settings to turn the radios off defeats the purpose of having an easily accessible Control Center for many users.
I seriously believe Apple botched this one, and hope there will at least be some way to get the old behavior (like it did with the removal and reinstating of Camera Roll).
I always had this option off. Now I went into settings and see that it's on. It's frustrating that an upgrade changes things and also requires the user to take specific actions to get it back to how it was (after the upgrade, I had to sign in to the App Store, to Game Center, and a few other things that were already setup).
Battery life is always bad right after installing a new major iOS release. Every time. Give it a couple days, it’ll probably be fine. Most of the time, turning off wifi to preserve battery is more superstition than real.
In fact, turning off Wi-Fi can hurt battery life. LTE requires more power, GPS kicks on more often, and if you have an Apple Watch, data transfer is forced to use Bluetooth which means both devices remain in a high powered state for longer.
> Most of the time, turning off wifi to preserve battery is more superstition than real.
This is not true in my experience. Having the WiFi radio on while network connectivity (including LTE/3G) isn't used hurts the battery runtime. It may be true for Bluetooth Low Energy, but not WiFi. Even when "disconnected" from a network, the WiFi radio now keeps looking for networks soon after the disconnect (I did see a "searching for network" message below the WiFi button in Control Center).
I'm not too keen to hear this news, but there is a tradeoff in that now you can quickly enable low power mode from control center. I still would like a way to entirely disable these connections at times, but in terms of battery there's a bit of give and take.
Don’t try to tell that to the iOS Beta subreddit on reddit. They swear up and down that there is absolutely no battery loss from having your WiFi and Bluetooth enabled even when not connected. To even question this is considered heresy.
Huh, I thought it was a bug. Sometimes the volume levels of AssistiveTouch and Control Center are in sync (iPhone SE) and sometimes they aren’t. I wonder whether that’s another hidden feature.
This is especially problematic because stores track your movements via wifi [1], even if you haven't connected to any networks. Now I have to go to Settings to actually turn off wifi and defeat this type of tracking. Terrible.
I'm kind of ambivalent to this issue, although I do think it's a regression that they use the same buttons to accomplish different tasks, and especially since it's kind of confusing that you think it's off but it's actually not truly off. I'm hopeful (but know it probably won't happen) that long pressing or force touching the buttons in the bigger menu from the Control Center will let you disable instead of "turn off".
I know it's against etiquette to comment on downvotes, but I wish they would reply rather than rage-drive-by downvote perfectly reasonable responses like this.
This seems like a pretty heavy-handed violation of the UX Principle of Least Surprise [1] given how those Control Center buttons have historically behaved.
I like this, even though the UI is shit as it lies to me.
The important fact is, if you really want to disable WIFI or Bluetooth, you can still do so from the settings (not control center). This is mentioned at the bottom of the article.
Not burning through limited data plan when a user wakes up in the morning I think. Maybe also linking back to the Bluetooth speakers by your bed for alarm/morning tunes.
This is actually fantastic, I am really happy about this.
Two main reasons (1) If you disable Wi-Fi its re-enabled when you goto a new location. Very often I disable wifi to temporarily get off a bad network in an area, and then curse when I get home and stream a 1GB video over 3G
(2) Much more user friendly for initiated actions
(3) You can still fully disable it by going into settings, but the quick-off is more like you expect.
Great work, Apple.
> This is actually fantastic, I am really happy about this.
This is not fantastic, my phone is lying to me. I was wondering what the bug was because I turned off Bluetooth and it kept turning back on every damn time I got near my car. I want it on when I want it on and not anytime else.
Icons and OSes that lie to user make it tougher to understand what's going on. I expect the control center to tell the truth and do what I want. There is no indication that the settings and control center are different. This is a user hostile decision.
Cruddy work, Apple... now I get to answer questions about this psychotic crud.
> my phone is lying to me.
If you force touch the UI, it does say "Not Connected" when you hit the button, not "Disabled."
I can understand the confusion, because they have re-used an old UI element for a new purpose, but there's no reason the button should mean "Disable Radio" rather than "Disconnect." And as cptide mentions, the button now has three states: blue for connected, grey for disconnected, grey with a line through for disabled. Once you know this, I think it makes a lot of sense.
If you want the old behavior, it's still there in settings, where the on-off toggle will turn off the radio itself.
Personally, I much prefer the new system (I far more often just want to disconnect from the current network/devices than disable it entirely), and think the new control center is much improved over the old one.
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When you enable airplane mode, you can actually see WiFi and Bluetooth crossed out as opposed to grayed out. So there is a difference in UI, but I agree - this is not intuitive to the user.
> Icons and OSes that lie to user make it tougher to understand what's going on.
Isn't the Apple approach that you just don't have to understand because the OS and their inventors know what's good for you? The main argument I hear from Apple users is that they don't have to care about anything and it works.
If you would really want to understand your mobiles OS, you would surely look towards other OSes.
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> (3) You can still fully disable it by going into settings, but the quick-off is more like you expect.
For me, I expect off to be off. What annoys me about this change is that the on\off behaviour is now asymmetric. If I turn off Wi-Fi in Settings, I can turn it back on via Control Centre but I now can't turn it off via Control Centre.
My preference is always to leave Wi-Fi off, turn it on when I want to use it, and then turn it off when I'm finished. This change makes doing that slower and clumsier.
>My preference is always to leave Wi-Fi off, turn it on when I want to use it, and then turn it off when I'm finished. This change makes doing that slower and clumsier.
It's exactly this micro-management that they try to obliterate, similar to this:
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/closing-apps-save-battery-make...
Reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/1172/
I think for the majority of users this is a really insightful change that addresses one of the biggest use cases the switch had (temporarily disable WiFi to get away from a bad connection) and one of the biggest issues it had for that use case (it was easy to turn it off and waste large amounts of relatively expensive wireless data)
>My preference is always to leave Wi-Fi off, turn it on when I want to use it, and then turn it off when I'm finished. This change makes doing that slower and clumsier.
Right!
But the good Apple developers believe that this way your experience will be somehow inferior:
From the article: >For the best experience on your iOS device, try to keep Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on.
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It's not fantastic for me. I'd like to off wifi from the control screen.
iOS can be configured to automatically switch to LTE if it detects you’re on a low quality wifi connection. No need to turn off wifi for that.
I think iOS needs to be a lot more aggressive with this, in both directions (switching because of poor LTE and because of poor WiFi). If it were better, I don't think I'd never actually need to touch the WiFi toggle.
The problem here is that a lot of people are on limited data plans. So if wifi is poor in one corner of my home, I dont want to accidentally chew up half my monthly data allowance.
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Where is this setting? I remember it being on an old beta (7/8) but I thought it was removed?
Edit: Found it. "Wi-Fi Assist" in Settings > Cellular / Mobile Data > Scroll past all the apps > "Wi-Fi Assist"
iOS won't detect when I'm on a good WiFi connection but its ADSL link has decent ping yet is much much slower (10Mbps/0.6Mbps) than what I would get with LTE (40~80Mbps both ways) at the same location. I'm on a 100GB plan so I could care less about data use, and I have FTTH (300Mbps/100Mbps+sub-10ms ping) at home so I want WiFi there but always forget to toggle it back on. This UI solves it for me, although I wished the 3D Touch UI would allow quick access to the third, disabled state.
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Unfortunately this isn't a good option. My Pixel XL on Project fi is supposed to do this. It never does it when it should. Never. I have yet to see a phone handle the tradeoff well.
I am glad we found the guy!
When I read comments like yours, I get excited to read the n-gate.com coverage of the article. I can see it now:
>a hackernews decides to congratulate apple for being duplicitous
I make it forget bad networks so it wont connect to them by default your workflow is poor.
Sometimes the bad network is my network, for example when I’m standing in my driveway. It’s still close enough to pick up my wifi but it doesn’t actually load anything. Or my office Wi-Fi once I get down to the lobby, but before I leave the building. Good for you if this never happens, but it’s a real problem.
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You can tell iOS to not connect automatically to a known network by disabling auto-join for that SSID. I do this so that it doesn't connect to "Free WiFi Secure", which can not be forgotten since it comes from my mobile operator's SIM (authenticates with EAP-SIM).
your post needs some punctuations
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When I turn off WiFi, I expect it to remain off and not just decide to turn back on whenever I find a new network.
Any other behavior is dark UX.
Ignoring the security implications, it has implications on battery life.
That button is no longer for turning it off. They've changed the meaning of the button.
I get that if you're used to the previous meaning it could be annoying, but it's not like it's actually saying one thing and doing another.
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So i guess you liked Microsoft Clippy too?
Instead of fixing the UI to make you empowered, it will decide what is better for you? great!
Sarcasm aside, I hated this feature until I used it a few weeks, but now I'm a fan. I would argue that this UI is empowering users, in the sense that it allows them to do something that they couldn't before (in contrast to Clippy, who usually suggested things you already knew how to do).
For example, on a daily basis, I usually spend my time in one of 4 places: - A location with good WiFi and good LTE reception (expectation: all services on) - A location with bad WiFi and good LTE reception (expectation: WiFi off) - A location with excellent WiFi and atrocious LTE reception (expectation: cellular off) - A location with bad WiFi and zero LTE reception (expectation: all off)
Previously, I had to manually toggle WiFi, cellular, or airplane mode on or off in these various locations, nearly always forgetting to change it again later. This is mainly a problem with turning things off - if I'm in airplane mode, I might not notice that I'm incommunicado for an hour or more if I'm engrossed in a task, whereas leaving everything on when I'm in the metaphorical dungeon will only cost me a few % of battery, at most.
However, by defaulting services to on after I move locations, my phone reverts to a communication device at the expense of a marginal amount of battery life. Think of it as a 4-square: 1) services on, actively using; 2) services off, actively using; 3) services on, not using; 4) services off, not using.
In cases 1 & 2, I'm actively using it and I don't care what it does as long as it functions (i.e. I can manually disconnect from shitty WiFi myself, so data will load again). In case 3, I lose some battery life for my inattention, but no big deal - I can still easily make it all day on a charge. In case 4, I'm SOL until I remember to turn them on again.
This behavioral change in iOS 11 moves some of my time from case 4 to case 3, which is a tradeoff I am willing to make.
I hope this helps to illustrate the alternative perspective to yours a bit more clearly.
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>it will decide what is better for you?
Regardless of this particular implementation, isn't that the whole point of computing? To get the software to be smarter and decide what's better -- all the way to AI assistants.
Bonzi Buddy was even better, it's the original "clippy that doesn't go away"
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Not a fan. Off is off simple as that. It’s also really confusing to have two actions one in control centre the other in settings behaving in a different way but no cue to say they do.
Another “feature” irking me on iOS 11 is the disabling of flash or the flashlight/torch below 15% battery. If I want to use the torch or flash then I’ll decide if there’s enough battery left
> If I want to use the torch or flash then I’ll decide if there’s enough battery left
Lithium batteries are worn a lot by high amperage when they are already close to empty. They are protecting the battery from wearing out too fast.
If I am in the dark, and really need to use that torch, the batteries are the least of my worries.
"Enabling the flash below 15% charge may cause additional wear on your battery and should only be used in emergencies. Proceed?"
Not a fan of how this was implemented either, but the cue is the descriptive text under the button. If you do toggle Bluetooth or WiFi off from the settings app, it even uses a different icon in the control center.
I didn't realize the flash was disabled, that is super annoying.
On the plus side, i'm extremely happy about the car bluetooth based DND mode.
Alternative answer: This prevents your phone from completely dying if you turn the light on, forget, and shove it in your pocket/bag. That's a great feature in and of itself. Hell, i've accidentally triggered the flashlight outside in the sun and not noticed before i pocketed the phone before.
For anyone that is running into this. The quickest way to get into settings so you can turn these radios off is to force touch the settings icon. Once you do that, you will see the different radios in the menu. You can simply tap into it and toggle the radio off. This, of course, assumes you have force touch enabled iPhone.
For what it is worth, this is a big privacy violation. I am really surprised you can't at least force touch on the control center and turn these things off. I hope someone at Apple is reading this and adds that back in.
That's still more steps from how it was.
Before: Swipe up for Control Center, tap to toggle WiFi radio, tap or swipe to return to current app.
Now: Switch from current app or close it, Force Touch Settings, tap WiFi, tap on the toggle in Settings.app, switch back to app you were on. The UX here is worse.
I can't seem to find a way to disable except in going to settings > wifi Where do you see these options in the force touch menu?
If you force touch the settings icon on your home screen, you will see Wifi, Bluetooth, etc. Just tap the menu item to go right to the settings screen.
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Thanks for the tip at least.
> For the best experience on your iOS device, try to keep Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on.
For the best protection on any kind of device, try to keep unnecessary attack vectors turned off.
what ever happened to the principle of least astonishment?
people are currently used to disabling wifi meaning disabling wifi.
>what ever happened to the principle of least astonishment?
I dunno, they actually measured real world usage patterns from millions of real users and did usability tests on their own premises, and found that this is the least astonishing for the majority, who doesn't need to wonder why AirDrop doesn't work or why their Apple Watch is not connecting?
Proof?
Is this how they conceived the touchbar, too?
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Or, to reuse a variation of an old saying, "off means off".
Seriously. This is a neat feature, but completely violates POLA.
Depends on the users.
If they're like most I know, they'll be scratching their heads why e.g. AirDrop doesn't work when they have the wi-fi turned off.
So this could be less astonishing for them.
POLA?
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Any other brand on the face of the planet:
Poor decision, potential security hazard, drains battery life, contrary to user freedom, sneaky, you name it.
Apple:
Contrived justification of how this is genius on Apple's part and actually the behavior you wanted without even realizing it.
Ironically, 4 hours later, this story also currently on the front page was submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15299165
I participated in the beta program and I thought of it as a bug first and reported it. Nothing happened except it turned out a feature in the release version. Why didn't they integrate "turn completely off" in the long press sub menu instead? NO, now I need to go all the way to settings and turn it off. I don't get it.
I wish they’d also fix the problem of Apple Pencil draining when in bag with the iPad - it seems to think it’s being used and is trying to transmit to the iPad. I’ve been turning off Bluetooth to deal with this stupidity, now I have to turn on airplane mode to actually turn it off properly.
Not a proper fix, but a workaround is to turn off Bluetooth then immediately turn it back on. This disconnects the Apple Pencil, which allows it to keep its charge (for weeks in my experience). With the new iOS update it sounds like you'll need to turn airplane mode on then off instead, which is a bit more annoying (but better than leaving airplane mode on the whole time).
I think the functionality makes a lot of sense. But it sure would have been nice to indicate what’s going on in the UI somehow. Maybe not reuse the familiar icons to indicate a new thing? Or, totally crazy idea, labels!
Clicking it could easily turn the icon into a timer, sort of like how apps show download/install progress. It's WiFi Snoozing!
This is a feature I would love. Ideally with a prompt "do you want to forget [current network]?" if you're connected to one because I'm probably turning it off because it's poor quality or I can't be bothered with the sign in process.
As it is, the icons grey out when you “disable” them from control centre, and have a line through them when actually off(which is how they looked before).
Affordances like that went into the grave with Steve, as far as I can tell.
I believe this is also a ploy to keep people pinging wifi routers. Can't say for sure, but that was my gut reaction when I discovered this during beta testing.
What would be the point? If it's for tracking, you can do that without actually connecting to the networks, just by monitoring passively, like Android does.
Yes. You must have the modem on. Before it would fully disable WiFi modem. Now it simply looks to be off. Perception is that it’s not connecting but keeps modem on to keep pinging routers passively. But again, that’s why I would do it if I were Apple. Not sure why they are doing it for sure.
More reliable map data to compete against Google Maps w/ wifi location assist?
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This sucks - I keep it off because as I ride a train it's connecting to every station wifi and losing it just as quick, completely breaking connectivity.
Perhaps the new TCP multipath stuff will make WiFi Assist work in these cases but I'm not holding my breath.
Maybe disable automatic joining of random networks? I don't use an iPhone, but I bet it has a setting for that. There's also the security implication of automatically joining unknown networks.
Will that help?
They're not random networks though. Sometimes I do use the station wifi (so it's in my network list), but that's if I'm parked there for 15 minutes waiting for a train and want to stream a YouTube channel or download a podcast. Just not when I'm on the train passing it.
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Having read that KB page, I don't really care for Apple's explanation on this, but it's really messy from a UX point of view after being used to the previous way of working. I have the habit of turning off WiFi most of the time to save on battery usage. I know when and where I'm in a place where selected WiFi networks are available, and I don't like having the radio on all the time.
I'm not buying new phones every year or getting batteries replaced - so taking advantage of any and most battery saving techniques (while having the device usable for my needs) is very important to me.
What's even more annoying is this - if I open an app that may need network access but cal also work or open up without that, now the device prompts me with a list of nearby WiFi networks and I have to choose cancel because I'm not going to connect to some random network! This is a serious security issue, IMO. Many people might inadvertently tap on available WiFi networks and suffer through password prompts on protected networks or get connected to some rogue network.
Forcing users to go to Settings to turn the radios off defeats the purpose of having an easily accessible Control Center for many users.
I seriously believe Apple botched this one, and hope there will at least be some way to get the old behavior (like it did with the removal and reinstating of Camera Roll).
Simply turn off "Ask to Join Networks" and you will never see the WiFi popup you refer to.
I believe having this off is default behavior since at least iOS 9.
http://osxdaily.com/2012/04/07/stop-iphone-looking-for-wifi-...
I always had this option off. Now I went into settings and see that it's on. It's frustrating that an upgrade changes things and also requires the user to take specific actions to get it back to how it was (after the upgrade, I had to sign in to the App Store, to Game Center, and a few other things that were already setup).
I always take it to airplane mode to disable all, I don't think any company can risk that.
Are we sure about this - you can enable Bluetooth and WiFi in Airplane mode - will this still work as before now?
Yes, you can enable both in Airplane mode. Just checked it
Well, that explains the battery life tanking.
Battery life is always bad right after installing a new major iOS release. Every time. Give it a couple days, it’ll probably be fine. Most of the time, turning off wifi to preserve battery is more superstition than real.
In fact, turning off Wi-Fi can hurt battery life. LTE requires more power, GPS kicks on more often, and if you have an Apple Watch, data transfer is forced to use Bluetooth which means both devices remain in a high powered state for longer.
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> Most of the time, turning off wifi to preserve battery is more superstition than real.
This is not true in my experience. Having the WiFi radio on while network connectivity (including LTE/3G) isn't used hurts the battery runtime. It may be true for Bluetooth Low Energy, but not WiFi. Even when "disconnected" from a network, the WiFi radio now keeps looking for networks soon after the disconnect (I did see a "searching for network" message below the WiFi button in Control Center).
I'm not too keen to hear this news, but there is a tradeoff in that now you can quickly enable low power mode from control center. I still would like a way to entirely disable these connections at times, but in terms of battery there's a bit of give and take.
You could always quicky toggle Low Power mode w Siri.
What really makes voice interfaces superior, IMHO, is the degradation of the UI.
By making one worse, the other is relativily better.
Don’t try to tell that to the iOS Beta subreddit on reddit. They swear up and down that there is absolutely no battery loss from having your WiFi and Bluetooth enabled even when not connected. To even question this is considered heresy.
That’s because the only battery loss is negligible
> It's 5 AM local time.
What?! Why???
Huh, I thought it was a bug. Sometimes the volume levels of AssistiveTouch and Control Center are in sync (iPhone SE) and sometimes they aren’t. I wonder whether that’s another hidden feature.
This is especially problematic because stores track your movements via wifi [1], even if you haven't connected to any networks. Now I have to go to Settings to actually turn off wifi and defeat this type of tracking. Terrible.
1: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/business/attention-shopper...
One hand gives, the other takes away. :)
I'm kind of ambivalent to this issue, although I do think it's a regression that they use the same buttons to accomplish different tasks, and especially since it's kind of confusing that you think it's off but it's actually not truly off. I'm hopeful (but know it probably won't happen) that long pressing or force touching the buttons in the bigger menu from the Control Center will let you disable instead of "turn off".
I know it's against etiquette to comment on downvotes, but I wish they would reply rather than rage-drive-by downvote perfectly reasonable responses like this.
This seems like a pretty heavy-handed violation of the UX Principle of Least Surprise [1] given how those Control Center buttons have historically behaved.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishm...
It would be nice if they made it a different icon like say a wifi symbol with a little timer on it.
I like this, even though the UI is shit as it lies to me.
The important fact is, if you really want to disable WIFI or Bluetooth, you can still do so from the settings (not control center). This is mentioned at the bottom of the article.
What’s the reasoning behind connecting WiFi / Bluetooth at 5AM?
Not burning through limited data plan when a user wakes up in the morning I think. Maybe also linking back to the Bluetooth speakers by your bed for alarm/morning tunes.
Probably because you’re sleeping?
iOS tried to hide file system from you once, which was brought back later. Now iOS tries to hide wireless hardware from you?
That's the very purpose of software -- to hide the hardware from you.
And the file system never came back -- an abstraction that looks like a file access dialog came back.
This is the same thing that happens in Android by default.
No it isn't. If I turn off WiFi from the pull down menu, it stays off.
Yes it is: https://www.howtogeek.com/211186/how-to-disable-google-locat...
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Yes it is. "Scanning always available" is on by default. You can disable it by going:
Settings -> Wifi -> Press the gear icon -> "Scanning always available"
Same for Bluetooth, but I don't remember where to turn it off.
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This is not true.
It isn't, but can you give an example?
"For the best experience on your iOS device, try to keep Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on." Oh really?