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Comment by ben_w

9 hours ago

> iOS apps tend to be more stable, better polished

It's been a while since I was last using Android, but first-party Apple apps no longer meet my standards for "polished".

e.g. type this sequence into the calculator:

  [2] [-] [4] [=] [x²] [=]

The answer should not be negative, but the app says "-4".

The desktop Contacts app has been putting invisible LTR and RTL codes around phone numbers for years now, breaking web forms when auto-entered. The mobile version refreshes specific contacts several times in a row to add no new content, preventing copy from working while it does so.

The MacOS Safari translation button appears on the left of the omni-bar, until you click it, at which point it instantly moves to the right and your click turns out to have been on the button that the left-side translation button had hidden. Deleting a selection of items from browsing history is limited to about 5 items per second, as it deletes one then rebuilds the entire list before deleting the next.

If I'm listening to a podcast on headpones and an alarm goes off, it doesn't play the alarm through my headphones, it plays on device speakers only.

Podcast app's "Up Next" is a magical mystery list that can't be disabled or guided.

The "Do Not Disturb" mode can be activated unexpectedly, leading to missed calls, and cannot be deleted.

Localisation is inconsistent at every level, including system share sheet and behaviour of decimal separators.

I could go on, but you get the point. Apple's quality control just isn't visible in the software at this point.

16 comments

ben_w

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toxik  5 hours ago

-4 makes sense if you understand that the input -2 is a unary minus operation. So typing -2 then hitting square only squares 2, not (-2). This is the same in eg Python so I'm not sure it's very controversial. I agree it's unexpected, though.

  • AshamedCaptain  4 hours ago

    At no point in the current expression you wrote "-", though. It may make sense that if you type [-] [2] [x^2] [=] then you get -(2²) = -4, but if your current answer is already -2, then tapping x² should result in (ans)^2 = (-2)^2 = 4. Splitting your current answer into a separate unary [-] as in - (2²) makes absolutely no sense.

    Most calculators, even CAS ones, simply get this always right. But sadly this is not the first "desktop" calculator that I see getting this completely wrong. And it makes some results outright wrong!

  • ben_w  4 hours ago

    I didn't enter -2, I calculated -2. The x² should have been taking x = (-2).

  • well_ackshually  5 hours ago

    "-4 makes sense if you consider that the calculator is so damn stupid it ignores every convention every single calculator has made in the past hundred years and instead copies behavior of a dumbass language" isn't exactly the praise you think it is.

criddell  7 hours ago

> The answer should not be negative, but the app says "-4".

When I do those exact keypresses I get the correct answer.