Comment by Liftyee

I've been a lifelong Android user and still find this a glaring omission. As far as I can tell, copying an image in a browser and then pasting it elsewhere results in a character.

There are some things that are hugely better on the iPhone, like accessibility setting that can be set on a per-app basis. Overall though, I expect the whole UX feeling to differ, but I am surprised that both camps have sort of given up on feature parity. Back in the days when "pull down to refresh" was novel it seems like iOS and Android meticulously copied each other's innovations.

They dont enforce the centralised settings. That is why it is maddening. Some apps have the settings in the settings app. Some do not.

They're both emphatically not fine from any erudite informed perspective of what has been better in the past.

I've used small-form factor DOS luggable-bricks, miniature Windows7 7" diagonal laptops (Fuji B112, B2131) obsessively since the epoch, also exotics like Fakespace NDOF dataGloves, yada~ and my usual combination of trackball magicMouse and 3D connextion SpaceNavigator on my desktops. Now I've got an Android tablet and an iPhone which are decidedly not 50 years better.

Neglecting the exotics, UX experience in DOS sometimes was better than, e.g. explicitly touching (yes DOS could do that) somewhere in the middle of a paragraph only to have the cursor leap to the beginning, end, select the entire paragraph (iOS18 or so..) or invoke some unintended 'gesture', and then require twenty more touches of adjustments to getthe selection right.

Using external near-fullsize BT keyboards which actually make typing tolerable on my iPh and DroidTab, I'm constantly taken 'aback' (to memories of the past) by having to remove a finger from the keyboard to the screen to accomplish some cursor positioning that might just as well be done with less trouble with a keyboard touchpad or mouse. I do use a tiny tactile feedback BT keyboard with it's own tiny thumb-trackPad which works nominally better than on-screen keybooards when I'm crunched for space and can't use near fullsize kbs.

  Oh.. there's speech-to-text these days. Something about my present set of afflictions is holding me back from venturing forth into that void. 

  Auto-spell correct, anything that interrupts the cadence of typing, because  waiting for CPU cycles or accomodating network delays - none of those 'helpful' things 'intruded' into UXs historically. These Gaffes could be easily wiped away by local high-priority code executing on handhelds which actually pays attention to the people trying to use devices these days, andm actually, timely respons to that.   

 One can see this pathologically simply by repurposing some old, deprecated thing like a Nexus4 phone not as a thermostat but as a Web client for music steaming. The Nex4 actually has a 1/8" mini audio-out jack!! Web pages are so hopelessly loaded down these days the Nex4 struggles, rendering them only slowly. Button presses may go completely unacknowledged for seconds until the button glyph actually changes. Almost like delays in auto-correct!!

  In an epoch of no tactile feedback on glass (maybe audio clicks..) Devs, frameworks, dn toolkits largely ignore all except 'the most recent browser' on 'the latest hardware' case, doing nothing and likely relying entirely on someone/thing esle (is there an acronym ofr this, like DNRY? It's someone ele's problem? >>ISEP<< to acomplish 'low level' requisite confirmations real humans depend on and use to see they've done something that affects the UI, and can continue on, e.g. type-ahead as was the case as of old. Gesture forward!, perhaps.. the UI will catch up. 

Yeah. What I'm used to. All those big keyboards, redundant left AND right handed mice, trackballs, ouch-tablets, and 46" diagonal screens that are still not big enough to not have annoying piles of windows scattered across half-dozen virtual screenspaces each filled with windows still obscuring one another .. while I'm confusedly and involuntarily warped back and forth between unrelated workspaces when all I 'intend' is to open yet aother window of some app like textEdit to use in/with whaterver I'm working on _in the screen I'm working in_. (OSX/MacOS are you listenting?)

  MacOS (as of Monterey, haven't gotten fa/urther) yet - has that 'application' (read: not _user_, nor _context_, nor _task_ centered behavior, _by design_. all AAPL genius, I'm sure. Yes I really want to see *all* my textEdit windows in Spaces. That makes a lot of sense when I have half dozen different unrelated tasks going on and need only another textedit window. Sure, hide *ALL* an applications windows when I hide only a single one. Like I don't exist and it won't take me half hour to find the one I need again. Forget that in X-Windows omg that's _dead_, Jim!! one could push a single window to the bottom of the window stack to get it out of the way and not have to minimize it to go search for it later in a micro-dock stripe with only enough room for half-dozen minimized (oh and fully descriptive)  window icons beside all those appicons. 

  The iPh sub-oops automagic rearrangements of screenfulls of colorful bouncing icons is particulay visceral insanity, All rearranging unpredictably when one is stuck amongst others, like some kind of entertaining visualization of a cocktail party. Android tries to rise to this level with some obscure thing in settings which completely obliterates perhaps tens of minutes of careful arrangement of multiple screenfulls of icons- all gone!  with what of course what is de-regeur in mobile smart-space now, no hint of 'back' or 'undo', anywhere. 
 
   If you want a summary, put an iPh1 next to a Droid, neglect the fact they absolutely will not talk to one another without multiple intervening clouds and laborious and error-prone interactive shovelling of 'takeouts' and exports of data involving visting dozens of WebPges, and likely only though some full sized PC/Mac intermediary, and simply contemplate how wildly baroquely different they are.

  Before I actually got one, I literally was incapable of using an iPh1, despite years of experience with Android and dozens and dozens of prior systems. I could say I'm yet pretty incapable now, a year on. a dozen years of OSX time doesn't help either. So many colorful icons I _NEVER_ use, filling my tiny little screen, glaring at me like they are hoping to induce a seizure. 

  Most glaring - what is abjectly absent with both Android and iOS. 'Messages' well there are different Icons, who wrote the App? Is that Meta's, or Apple's, or Google's, or someone else's messages? Oh my phone buzzed; some notification appears then disappears, irretrievably. Does one have to go the the AppStore, Play, or 'settings' to find out these things in the middle of trying to figure which app to use to reach someone?? 


  No 'info' hover-over (no hover over ever, I guess for touch, yet an uninvented 'gesture') Obscure and infuriating and undocumented (guess one has to buy the book, or read the mags, and fawn for a while) things like the phone UI changing such that the button to hang up a call, even the entire phone UI disappeared over on some other appView perhaps.. That one might search and find three identical names in contacts, none which can be edited with all the data of all the others still visible. None which can usuall be edited _AT ALL_ unless one is deep within the bowels of 'Contacts'. A name but no a phone number displayed. Which of that persons phones am I calling?

  DNRY - a mantra of devs, seriously the bane of UX. forced modeful dives into app ratholes when something is right in front of you and you don't have ten minutes to go into its' 'responsible' app to fix it. And Certaianly *NO WAY* can you edit it right then and there.  No one ever would think some magic invocation might be possible to enable doing literally anything which is possible to to with something that's right in front of you, displayed on your device. Sort of the non-authentication triple-A: anywhere, anytmie, anyplace.

   I've used some remarkably baroque UIs  - seems every single CAD package of any sort has it's own. Some like Blender resembling the empty bridge of the NC1701 Enterprise void of helpful crewmembers. Want to know hoa to use something? Nothings' 'idempotent' anymore - gotta go Google it.

Evolved over decades, CAD UIs takes years - longer than the replacement cycles of smartPhones - to become proficient at using them (and zillions in edu-industry tuition fees) Gamers it seems build stuff today with apparent intent that products they produce are 'affectively' challenging, archetype of a game. Perhaps this is intentional? After all the more attention,good or bad, or the money you have to pay to learn how to use something, the more ingratiated you are to continuing to use it, damn all the competition. Forget that like most all affective coding, cognitively burdens conseqently corrodes your abilities to acompplish higher-order objectives unrelated to navigating UIs to accomplsh your intentions.

No drag-and-drop, have to thumbsType everything character by character. Copy/cut/Paste selections when not impossible, barely controllable. Time is displayed but not the date. <eyes wander, sees clock at top of screen>

Gotta go.

Do you mean that new action button thingy above the volume controls? You can reassign to perform something else in the settings. Only a few options to choose from, but it's totally possible.

As for powering off, you can tap the ⏻ symbol in the upper right-hand side corner of the control center.

If you long press the lock button and volume increase at the same time you can turn the new iPhone off. I can’t imagine doing 5 clicks to do this!

Back tap is an accessibility feature, not intended for general public use.

Why is the toggle allowed at all? Presumably, sometimes we don't want apps to know where we are and record/share that to the highest bidder.

International travellers will know that some apps will alter behavior or refuse to work based on your location, if it's provided. If I use a VPN, I want the app or website to use only the IP location*, not the radio location.

If you are not actively benefitting from GPS, why let the man get a constant lock on your location? Make them suffer with cellphone tower pings.

I too keep GPS off unless I am navigating.

Increased privacy and decreased battery use when disabled, presumably.

I have this feeling for every software out there.

The problem isn’t so much that the original people aren’t there anymore - that’s just a fact of life, and is unavoidable.

The problem is that software design as a discipline has changed fundamentally in terms of core values. “Old school” designers had a bit more of a human factors training and would think about things like discoverability, information hierarchy, error recovery, etc. And the software from that era tended to be stable for many years in terms of design, in no small part because it shipped in boxes.

Current day designers work almost exclusively from a visual bling/marketing angle - what’s going to look good in a 5 second sizzle reel? And because software can be updated 5 times a day if you want, design is much more subject to the whims of a random exec/PM wanting to push their feature/whatever AB test is popular that week rather than stable, proven foundations.

The web, rather than desktop, being the primarily delivery vehicle for software also changes what kind of design gets built.

And with more and more software being AI designed in the years to come, this won’t get much better I’m afraid.

IMO Apple grew too much it became another slow megacorp, more connected to their quarterly reports and shareholders than their consumers and engineers. The growing Apple was the one that gave us innovation.

I'm not saying it's dead, not by far, but it has become stale. The biggest innovation it has made in 10+ years was using their mobile processors in laptops.

I think the problem is actually political capital.

Someone who deeply understands how to qualify the product.

But with enough political sway to tell entire orgs of 1000s employees to shred their timelines and planning docs and go back to the lab until it’s right.

Without those two pieces, the problem is that individual devs and leaders know that there’s a problem. But the KPIs and timelines must lurch onwards!

I don't think vibecoding is the solution to software quality problems, regardless of what tools/models you are using.

"Quality" and "features you happen to want" are two different things.

Their hardware is world class. Software? Not so much.

The most frustrating aspect of Siri's quality decline is that super-basic things inexplicably stop working. For years I have been able to say "call <wife's name>" and Siri called my wife. A couple weeks ago she started dialing another contact I haven't talked to in 15 years with a similarly-pronounced name (but different spelling). I had to delete the old contact to stop that behavior from happening.

I'll sometimes ask Siri to take me to a local address, and it'll instead pick some random address in a city 2500+ miles away and start routing me there like that's obviously what i wanted

I’m not sure if gitfriend is a typo.

I’m lonely and really want a gitfriend to push and merge with! Please tell the story of how you got one!

/s for the /s impaired

I had an iPhone for three months until I switched back to Android because the keyboard was trash. The one thing I could not believe is how even SwiftKey on iOS is horrible, even though it's my default keyboard on Android, and I've been very happy with it.

This comment explains why:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1l2gg3r/thirdparty_ios...

tl;dr: gatekeeping by Apple. Yes, it would probably be embarassing to Apple if someone built a way better touch keyboard.

3rd party keyboards are frequently banned from some of the bank apps, delivery services and so on.

This way you have to keep the default one anyway and make even more typos when yet another app forces you to get back to Apple’s keyboard.

I can’t even search stuff in my local delivery with SwiftKey

> 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.

This is an extremely popular bit of apocrypha that's repeated ad nauseam across reddit. It's more like a political truism than an observation on the behaviors of the silent majority re: Apple users.

> The silent majority is called that for a reason. It doesn't mean they are happy or content. Ignore that reality at your own peril.

It doesn't mean they're discontent either.

o/ I'm a silent majority member for sure. I've seen these complaints before and I nod my head every time remembering that "Oh yeah, this DOES suck but I just put up with it because it happens so frequently and there ain't no way I'm switching ecosystems".

Sidenote: please Apple, if I type the same misspelled (but not) thing two times in a row, just leave it be. And no, I did not mean "what the he'll". And why is selecting text so hard.

> 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 think I'm just #blessed with the specific American accent (or "no accent") they must have trained it on lol. On the other hand, Siri frequently mishears my wife who's from California but doesn't have what I would call an accent any different from mine, so who knows.

Yeah I used to love the iOS keyboard 5 or 6 years ago but now I find it completely baffling, and the way it goes back into my sentence to change words around the word I just typed is very frustrating as I will then have to edit those words back.

Dear Tim Apple, I meant exactly what I typed please stop changing it because your product manager doesn't think I know English.

I'm definitely willing to consider that. If it wasn't clear from my original comment, that was just my own impression based on my own experience and observation of HN/Reddit's anti-Apple trends over the past few years. It wasn't meant to be a rigorous assessment of all opinions regarding the state of apple devices.

What?

You don't get a blue bubble for using RCS. That's still reserved for iMessage exclusively. (At least, on iOS 26 in the US on T-Mobile)

Pretty sure that was sarcasm.

That’s not what this is about. If you have a group chat with one android user, it used to make all aspects of the interactions clunkier. Green bubbles, sending a new text instead of reactions, etc. as such, people would get left off of a list. Those small interactions add up over time.

Yes. Mean girls at school are mean. If everyone has the same color bubble they’ll just find something else to be mean about.

I'm not a highschooler, and you don't understand the point.

If you're not an American younger than 35, this is probably something you don't understand because you didn't experience first-hand.

It's not a scenario where "your friends refuse to talk to you", it's "there are so many people to talk to, and there is a lot of friction around talking to this one person". You don't get the chance to become their friends in the first place.

If you can't get on iMessage, you can't be in iMessage group chats.

Similarly, if you don't have a cell phone, you can't text. If you don't have a landline, people can't call you. If you don't have the internet, you can't get on chatrooms. You wouldn't expect a teenager in the 90s to give up a landline in favor of living exclusively by handwritten letter.

This is the state of friendship in the social media age.

The last sentence makes it clear that it is sarcasm

It was kind of true a very long time ago except in potato quality. And if you were out of data, but was connected on WiFi instead, you actually couldn't. And you still can't text a large video across the Android / iPhone chasm, can you?

I agree, Liquid Glass is the reason why I'll stop buying Apple products. In the meantime, my Mac is going to be stuck to Sequoia.

5 year old as in .. a child of 5 years old