Comment by jclardy
13 hours ago
I think the best example is in iOS. On old iOS versions, the keyboard responsiveness took precedence over everything, no matter what. If you touched the keyboard, it would respond with an animation indicating what you are doing. The app itself may be frozen, but the self contained keyboard process would continue on, letting you know the app you are using is a buggy mess.
Now in iOS 26, you can just be typing in Notes or just the safari address bar for example, and the keyboard will randomly lag behind and freeze, likely because it is waiting on some autocomplete task to run on the keyboard process itself. And this is on top of the line, modern hardware.
A lot of the fundamentals that were focused on in the past to ensure responsiveness to user input was never lost, became lost. And lost for no real good reason, other than lazy development practices, unnecessary abstraction layers, and other modern developer conveniences.
Yeah long ago when I was doing some iOS development, I can remember Apple UX responsives mantras like “don’t block the main thread”, as it’s the thing responsible for making app UIs snappy even when something is happening.
Nowadays seems like half of Apple’s own software blocks on their main thread, like you said things like keyboard lock up for no reason. God forbid you try to paste too much text into a Note - the paste will crawl to a halt. Or, on my M4 max MacBook, 128GB ram, 8tb ssd, Photos library all originals saved locally - I try to cmd-R to rotate an image - the rotation of a fully local image can sometimes take >10 seconds while showing a blocking UI “Rotating Image…”, it’s insane how low the bar has dropped for Apple software.
This trend was obvious when they started removing physical buttons. My thought was, man these people do put so much faith in software.