Comment by mvkel

2 months ago

This is true in iOS, too. Taps are ignored until any animation completes. Must be deep in the code!

That's entirely app-level issue; the frameworks and the system itself is perfectly capable of handling this. [1]

It's just that for _most_ cases it's perfectly fine to make the users wait until the animations is finished, and handling users tapping multiple things in a quick succession can get annoying and unwieldy.

There are some apps when it's infuriating though, especially when they're quadruply badly engineered and _tie the internal logic state_ to the UI state.

As someone living in a country where I don't speak the local language, I swear at Google Translate engineers daily because I do a "swap the active pair of languages and then quickly launch the camera mode" combo _very_ frequently, and the selected pair of languages isn't actually updated _until the animation finishes_.

It's maddening. [2]

[1]: A quick demo: tap an app on a Springboard to open it, and very quickly swipe up from the bottom to hide it. You'll absolutely be able to interrupt the animation of it launching.

[2]: I'm actually sorta guessing that this is a workaround for a different bug they had; when if you tapped this quickly enough a couple of times you could end up in a situation where the UI displayed a different pair of languages than the internal logic had, so they added that delay, but who knows, maybe I'm theorycrafting too much.

  • The -only- time I experience it infuriatingly is in iOS natively.

    For example: on the Home Screen, open a folder, then tap outside it to bring back the Home Screen. While the animation is happening, try opening an app. It won't.

    Open the camera app. Swipe between modes and press the shutter button. It won't work until the animation completes.

    An especially egregious one: open messages. Tap the + sign, and tap the letter P while it's animating. I had to tap the letter 10 times before it finally started showing Ps.

    The OS is riddled with them.

    • I wasn’t claiming that Apple apps are immune to this, or even noticeably better — just that this is very much not a OS-level limitation, and something that _can_ be accomplished.

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