just a few days into my iOS challenge I
started to look a little differently at the Apple users in my life they describe
Apple products with marketing slogans like it just works as though they
actually believe them and it made me wonder does Apple have one version of
their products for the True Believers and then a different one for the scrubs
like me because my time with the iPhone 16 plus has been absolutely riddled with
unintuitive design choices unnecessarily limited functionality and some of the
weirdest bugs that I've have encountered on a supposedly finished product in
years but Mama Sebastian didn't raise no
quitters so I've stuck it out for more than the month that I promised and I've
compiled a lot of thoughts both from myself and from helpful members of our
community who see the world through more pink lady lenses and some of their
points were extremely valid turns out I
really was just holding it wrong and over time there's a lot about iOS that
I've learned to love even on my own but there's also a lot that well to say how
I really feel I'd probably have to use language that might not sit well with my
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check it out using our link today let's kick this off with some positive vibes I
am a big fan of the app Library I know it isn't new but as someone who hasn't
daily driven an iOS device in a while it's new to me and any effort to
organize the pure chaos that most of us carry around in our pockets is much
appreciated like finally the ability to put your icons anywhere you want I also
appreciate the intuitive and Slick way that iOS handles switching between
picture and picture and background media playback I mean how cool is this as for
my other primary use of my phone you know phone calls that got a big
improvement too I get so many different
kinds of calls these days phone teams WhatsApp whatever and iOS streamlines
this experience by unifying the interface between all these different
apps which is especially nice when I'm in the car it even consolidates my call
logs so I don't have to remember who prefers what when I mash a contact to
call them back multi- widget Stacks are super cool I don't actually know if
they're new or not but I don't really care quick access and high information
density all always get a thumbs up from me and I use them all the time to
quickly check the weather quickly check my calendar now I've heard that these
are a thing on newer Samsung devices as well but look this video is not a
comprehensive comparison Matrix of every software feature that's ever existed
it's my thoughts on coming back to iOS after an extended absence and some of
those changes really are refreshing screenshot management has leveled up in
a big way and is full of nice to haves like I love the ability to quickly
delete rather than archive my screenshot after I've shared it with someone and I
love the little popup in the dynamic Island to help manage my airpods if
they're paired to my laptop already and I'm sitting working but an incoming
phone call comes in it'll be like hey want me to grab those and I'm like yeah
thanks actually any sort of interaction between the iPhone and other Apple
devices is pretty great like my Apple watch unlocking without needing to mash
in the pin if I have my phone unlocked nearby so efficient speaking of
efficiency I probably plugged this thing into my nightstand to charge maybe four
or five times over the entire month plus that I was using it which Probably
sounds Bonkers but what I found was that just plugging in during my daily commute
plus the occasional longer trip was enough to keep me going for literally a
week at a time unless I was binging a
show all day or something iOS then noticed this and piped up with a
suggestion that I switch to 80% maximum charging in order to prolong the life of
my battery that is the kind of proactive user handholding that I can really get
behind and the same goes for how aggressive iOS gets about prompting the
user to mute or block app notifications
and tracking to be clear Android's tools for managing these things are pretty
good too actually very granular but what
Android doesn't do is get all up in your grill about them like iOS does which
results in an experience where if you get a notification on your iPhone you
can be pretty darn sure that it's something you wanted to see or you can
easily get rid of it now pretty much everything so far has been mostly to do
with the software but I've got to say I kind of like the hardware too the screen
on the iPhone 16 family is incredible
with outstanding brightness for watching videos outside not to mention their
super dim mode that supposedly gets all the way down to one knit and makes
nighttime reading way more comfortable for me uh oh here's a fun one you know
how phones are supposed to be you know phones I'm getting way better call and
data reception near my house and not just against my ancient note 9 but even
against my wife's Galaxy s23 Ultra so I can finally close my garage door from
the driveway all right you guys think that's enough positivity to appease the
Apple stands if not I could probably keep going for an entire video's worth
but unfortunately I could probably go multiple videos about the things that I
didn't love so much so we should probably address at least some of them
let's start with how slow the device feels which okay no wait hold on step
away from the comment section I recognize this is absolutely not a slow
device but that makes it all the more frustrating when it feels like Apple's
interface decisions are holding me back like the animations they're beautiful I
love the way the home screen icons come flying in the first time that it loads
after you set up a new iPhone but I don't need to see it every time I unlock
my phone guys guys I've got urgent Facebook Marketplace Doom scrolling to
do and yes before you ask I did turn on
reduce motion and I even tried prefer Crossfade another gorgeous animation by
the way but none of that had the desired effect of getting the fluff out of my
way so I can just use my phone I'm just picking what I get to look at while I
wait for the UI to catch up with me while we're at it by the way why is this
setting and so many other useful ones hidden away in accessibility options I
can't change that unne necessary slowdowns are going to bother me like
this thing that Apple does where it animates all the steps to get to a
setting that I have searched for or clicked a shortcut to the rationale that
I've heard for this behavior is that it's trying to teach me where I should
have gone but I got there with a shortcut is that not an okay way to do
it who cares if I know all the breadcrumbs adding insult to injury
depending on how I try to go back I get to click through all of those screens
that it zipped through on the way back to the thing I actually cared about
which brings me to a pretty big subject
going back on iOS is objectively bad and
okay all right something can't be objectively bad but what it can be is
objectively inconsistent which from a user interface and user experience
standpoint is well objectively bad I
can't believe that Apple still hasn't mandated an official Apple way to go
back they seem to be big fans of the swipe in from the left but they only use
it just enough to trick you into thinking that it should work all the
time and then bam an app hits you with clicking on the top left like my old
iPhone 4 or cancelling in the top right like this and even the occasional swipe
in another Direction now app makers
absolutely share some of the blame for this but guys we are 17 years into this
experiment so I think it might be time for Apple to just take the darn RS or
maybe in other cas is loosen them overall I found carplay to be pretty
okay uh my car doesn't have a physical button for previous track so if I wanted
to have media controls and my map on screen at the same time I had to use
split screen which I don't prefer I like a nice big map but that's probably more
of a Mii problem and you can't blame the handset makers for all the dumb things
that the car manufacturers are going to do so let's not worry about that let's
worry about the bugginess that I experienced every once in a while the
volume would shank itself and I ran into
this issue twice it's probably worth noting I saw this with some random
Bluetooth earbuds too though so maybe it's not carplay related actually now
that I think about it there were more problems with audio notification volume
would occasionally go super loud there's all the
cabling which is apparently an iOS 18 bug and compared to Android adjusting
the volume level of anything you aren't actively using is super nonobvious like
Andy how do I change the volume of my like system tap sounds when I'm
listening to Media for ex for example you just m it no but like how do I
change the volume of that I don't know if you've never touched Android
this is going to blow your freaking mind no matter what I'm doing if I touch the
volume button I can adjust my ring tone
my notifications my media and my system
sounds the fact that that doesn't
exist iOS users should be rioting in the streets
I know this next one is going to get lost in translation as Android and
iPhone users are coming from completely different experiences here but oh my
goodness the iPhone keyboard is missing so many things that I completely take
for granted as basic functions of an Android keyboard for example while the
iOS keyboard does let you hold down a key in order to modify your letters with
whatever diacritical Mark you need or even sneak in the occasional Thorn yog
or esset Android lets you use the same Tech technique to access numbers and
common punctuation from the first layer of the keyboard you can even dial in the
delay so that you barely have to slow down to insert one of those secondary
characters and this is an absolute godsend for those of us who write our
texts like our AP English 12 teacher my greatest on them now I tried switching
over to my usual alt keyboard swift key on iOS but somehow all these years later
it is still trash on the iPhone core features are missing like the
aforementioned long press tuning and even the ability to resize the keyboard
and in general it just feels off with worse predictions and a more tedious
process for going back and making Corrections like maybe I want to type
rhis it autoc corrects to this I go back
when no no I meant rhis and I should be
able to fix the accidental auto correct and my capitalization at the same time
on the iPhone not so much now if I had
to guess I'd say that this limitation probably comes down to Apple giving
keyboard apps far less access to user inputs which is probably a good thing
but it makes for an overall significantly worse typing experience on
my keyboard of choice which also just would occasionally disappear leaving me
with the default weird now one thing that's better about iOS is the super
responsive long press keyboard shortcut to reposition the cursor I like it but I
also don't struggle with fine motor control and it's usually faster for me
to just tap the point in the middle of a word anyway so not being able to do that
on the iPhone actually kind of drove me crazy now I've got a lot more things to
get through so let's uh rapid fire a few I can't get to the home screen without
physically swiping the screen after authenticating and then it's animation
time again just got out of my way and let me use my phone I can't change the
size of the app grid I'm stuck at four wide on the normal iPhone 16 that would
be fine but if you're giving me all these extra pixels on the plus
I'd really like to use them it's like they intend for their larger devices to
just be for the elderly or people who have trouble with the smaller screens
and here's a weird one I ran into this problem while rearranging apps I think
maybe the ones I place manually might behave differently than the ones that
are automatically placed sometimes it just gets confused I don't know In
fairness Apple's new to this whole putting things where you want them thing
and here's a funny one when I was migrating in the first place Apple's mov
to iOS app failed twice before actually
working and even then it basically just copied SMS photos and WhatsApp I had to
manually sign into to everything including my Google account which left
me wondering what exactly was the point of this I'm not sure but I'd like to
talk about that Google account for a minute in the past iOS had an account
section in the settings app where you could centrally manage and sync your different accounts for email calendar
contacts all that kind of stuff that seems to be gone now but I work for a G
Suite organization so I'm going to need my Google Calendar to tell me what it is
that I am doing today this is where past experience with iOS got in my way the
account setting was gone and I couldn't find an obvious way to add an account in
the calendar app so I started looking for workarounds and ultimately
discovered that if you open the iOS mail app it immediately prompts you to add a
Google Mail account which will also sync my Google Calendar in the native
calendar app now I ended up getting attacked pretty hard for calling this
out on the WAN Show but I'm holding firm that this is a prime example of
spectacularly unintuitive design the justification I was given for this is
that app settings including accounts should be managed from within the
settings app and the apps menu and then the individual app and that is Apple's
aspiration but as we've seen with back functionality Apple's aspirations don't
always match reality so let's play a quick game called find the account
management menu in the app yeah this one's in the
app another one that's in the app hm
they're pretty much all within the apps themselves and while the first party
mail app does have account management buried four layers deep within the menu
the Apple preferred way for some reason it still prompts you to sign in that
first time you open it meaning that if you're trying to sign into an account
from within an app that is a perfectly
reasonable expectation even if you had no prior experience with other platforms
the good news for Apple though is that the solution to this is simple when I
click calendars add calendar add calendar and then I have this account
thing here that should just be a drop down that should prompt me to add
another account instead of it just doing nothing you're welcome now to be clear
this isn't a deal breaker by any means it just means the next time that an
Apple fan tells me it's just just so gosh darn intuitive I don't know if I'm
going to be able to help it I might actually laugh in their face maybe a
little Doom scrolling will calm me down and oh boy if you want the long version
of this rant you can check out the W show from a couple of weeks ago but the
tldr is when I flick my finger in my
news feed or on Reddit I expect the screen to move at the same speed that my
finger moved and then decelerate from there I do not expect it to move at
whatever relaxed chill Pace that some
apple focus group has determined is the most aesthetically pleasing in order to
hide their 60 HZ refresh rate another thing I touched on during that wow
segment is buttons particularly this new
camera button here out of the box I kept accidentally hitting it only to have a
user point out to me that I could configure it to require a double click
huh well that's super cool I thought I wonder what other apps I could make it
LO no camera and Camera adjacent only
speaking of the camera boy was that an upgrade though as someone coming from a
six-year-old device I don't know what to say other than I should hope so and
besides my main focus isn't on the particular iPhone but rather My overall
experience with iOS 18 an experience I could probably go on for hours about but
Tim Apple a more relevant meme than ever these days doesn't have hours to watch
this video so how about I boil it down to just one thing that I need fixed
let's talk about rotation locks most iPhone users I run into don't even
realize this but for a good 10 years now
you've been able to lock an iPad in landscape orientation but not an iPhone
now we use iPhones as our teleprompters here at lus Media Group and because we
can't lock them in landscape mode we have to train all of our camera
operators in a maneuver that we call the dip to reorient the screen it's
something we do so often that we don't even really think about it anymore so
why bring it up because when I was going
through the list of apps in my account since the migration wizard didn't
actually copy my apps over like it said it would and I had to do so manually I
came across jetpack joy ride and I was like oh my goodness I haven't played
that since the last time I daed iOS it's been years and I immediately fired it up
I played it for a second then I put my phone down to make a note about
something and when I picked it back up the game was upside down I showed this
on the W show as well I gave it the old wiggle I tried to reorient it but no it
would only work in one of the two possible landscape orientations what the
heck Apple these kinds of arbitrary
distinctions like which way is the approved landscape orientation assuming
I'm allowed to be in landscape at all do nothing for your user they do nothing
for your profits so why to be clear iOS
has come a long way over the last few years and it can do so much more than it
used to do find my as a godsend Spotlight still rules TOS airdrop is
legitimately super cool as long as everyone around me has an iPhone but
Apple still has some work to do to be willing to accept that after the iPhone
leaves the factory it's my iPhone and if
I want to hold it like this instead of like this or I want to use it as a
teleprompter that's my business if I want to move the dynamic Island to the
other side that should be my decision too and until Apple's willing to truly
Embrace that rather than begrudgingly give us little breadcrumbs I just don't
think this is for me which doesn't mean that it's bad if you love your iPhone
and it works for you you are not wrong
just don't get upset if you run around declaring that your preferred ecosystem
is the best and not everyone agrees with you especially if you've never spent
significant time on the other side of the Divide maybe we need some kind of
cultural Exchange program you know like 6 months of seeing how the other half
lives that could be a really interesting experiment now if you'll excuse me I
need to go hide from some Fanboys oh but not before I tell you about our sponsor
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