iPhones are hard to use - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fawny.org/2018/10/22/hardtouse/ <comment><USER5> Most of this article just lists semi-advanced features that people don't know about. I think that's Apple's intention...

Having every feature and option up in your face can reduce usability and make simple tasks harder for the average user. Apple wants a product that's easy for anyone to use and that often means keeping non-essential features out of the way.

I'd be more interesting in seeing feedback for Apple on how to improve the situation without compromising on ease of use.

(Regarding the WiFi thing...I agree this is a very annoying default setting, but I think a worse outcome is when a user shows up in their friend's house and has no idea how to connect to the WiFi. Making the user go to Settings -> WiFi to disable this prompt means they've demonstrated they'll be able to go back to that page to manually connect to a network in the future. If you turn this setting off on a friend's phone, be sure they still know how to connect manually.

(Though I do think iOS could be smarter and not prompt you to connect to intermittent networks while you're driving around a city...))

<comment><USER6> The problem lies in what's _semi-advanced_ to one is critical or basic to many others. Apple has been known to hide (aka. make subtle) basic operations. How often have you wanted to load a page in 'desktop mode' in mobile Safari? It's there, just invisibly so. The UI does not teach in the name of clean/minimal design which is Apple's way: form over function.

Edit: it's the equivalent to not putting keyboard shortcut keystrokes into pull down menus.

<comment><USER7> Steve Jobs was heavily against hidden functionality (sorry there is a word for it I can't remember off the top of my head). It's why Macs had one-button mice for so long. It wasn't until the third major revision of the OS that iPhones got copy+paste!

<comment><USER8> > Steve Jobs was heavily against hidden functionality (sorry there is a word > for it I can't remember off the top of my head). It's why Macs had one- > button mice for so long.

That doesn't make sense at all to me: The right click button on a mouse is visible.

The Mac way of hiding it behind the ctrl key was non-discoverable and non- obvious to me.

<comment><USER9> Or under pull down menus... or context menus... or...

Force touch just seems like a different form of right mouse clicking.

<comment><USER10> I know a few people who - even after trying - can't make "force touch" work properly. I love it and try to show them. But they can't seem to make the effort to learn it.

<comment><USER11> I know at quite a few people that have not upgraded their iPhone 6-vintage phones simply because they found 3D/force Touch to be a really significantly negative feature, and just flat don't want it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most people know it's controversial to say "iPhones are hard to use" because most people feel that the iPhone, perhaps more than any other technological innovation in the past 20 years, made technology easy to access, use, and integrate with their lives.

To say 'iPhones are hard to use' and then point out all the small edge cases of use as significant flaws is hyperbole in bad faith. The author is caught up in his own intellectual habit and not in touch with reality.

A better title for this article could be 'Simplifying complexity inevitably sidelines some of some user's needs'.

<comment><USER13> But then nobody would read it

<comment><USER14> Well sure, the profit-motive explains clickbait (or in this case, wanting readership; I see no ads).

We should still keep it off HN. I expect the headlines to work for me, not for the author.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's a lot to unpack here, and a lot to disagree with, as I believe there's plenty of evidence Apple cares _a lot_ about accessibility.

Also harping on specific terminology like password vs passcode is not really productive in terms of improving the underlying UX, as the word gets translated into tons of languages which may or may not have the same level of nuance.

While I don't necessarily agree with the premise, especially when compared with the competition, I will say that _iOS has not gotten easier to use over time_. Features like 3D touch are implemented inconsistently both at the hardware level, and in the UX — Worst is how undiscoverable they are. Here's the crazy part: Apple is about to release the iPhone XR, their _1 and only phone without 3D touch!_.

<comment><USER16> It's gotten worse. Screens keep getting bigger, but more and more functionality keeps getting hidden behind undiscoverable swipes and taps. I've been an iPhone user since the 3G, I used to program computers for a living, and I don't have a reliable mental model of what the available gestures even are these days. I'm reduced to randomly tapping and pressing and swiping like some sort of idiot.

<comment><USER17> I'm generally dismayed at the state of UX in general, and mobile UX in particular, these days.

It feels like we have regressed a lot from where we were in the "golden age of the desktop". I mean, we actually had standards for things - remember CUA? And UX was designed in a way that made it so that once you learn a few basic tricks (like double click and drag and drop), they would work everywhere, and they would do so _consistently_. Consistency, in general, was key to the UX of that era. Some things might not have been as easy to access as they are today, but all things could be found where you expected them. Even the menu hierarchy was largely standardized.

Now, even if you stick to one particular platform, it often changes the concepts radically within 4-5 years; and many of those aren't even consistently applied. Worse yet, instead of fixing the mess, the UX designers just keep piling more and more stuff, like Apple's "3D touch".

<comment><USER18> 20 year UX veteran here. It's absolutely unheard of for UX to be the final arbiter on marketing &/or development driven features.

To take your 3D touch example. I'll bet it went a little something like this; development said 'we can now detect pressure', leads (inc UX) brainstormed on ways to utilise the functionality. Then it's soley on UX to make it usable.

I've never been involved in a situation where I get to demand capabilities that hitherto did not exist. Nor have I ever held the power to stop-ship. We have varying degrees of touch on functionality as it evolves for sure but not the power you assume we have.

We don't live in a reality where any company, Apple specifically, says 'hey customers, we realised we actually got things right on the last release, please give us more money 'cos shareholders'

<comment><USER19> Product design is inherently a push system. If it was needs-based pull, the world would be slightly different.

If everything was evaluated by cybersecurity and UX experts first, we wouldn't have half the problems, but people aren't interested in those sorts of issues, it is more of a matter of getting there "firstest with the mostest".

<comment><USER20> > If everything was evaluated by cybersecurity and UX experts first, we > wouldn't have half the problems

That's an extremely brash assumption. The reason privacy and security haven't been built into the core of everything we do is because the ease of use within highly secure systems is inversely proportional to it's UX. The more secure you want something to be, the harder it is to learn and use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have been an android-windows user for the longest time, and using Apple devices is among the most difficult things I've had to do.

I have used windows phone, linux, chrome OS, Blackberry's palm-like UI over the years, but I have gotten the hang of each over a small period of time. Apple devices however, are simply counter intuitive for me.

Apple seems to design UI for 2 types of people.

1\. Old Apple users 2\. The person whose phone use is the same as it was 15 years years ago + an app launcher

Because of those, I have seen 2 negative trends in their UI/UX design :

1\. Sticking to old but familiar (for Apple customers) ways, even if they are cumbersome. (itunes) 2\. Front loading everything that is heavily used by a layman (their launcher and quick setting menu), and hiding everything else behind a bevy of menus in settings.

If you have not grown up thinking like an Apple user and want to do anything advanced (my demographic), then their interface is incredibly alienating. The only other time I have felt this way has been when using SnapChat. (although Snap's was a lot more egregious than Apple)

I used an iPad for 2 months this Summer, and swapped it out for a Fire HD 10. As much as the iPad was fast, I can't be happier to be back to familiar territory in Android (even if it is on 5.1 Lollipop)

Granted, that my demographic may be the minority, esp. in the US. But, I can't help but feel, that the incessant praise showered on Apple's devices is partly because of the greater familiarity people have with those devices. And, that Apple won't fare as well if they were to be evaluated by an audience unfamiliar with their brand and devices all together.

<comment><USER22> When the Android phones came on the market, I was extatic. Linux, in my pocket!

However, Android did not live up to my expectations at all. I don't know what I was hoping for, but Android was not it.

After a while I came to understand that for me personally Android was a bad fit, and everything I had envisioned about running Linux on my phone was ill- adviced. Linux and FreeBSD are my main two operating systems I run on my own computers and servers, and I would not trade them for anything in the world on my main laptop, main desktop and servers. But on phones neither have anything to offer that is of use to me actually.

I don't really understand what kind of "advanced" things you are referring to not being possible on iOS. Could you expand on that?

I use my iPhone for web browsing, watching videos, making music, playing some games, taking photos, 2nd factor auth, sending and receiving money, SSH client in my pocket, GPS with updated maps, listening to music, writing down notes, setting alarms, keeping track of my schedule, keeping in touch with people, creating PDFs that are indistinguishable from the scan a full size flatbed scanner would give me. The list goes on.

Everything I thought I wanted when I imagined having Linux in my pocket turned out to be a distraction. When I need Linux or FreeBSD, I have my laptop, desktop and servers for that.

Anyway, the point is to say that I don't identify with the two groups of people you said are their target audience, but I find myself a very happy iPhone user.

But I am not married to Apple, and I am a loyal customer only because of 1. their stance on privacy and security and 2. their product fits me so well.

If they mess up with my trust then they will lose me as a customer. If they make changes to iOS that make using it bothersome, they will lose me as a customer.

<comment><USER23> > I don't really understand what kind of "advanced" things you are referring > to not being possible on iOS. Could you expand on that?

I could give you one. An actual user-accessible filesystem instead of having only iCloud plus siloed app-specific storage. (No, Apple's eventual capitulation to include a "Files" app which just aggregates files from different apps doesn't count.)

<comment><USER24> Seconded. Hiding the filesystem is both destroying productivity and fucking up people's mental model of computing. I hate when people build abstractions that _lie to you_ about the way things work - because lies are always inconsistent, they'll eventually leak and confuse people.

Proficient users aren't born, they're made. Or, increasingly, _not made_ , thanks to contemporary UX trends.

<comment><USER22> I am not sure that the way files are usually presented is actually that much better.

You and I know that a file is data and a file format is defined by the structure of the data.

Most regular users I have talked to don't know this. If you ask them what a file format is they will say that the file format is determined by the extension of the file.

Even with a file system presented to the user you still end up with most people not having a real understanding of what files actually _are_.

Likewise, a lot of users will insist that certain file formats "belong" to some particular program, just because the extension associated with the format is handled by that program on their computer.

Furthermore, most users have no idea what really happens when you open a file in a program.

In fact I would bet that at least some are completely unable to distinguish the data of the file from the interface that they are using to edit the file.

A file system is a powerful abstraction, but I don't think it teaches the "truth" on its own.

Neither do I think knowing about files is the most important for someone wishing to understand computation.

The most important to understand is what a data format is, and knowing that knowing the details of the byte-level structure of the data is what allows software to be implemented to interact with and optionally transform that data.

Furthermore, I wish more people knew some fundamental things about data like

\- the difference between text and an image of text

\- the difference between bitmap and vector graphics

\- the difference between lossy and lossless compression, and how these work

\- why some formats are hard to work with, for example extracting data from PDF files

Etc.

Understanding these things does not require a user visible fs, nor will a user visible fs help most people understand these things for reasons I stated earlier in this comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is another case of Apple being held to a higher standard than competitors in the market.

Apple literally revolutionised the smartphone market with the simple usability of the iPhone. Of course, there are things that can be improved (with many decent suggestions from the author that most power users would agree with) but based on the author's mild annoyances and casual observations that elderly, visibly challenged or foreign language people do not always know about features that can help them, iPhones are now "hard to use". That's quite an unfair title. There's zero consideration by the author of how many hundreds of millions of people perform so many of the same tasks (email, messaging and navigation) almost seamlessly everyday using an iPhone. Our human nature is to only notice things that 'dont't work' though. It would be interesting to see how the same people mentioned in the article fare on an Android device.

This article reminds me of the time when the iOS alarm clock app had a bug that caused the alarm to go off one hour later on some random Sunday and it made headlines in all the tech press. Compared to the accepted norm that malware apps are almost routinely found in the public Google Play store.

<comment><USER26> > Compared to the accepted norm that malware apps are almost routinely found > in the public Google Play store.

To add to the author's list of things that iPhone users don't know that Apple keeps hidden, several orders of magnitude more iPhone users have been infected with malware than Google Play Store users despite the Play Store having several orders of magnitude more users.

[https://www.macrumors.com/2015/09/20/xcodeghost-chinese- malw...](https://www.macrumors.com/2015/09/20/xcodeghost-chinese-malware-faq/)

<comment><USER27> Given that it is reported on a very well known Apple blog and Apple released a statement on the issue I don't think you can say they are hiding it.

So a quick google for xcodegohst brings up a Wikipedia page and widespread main steam news coverage (including BBC), with quotes from Apple - <USER2> not hidden at all.

<comment><USER26> Apple underreported the number of affected apps by two orders of magnitude, reported that only on its Chinese website (even though millions of users outside of China were affected), took down even that report shortly after (it now loads a marketing page), and left the apps on users' phones. [https://www.fireeye.com/blog/executive- perspective/2015/09/p...](https://www.fireeye.com/blog/executive- perspective/2015/09/protecting_our_custo.html)

I consider anything that Apple says to be an ephemeral marketing gimmick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Ok, I need to say it. This article just has iPhone in the title to get more views. This is a problem with not just all smartphones but all rapidly evolving technology products. Do you think you could hand an android phone to one of those example cases and have them do any better with it?

Also half of the time I am in an apple store I am helped by someone who needs to use the accessibility features to check me out/in. I think it is awesome that Apple dog foods their products that way.

<comment><USER29> Just because all companies handle the problem space really badly, doesn't mean we should excuse it.

Apple products, as far as I can remember, do not come with any sort of manual describing the nifty little shortcuts that they have. Even as someone who did IT support and handled a lot of iPhone troubleshooting constantly, I got blindsided by lots of small things, like when they switched the force reboot from power+home to power+volume down, or whatever it is now.

If you have a feature but nobody knows how to use it, is it really helpful?

<comment><USER30> The "Tips" feature (Swipe left from home) points you right to the User Guide downloadable from the Books app for the device. It also prompts you with this info shortly after you finish setting up the device. It's a 600+ page manual that describes every single button, gesture, function, menu, for every preinstalled app on the phone.

There's a section that describes most everything that has changed in the newest iOS release.

<comment><USER31> _The "Tips" feature (Swipe left from home)_

I think this is sort of his point. How in the world am I supposed to know to do that?

<comment><USER30> Well there are many ways to get there, tap the Tips app that is preinstalled on the home screen on a newly setup iOS device. As I said, it also sends a notification shortly after device setup directing you there.

<comment><USER29> I've literally never seen the Tips app. Granted, I haven't had a new device in a while; but I don't recall this being present when I bought my iPhone 7, and it certainly didn't show up when I upgraded to iOS 12 over the weekend. And as someone who has had iOS devices for a while, I'm not sure that I would ever get it, since my first thing is usually to just transfer a backup to my new phone.

The point is, devices used to come with a manual that had at least some guidance on how to use a device. It may not have exposed everything, but it told you the basics. Apple, anecdotally, has outsourced this to Google and the kindness of strangers like yourself, to tell me how my device works. And that's the biggest CX failure for me.

I've honestly considered switching to Android many times because the iOS premium no longer seems justified in terms of hardware or UX, and at this point the only thing stopping me is my suspicion of Google.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, the Tips app is new in iOS 11. It might have been relegated to some "Preinstalled" app group somewhere or pushed to one of the last pages. It's definitely front and center on new phones now.

<comment><USER32> The Tips app was new as of iOS 9:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20151204044205/http://www.apple....](https://web.archive.org/web/20151204044205/http://www.apple.com/iphone-6s/specs/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> My mum is 68 now. I first got her a windows phone. I taught her how to make calls. That was it. Then a month later I got a string of text message.

Hello

Son

Is

This

Working

?

She worked out how to send texts.

I upgraded her to an old iphone. I sent it to her in the mail. She worked out everything including how to take photos. I told her about LINE and she found the App Store and downloaded it.

Her phone died so I bought her an android cos I couldn't afford the iphone.

She can't figure it out at all. She had to go to the store to ask how to connect to wifi. How to use the play store, etc.

I thought cos she went iphone > android she would be able to pick it up. That isn't the case.

iPhones may have hidden features. But they are a lot easier to pick up than an android phone by a Long shot as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER34> Once you get used to one O/S, the other becomes harder, because instead of just not knowing any of the conventions, you've actively trained the wrong ones.

<comment><USER33> My mum went from Windows Phone to iPhone without issue. I didn't have to teach her anything about the iPhone. To me that suggests either Windows Phone / iOS are similar (they aren't) or intuitive.

<comment><USER34> I mainly use Android, have an iPhone, and the differences are constantly tripping me up. To the point where the claim that iPhones are user-friendly feels intuitively completely wrong to me. I always want to point to the wifi thing, or the lack of periods and commas on the keyboard, or the terrible home-screen arrangement/customization stuff as ironclad proof that the iPhone is less user-friendly.

But that's not actually it. People who go from iPhone to Android find Android difficult to use. People who go from Android to iPhone find iOS difficult to use.

<comment><USER35> I went from iPhone to Android and struggled but now I have serious trouble using iOS devices.

I'm now convinced the greatest UI innovation this century is the Back button. If IBM PC keyboards had a big dedicated "back" key the world would have a been a much better place.

<comment><USER36> I very rarely use iPhones but when I do I have no idea how anything is supposed to work without a back button.

<comment><USER37> I guess they end up being soft buttons on the screen.

<comment><USER38> In inconsistent places. In many UIs they're on the top left. In the browser it's on the bottom left?

So weird.

<comment><USER39> You can however consistently swipe from the left side of the screen to go back. There are a couple of apps which I suspect were not written by iOS users where this functionality is broken (such as Valve's Steam iOS app), but those are far in the minority.

<comment><USER38> It isn't necessarily consistent.

I used my coworker's iPhone yesterday, opening a link from a text message, and couldn't figure out how to go back to the message. Swiping in from the left side went back... within the browser, which had no back history. I had to go to the home screen and open text messages again.

On Android, you just hit the back button and it goes back to the previous app in the stack if you launched one app from another.

<comment><USER39> It's consistently going back in the context of the app you're in.

If you want to go back to the previous app you can swipe from the left on the home indicator, or on older iPhones swipe from the left with force.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I recently switched to iOS from Android after years on Android. I'm coming from being a daily macOS user for almost a decade. I would argue that iOS should no longer be considered the more "user friendly" of the two. That might have been the case years ago, but iOS seems to expect prior experience with what I can only guess are iOS paradigms specifically.

Almost every important action I need to take in an iOS app is hidden behind a gesture. In Android apps, gestures are value adds. They make on-screen actions or actions accessable through contextual menus quicker to accomplish for the experienced user. In iOS they're essential to accomplish some tasks.

<comment><USER41> Can you give some specific examples? I'm so thoroughly baked into iOS that I don't notice these potential issues.

<comment><USER42> Opening the app switcher is essentially a gesture. As is opening quick settings. Opening notifications makes a little more sense as notifications appear at the top of the screen. Rearranging the home screen is also a gesture.

<comment><USER41> Thanks, fair examples. How is home screen arrangement handled in android?

<comment><USER42> A long press on the icon you want to move and you've picked it up (it comes "closer" to you and moves to be exactly under your finger). Drag it around and other icons will move around to preview/indicate where it'd be. Let go and it drops into place. There is no jiggling. You can also drag to Remove or Uninstall (Remove leaves it in the alphabetical app drawer).

Creating folders is the same as iPhone.

There is a caveat that if the icon was held very still then you'll open a menu similar to 3D touch menu. I never use this because it isn't that discoverable.

<comment><USER41> Other than the jiggling that's the exact same method as iOS, unless I'm missing something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> All tech is hard to use. All our interfaces expect a certain amount of familiarity with abstract concepts that have little to no relation to the real world. Most people get by because they memorize the most obvious processes (how to save a file) and build their own largely incorrect mental models that happen to give the correct results most of the time (assuming a consistent environment). As soon as something minor breaks or changes, these models become completely useless.

I've had somebody come to a PC repair shop for columns being the wrong size in Thunderbird. She wasn't a dumb person, but it's clearly a deeply flawed and incomplete understanding of the interface and computers in general that led to her inability to cope with the entirely new state of her desktop (yes, I'm still talking about the columns).

</comment><comment><USER44> > If Apple actually cared about accessibility (it does not), on the setup > screen for every iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch would be a step you could not > skip wherein you have to choose your preferred text size.

iPhones literally do have an unskippable screen during setup that prompts you to choose a text size

[https://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/styles/xlarge/pu...](https://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/styles/xlarge/public/field/image/2015/09/06-set- up-iphone.jpg?itok=oLTHj3Gb)

<comment><USER45> Display Zoom is a different setting than Text Size.

<comment><USER46> And also not an option on all devices.

<comment><USER47> To be fair, it's an option for all currently sold iPhones.

<comment><USER46> I don't think this is true.

[https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8586721](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8586721)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> In the modern day I would really avoid using "autism" as a negative descriptor or analogy in published works like this, as much as I may say it in private contexts to friends.

<comment><USER49> 100% agree. I stopped reading when I saw that. What exactly is "Windows autism" exactly? My autistic son would like to know... And I would encourage you not to say it in private contexts with friends either.

<comment><USER43> > And I would encourage you not to say it in private contexts with friends > either.

Not sure it's any of your business what he says to his friends in private, even if you have an autistic son.

<comment><USER47> Encouraging people not to be offensive in private? The nerve!

<comment><USER43> Offensive to whom exactly? Are you literally insane?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Last night, while putting my children to sleep, I tried to change the volume on my wireless headphones and instead called 911. It also woke up the children because it makes a loud noise like a car alarm. After I cancelled the impending call to 911 (I hope), it switched to trying to call my wife instead.

I can see a case where this would be valuable, but I'm not an old man and not likely to be in an accident where the only thing I can do is press the not- the-volume side of my phone a few times. On top of that, it was only a year ago that this was an inconspicuous shortcut for disabling your Touch ID from an attacker or the police. Now it makes an alarming in what might already be a tense situation. If you have an iPhone, you probably want to review your "Emergency SOS" settings to better understand what the few remaining buttons on your phone do.

</comment><comment><USER51> A number of years ago, I was employed by an Apple Retail store. I don't know how it is now but when I started (in 2010), they would hold employee-led workshops on the basics of iOS devices and how to customize them.

By the time I left, they had completely revamped those workshops to be mere Q&A sessions. My biggest gripe about these Q&A style workshops is that most of the people attending weren't aware of _what questions to ask_.

<comment><USER52> > weren't aware of what questions to ask.

This seems completely fine to me.

The idea is to help people solve their problems. Not give them solutions for problems that never had in the first place.

<comment><USER53> Most people don't even know that they have a problem because they are unaware of what they should be able to do. They think that any preventable annoying behavior is the natural state of the machine. I was spending time with my parents awhile back and happened to look over to watch my mom try to communicate some content from a website she was looking at to a friend. She would go back and forth from the browser, to the message, to the browser, to the message, reading and typing. I asked her "Does that site block copy paste? Why aren't you copy pasting?" She gave me a blank look. I showed her that copy paste was a feature and it blew her mind.

She didn't think that she had a problem because she didn't expect copy paste to even be a function on a phone (as she is not a confident computer user either).

<comment><USER31> Easy to complain about copy/paste functionality, but how else would you implement it?

I agree with most of the criticisms in the article, but copy/paste is just one of those things that is never going to be 100% reflexive or intuitive on a touchscreen.

<comment><USER54> I know how to copy/paste on an iPhone and it's still an insufferable operation. I don't know if my fingers are fatter than the average but I find it next to impossible to select anything, or even place the cursor at the end of a word instead of selecting an entire word for that matter.

<comment><USER55> Same here. I just learned yesterday that iOS 12 allows you to rest your finger on the space bar to begin moving the cursor like you would a mouse. Use another finger to tap the keyboard (anywhere) to start and end selection mode.

It's a lot easier than trying to precisely aim your fat meat fingers on the itty bitty text!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> And now dumber than ever. At least on my iPhone 6s with the latest update. Now you have to go through 2 screens to send a photo to someone in imessage, whereas before the most recent photos were easily accessible. And on facetime you have to pull up a menu [that covers the entire screen] to flip the camera around, and if you accidentally hit it a couple times theres no way to know which way your camera is facing without closing the menu.

<comment><USER57> I'm glad I'm not the only one. I was feeling old when I became confused by the facetime pull up menu and accidentally disconnected the call, unable to figure out if the camera was flipped, and how to get back to the call.

<comment><USER58> Agreed on this one. Does FaceTime really have that many controls that they need a separate menu rather than just lining the ever larger device screens with them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> As someone who worked heavily in sales in the telecommunications industry, and having spoken to many customers of all ages. This article is not constructive at all, it's terribly fraught with emotion. The intrusive reminders of WiFi networks? Really, that required an entire paragraph? I can't remember the last time I was interrupted by it, probably because I switched it off on the welcome screen when setting up my device?

Nobody knows that they can swipe up or down on the screen? Tell me where Android shows you this during setup and tell that it's not the same with most devices.

This article should just be "Smartphones are hard to use".

Heck, there are features mentioned in the article that I don't frequently use, that doesn't mean I should nor that Apple has done a bad job at showing me.

<comment><USER60> Apple (used to) market the ease of use of the features of iOS very heavily. iPhones don't get a pass because Android phones are complicated as well since Apple (used to) stress that they were so much better than the competition.

Nowadays I notice Apple mostly just markets the new shiny. The XS commercial is a masterpiece of vapidity, they don't even pretend it's anything but brand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> It's not surprising at all to me that people who don't take the time to learn how to use the supercomputers in our pockets are unable to use them.

It's like typing. Learning to touchtype was one of the best things I've ever done on a return for investment basis. All I did was stick a little printout of the keyboard layout under the monitor, and committed to not look at the physical keyboard ever again. It was slow for a couple of weeks, but from then on I could touchtype. It was not such a massive burden. But most people I see are still painfully hunting and pecking, even people who use a computer all day long in a professional capacity!

I know there is much more that Apple and other manufacturers could do to make things better, and definitely they should be doing those things, but the main problem IMO is that people are just lazy. They want their phone to do complicated things, but they don't want to spend the time to learn how to do those things.

It would be good if there was easy training for these things though, maybe some kind of beginner courses? I know some community centres/libraries have courses for beginners and older people... But most people just expect to automatically be able to use a smartphone with no training, knowledge or effort.

<comment><USER62> I am older, ~40, and my relationship with technology changed over time. I'm no longer eager to learn a new interface as I was when I was younger. When I was younger a shiny thing would make me excited, take my eye and sort of fool me that this new thing is cool. I'd be excited to learn what the new thing was all about. I'd spend a few hours and figure it out. Back then apple was winning big with consistent and intuitive interfaces, operations. As I got older i started to prioritize what I want to learn in a different way. Now all I want from the phone is to be a tool, not the other way around. A good tool but not something I have to learn over and over. And especially when I know these changes were made for.. the sake of change, to sort of give the impression of innovation I'm even less incentivized to take a course to teach me how to use a phone. And most of the time these changes make my life harder... e.g. remove the tactile button trend. I'm willing to bet that the 1 button will return at some point as an "innovation". Someone here mentioned the mental maps that people build when learning a system. If you mess with that mental map for a few generations you end up with frustrated users. We know what game these companies are playing: force people to upgrade through planned obsolesce. If it's real upgrades such as better performing cameras, faster ram, etc, I will eventually upgrade. But if they're forcing these changes through updates that we cannot turn off, we have a problem.

<comment><USER31> _I am older, ~40, and my relationship with technology changed over time. I 'm no longer eager to learn a new interface as I was when I was younger._

I don't mind learning a new interface or even coming up to speed with an entirely new UI paradigm, if there's something in it for me. But my objection is that as soon as I learn it, someone who is paid to look busy will change it for no reason other than to justify their role in the company hierarchy.

Obvious examples include almost anything from Microsoft ("Metro^H^H^H^H^HWindows 10 is awesome! You just don't like change!") or Google ("We have altered GMail. Pray all you want, we're going to alter it further"), but Apple is far from guiltless.

When that happens, it's hard to escape the feeling that your time is being wasted... and as you suggest, the older you get the bigger a deal that is.

<comment><USER63> Actually the MS 'Metro' design used in the ZuneHD and Windows Phone UI (best Home screen design by far) were both more logical and discoverable than the iOS UI (well until they released the Win Phone 10 UI with the hamburger menus...), but everyone just learned how to navigate iOS because 'everyone's doing it.'

I still believe the iOS UI is terrible. Navigation is all over the place, the wall of icons gives no preference to priority (other than creating folders), the icons and colours change (as mentioned in the article) and interaction is inconsistent (press/long-press).

But everyone learnt the interface so now it's 'good.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> "Seriously advanced security features like two-factor authentication (which kind? Apple offers two) are exactly the sort of thing only experts who don't need them will ever set up."

Hmm. This is a reflection of the author's bias towards not having the features he likes on the Iphone be more in your face, and the features he finds annoying are labelled as useless.

The two factor ID, is there as a CYA for Apple, so they won't have to deal with the fallout of their users' accounts being compromised. Those are the types of features prioritized and forced. The same goes for touch ID, in addition to it making new purchases a seamless and more effortless process, it also helps deal with chargebacks and the like. When I use touch ID to call a Lyft, I have esseentially 'signed' the CC receipt of that transaction.

The other features he finds annoying, may be annoying to many people, but those are key features that most people would otherwise not turn on, and as a result have a poor experience with wifi. the list goes on.

<comment><USER65> Two Factor Auth is not a CYA.

It effectively prevents phishing attacks and helps mitigate weak/reused passwords.

Everyone should have it turned on. If you don't have 2FA turned on, it's just a question of time until someone downloads all your nudie pictures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Phones are computers now. We can't expect everyone to know AND USE all of the features. Many of the features are obscured on purpose.

<comment><USER67> I thought that when I read, "He (a senior citizen) also thought he had to use the Gmail app to read his Gmail"

Like what do you want, an unskippable popup about the difference between email providers and email clients, and instructions on configuring IMAP and SMTP on a 3rd email app? That would only lead to more fear and confusion. The Gmail app is fine.

<comment><USER68> I believe what the article wants to say is that the built-in Mail app allows setting this up easily, so people should use that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> How many hours does the author think it should take to set up an iPhone? If they want every toggle and every accessibility option presented at device setup, with enough explanation of what each one does and how to use it, it'll take at least 2, probably more since the elderly tend to use technology slower.

You know what the author didn't mention? That with any Apple device you can go in for a 1:1 session or a class on usage, and the people running them will walk you through everything. They're also good at identifying people struggling to use the device in various ways and know about all the accessibility options, which in general are more plentiful and _much_ better supported in iOS than Android.

My mother got an iPad after years of owning only android devices, went in, and not only did they walk her through it, but they let her know that a new iOS release would be coming out soon which would change a few things, and invited her back to a second session after that change if she was at all confused.

</comment><comment><USER70> > The gold standard here is Undo. You have to shake your iPhone (or giant iPad > Pro) to undo an action. You discover this by accident as you get up from a > restaurant table with your phone in your hand, only to be greeted with an > Undo Typing dialogue box. Unless you are an expert, you have no idea what > just happened.

Wow I have been an iPhone user for many years now, spend several hours a day using my phone (according to their new screen time metrics), and I did not know this!

</comment><comment><USER71> I agree with this post, but outside of a few specific things I don't think the issue is with Apple (or Android, or whatever).

The issue is people; most non-tech people either don't care about learning how to _properly_ use a tool they'd be using for the rest of their life, or are scared to for whatever reason.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Dumbing down the UI for the lowest common denominator doesn't seem viable - it would completely kill any productivity (try to do your job with the children's toy equivalent of your usual tools), and I'm not even sure it would solve this - the "target market" of such change would most likely also get annoyed by it (I noticed that the people we're talking about are outright not interested in spending _any_ time setting up their device, so a 50-step setup screen is unlikely to sort out the issue).

Maybe the solution is to let "natural selection" take its course; eventually you'll be expected to know how to operate these devices if you want to function in society. And honestly that's fine by me. There are already tons of things you are expected to know if you want to operate in today's society (social skills, managing your finances & administrative tasks, etc) and everyone seems to be doing fine with that.

<comment><USER72> On the other hand, there's Huawei that went with Advanced and Simple mode: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcalxGyLE1w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcalxGyLE1w)

And for aging parents, the simple mode works fantastically!

<comment><USER71> The downside of a simple mode is that it locks the user in and prevents them from discovering what "advanced" stuff their device can do; so essentially they're wasting money by having a 1k$ supercomputer in the pocket and intentionally it dumbing down to Nokia 3310 levels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Who is this guy and why he is so oblivious to his own bias ?

He says that few people understand AirDrop, Apple Pay, iMessages Apps. Even though we have numbers on Apple Pay adoption (people do understand it) and we know how much Apple invested on Animoji (many younger people love apps).

Also does he know Apple has anonymous telemetry ? They don't guess what is popular or not. They know.

<comment><USER73> Joe Clark has been writing about web accessibility for nearly twenty years. If he's not the world's leading authority on digital accessibility, then he's at least one of the most influential writers on the topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> One thing I have come across in trying to explain phones to older people is that they have difficulty grasping the difference of cellular vs. WiFi and where they can and can't use data.

I have a parent who is terrified to use the internet _while on WiFi_ because they don't want to get a huge bill at the end of the month. I have done some explaining to reduce that anxiety and I'd like to tell them not to worry about it, but frankly, iOS doesn't help at all, both in terms of managing data, communicating how much LTE data you are using, etc.

I know others who spend hundreds of dollars extra per year on "unlimited" data plans even though they have no need for it. But it's easier than trying to manage their data. Imagine how many people who don't understand data usage are spending hundreds of dollars annually on data plans they don't use "just to be safe" because the phone company might send them a $5K bill if they accidentally misconfigure their phone to allow Netflix access to cellular.

If iOS wants to be layman-friendly, there has to be a better way of handling data and communicating to a user what the status of their data usage is. This is just one example.

<comment><USER75> Get people onto unlimited data plans with a limited amount of fast data. Most (all?) US carriers have a plan like that, although I don't know how common they are overseas. You can usually pick how much fast data you want, and if you go over, it's not the end of the world. Sometimes I've had phones that didn't have matching lte bands, so the 'slow' data rate was faster than what I could manage anyway.

<comment><USER74> We do have that, but it's the most expensive "unlimited" plan that does that. By "unlimited" they mean 10gb and then slow speeds! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I'm okay with Claudia being banned from the page. I still would like to not get reminded every time I set down my mouse on your site...

<comment><USER77> Not sure what you're talking about, I don't see any mention of a Claudia on the page.

<comment><USER78> It's a title attribute on the body element. It can show up as a tooltip when you rest your cursor on the page.

      <body id="APOSTOPHES-body-id" title="Claudia, you are banned from here">

<comment><USER77> Ah that explains it, I was viewing on mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> My biggest difficulty is moving the edit cursor when trying to edit text. It takes too many tries to get it exactly where I want. I wish they'd add cursor keys...

<comment><USER45> Another hidden UX: you can long press the keyboard and it'll turn into a touchpad that you can use to move the cursor (still not as easy as cursor keys but much better than the long press and drag method).

<comment><USER80> I use this all the time because it's convenient, but there have always been two things that frustrate me about it:

1) There's no way to scroll the text while moving the cursor by moving it to the end of the last visible line, the way there is with the cursor interface you get by directly touching and holding the text.

2) Sometimes when I'm doing this it will randomly select the word my cursor is over, and I've never figured out exactly what triggers this.

<comment><USER68> > There's no way to scroll the text while moving the cursor by moving it to > the end of the last visible line, the way there is with the cursor interface > you get by directly touching and holding the text.

This should work–at least, it does for me.

> Sometimes when I'm doing this it will randomly select the word my cursor is > over, and I've never figured out exactly what triggers this.

On 3D Touch devices, pressing harder does this.

<comment><USER80> > This should work–at least, it does for me.

I should have been more specific: this works for me up to a point, but there's no way to keep scrolling. To see what I mean, try to use that method to delete the last character of a long URL in the address bar of safari — you can't scroll all the way over to it.

> On 3D Touch devices, pressing harder does this.

I had suspected that might be the case, and I'm able to reproduce it now. Not having any haptic feedback on the second, harder 3D Touch feels inconsistent though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> A couple of things I absolutely hate about Apple's products:

1\. Whenever switching an app in iOS and going back to the same app I don't know if I'll find it in the same state as before, even after only few seconds. It's unbelievably annoying to read an article opened in embedded browser in Facebook app, check something quickly in Chrome and be forced to look for the same article again.

2\. Some apps don't allow me to open a url in Chrome, for some reason I have to do it in Safari. And why can't I delete Safari altogether? How's it's different from Microsoft and IE in the 90s?

3\. There's no easy, automated way to disable background running, bandwidth consuming apps while connected to hotspot in macOS. This should be obvious I don't want to backup 30GB of data to Backblaze while on my data plan.

<comment><USER68> > Whenever switching an app in iOS and going back to the same app I don't know > if I'll find it in the same state as before, even after only few seconds. > It's unbelievably annoying to read an article opened in embedded browser in > Facebook app, check something quickly in Chrome and be forced to look for > the same article again.

Apple would very much like you to have the experience that apps do not change when you leave them. There are a couple ways that apps break this model, though: if they use a lot of memory, iOS will kill them in the background. In any case, apps are supposed to have state restoration to get back to where they were when you last left it, but few apps implement this correctly.

> Some apps don't allow me to open a url in Chrome, for some reason I have to > do it in Safari. And why can't I delete Safari altogether? How's it's > different from Microsoft and IE in the 90s?

Safari is the system browser. I believe the difference from Microsoft is that iOS is not a monopoly?

<comment><USER81> > Apple would very much like you to have the experience that apps do not > change when you leave them. There are a couple ways that apps break this > model, though: if they use a lot of memory, iOS will kill them in the > background. In any case, apps are supposed to have state restoration to get > back to where they were when you last left it, but few apps implement this > correctly.

You're probably right. But Facebook isn't just some random app - it's used by around half of all iPhone users, and Apple is known for lengthy acceptance process in their app store. They should be able to detect such cases. And if Facebook doesn't implement the model correctly who will. Also, switching apps is such a common pattern it shouldn't be garbage collected that fast in the first place.

<comment><USER82> To be fair... Facebook often refreshes in the web while you're reading a post, only to find it disappeared from your timeline, only to be found again a year later when someone comments on it and Facebook remembers you want to see it again...

(sorry for the semi-off-topic rant)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> The problem is the "perpetual novice" sentiment.

Smartphones are sold with the underlying assumption that 'user friendly' equates to zero training or learning. The idea is that UI is so intuitive that you can simply pick the phone up and use it.

It's clear that this novice strategy has upper limit respect to the number of features.

If you spend $500 on a device that you use more than your car or computer, maybe you should spend 6-12 hours to learn it. People take courses in woodworking, knitting, why not smartphones.

<comment><USER84> > If you spend $500 on a device that you use more than your car or computer, > maybe you should spend 6-12 hours to learn it. People take courses in > woodworking, knitting, why not in smartphones.

I completely agree with this. And if you're not willing to learn how to use a device, why would you buy one anyway?

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> First couple of paragraphs were appeal to authority, followed by anecdotes about what makes an iPhone hard for old people after which I stopped reading.

The title of this article is click-baity. "I think iPhones are hard to use if you're old or disabled" would have been better but that doesn't drive readership, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER86> >There are people who know what address bars are but not search bars, so they go to google.com

I've been forced to do this recently on android. In chromium, the default search engine has location permissions by default. No way to disable this without patching and recompiling chromium. So if you leave google as your default search engine, which is what it ships with, google (i.e., *.google.com) gets location permission. So my workaround has been to set AOL as the default search engine. When I really want to google something, I have to go to google.com.

</comment><comment><USER87> Not sure I agree with the majority that's been said there and I say that despite replying from a Pixel now. I think most critique there had little to do with Apple and isba general tech-has-advanced-so-far problem that some demographics might struggle to stay on top of everything new. The same things apply to my Pixel phone. Currently my biggest annoyance is that in the latest update they changed the WiFi button in the top menu to turn on/off WiFi instead of opening the list of available networks. Now I need to long press it to open up the menu and I see that my wife struggles to do that now. Some things will always be difficult for people. My grandma also struggles with a contact less payment card and personally I don't see how chip and pin is easier than a quick tap with the card but she swears it's easier to her, so what can I do!?

</comment><comment><USER70> On the one hand, I agree with the author. A lot of iPhone features have serious discoverability issues, and I am constantly googling how to do certain things on my iPhone. After probably thousands of hours spent using an iPhone, I just learned today (from this article) that you can shake to undo.

On the other hand, my mother who in her 70s recently got an iPad and an iPhone and is able to engage more confidently with those two devices than any PC or laptop she owned in the 30 years prior. And my son who is 4 years old is able to move around between and within apps fairly effortlessly - without even knowing how to read.

So while there are definitely some things that could be improved in iOS, I think it's also important to recognize that the iPhone has ushered in an era of unprecedented usability for the general public.

</comment><comment><USER88> Apparently Claudia is banned from there.

<comment><USER89> It's a weird blog. As well as the Claudia tooltip and throwing around 'autist' as an insult, the title bar at the top also has the 'title' attribute set to "Analogous to allowing transgenders to rewrite gay history. (Ask a Millennial who started Stonewall)", and it looks like there are a bunch of links/rants about "trannies" in the archives. Not that that should necessarily detract from what seems like a pretty reasonable article about usability, but it doesn't give me a good feeling.

<comment><USER90> Interesting. [https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/straight-talk-from-a- ga...](https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/straight-talk-from-a-gay-guy- bill-28-is-nonsense)

<comment><USER91> Even gay people can be transphobes, sadly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> I truly believe the iPhone has the most usable mobile platform simply for all their granular accessibility controls.

The author touches upon a topic that I also have seen and experienced countless of times in my life, which is the need for a better first-run accessibility settings onboarding experience for users that would benefit most (e.g. senior citizens), that also can be trivially skipped by more tech savvy users.

This new onboarding flow can be triggered by apple determining a person's first time ever signing into that model iPhone, under the assumption that most new users to the platform would benefit the most from becoming familiar with these accessibility features and where they live in the settings from the get go.

I know many senior citizens (including my parents) who would have greatly benefited from a heavy accessibility settings onboarding experience, due to many of the issues the author mentioned regarding eye sight and vision related age decline.

It's a shame that a company like apple, one that pioneered usability and human factors in designing products for people since their very beginning (see Human Interface Guidelines [1]), buries these crucial accessibility settings and makes them so difficult to reach for the people that need them the most.

I hope someone from apple is reading this and can champion this topic internally to improve the lives of senior citizens, cause we'll all be old some day scratching our head trying to use the latest and greatest iDevice...

[1] [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=573097](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=573097)

</comment><comment><USER93> The author is right, but for the wrong reasons. Conventional app design on mobile devices (not just iPhone, Android is particularly bad about this) puts all the interactive UI elements in difficult to reach corners of the phone/tablet. It's especially apparent when trying to use a device one-handed, which admittedly is becoming more difficult as OEMs engage in a pissing match of who can build the biggest phone[1]. I get the need for keeping content centered and scattering UI elements around the four corners, but could they perhaps focus on a single corner so you're not constantly fumbling around with the hardware in your hand(s) to reach the various areas you interact with most? Ergonomic best practices are wholly ignored in every device I've ever used.

[1] [https://kneeland.me/2011/10/07/2010s-smartphone-screens- are-...](https://kneeland.me/2011/10/07/2010s-smartphone-screens-are-the- new-1950s-tail-fins/)

</comment><comment><USER94> I think this article doesn't grapple with just how _hard_ it is to solve any of the problems it brings up. _Of course_ if you're sitting next to someone, observing them doing something wrong, and telling them exactly how to solve it, then you can improve their process. You can say the same thing about how most people use computers - it's even a meme that techie folks have a hard time watching non-techies use computers because they never use shortcuts etc.

The problem that _Apple_ has to deal with is how to teach people _without_ having 1-on-1 time with every single user to watch what they're doing, and this article offers _no_ solutions for almost anything. (Except for asking for a few things to be part of the on-boarding process, which semi-solves some issues - text size _is_ now part of the on-boarding process, but often, the person using the phone is not the same as the person setting up the phone, especially with older users I imagine).

</comment><comment><USER95> With the new FaceID features, I could see it being a nice touch if iOS were to ask users if they want to increase text size if it senses the user always holds the phone ridiculously close to their face and/or constantly squints.

Beyond that, I don't know how much of a responsibility it is for the phone to push its accessibility options on everyone after initial setup.

</comment><comment><USER96> It would be fascinating to see this from the Apple designer's point of view. I'm certain that this is a political problem inside Apple: how much priority each feature/module gets, how many pixels they can have, and how much exposure they get at the website, etc. iPhone (or any product really) is the product of politics as well as its technology.

</comment><comment><USER97> There are persistent bugs in common functions also. E.g. in messages attach a photo, press the left arrow and then come back to the conversation. The photo will be messed up (XS with the latest update).

</comment><comment><USER98> Good UI/UX designers (like Apple have) will classify interactions into: Obvious, Easy, Possible.

Take the iPhone camera;

Obvious: taking a picture with the shutter button

Easy: switching between front and back cameras is easy to discover

Possible: switching between HD and 4K (in the settings menu - possible to discover.

Unless your product is as simple as an office stapler, some parts of it will be non-obvious, that's fine.

</comment><comment><USER99> The concealment of features is why my severely disabled mother was able to use an iPad in the last years of her life to watch TV shows, send emails, and FaceTime with her family.

</comment><comment><USER100> It's sad to see that many people here in the discussion are not trying to critically assess the subject matter in proper context and rather targeting the article author about his bias or why he dedicated a whole paragraph to a certain issue. Seriously? We can all do much better than this.

<comment><USER101> What is the proper context?

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> There are at least two kinds of ways different people use their devices: people who actively discover everything their device is capable of, and people who don't do that, because they are afraid to break things. My parents, for instance, are the latter ones. I am the curious "electronic computer stuff" guy, just because I explore my possession to the fullest.

However, Apple makes it as easy as any Android vendor to explore their devices, except that on any Apple iOS device it is _the same_ system, and almost the same _tricks_. Not so on myriads of Android devices.

I must admit the bit that some features are indeed hidden, so that I cannot find them _exploring_. Sometimes I read an article about iOS devices and discover functions I didn't know my iPhone could do.

</comment><comment><USER103> Are any of these issues handled better on Android phones?

<comment><USER104> I currently own both Android and iOS devices, and have used both for years.

I think the single "Omni-Pull Down" from the top works way cleaner than the now 3 seperate pull from side of screen actions. I actually find pulling up from the bottom difficult and frustrating.

Swipe to dismiss, tap to open makes so much more intuitive sense than swipe to open.

Text editing / selection does what I expect way more often.

Android doesn't bug you about Wifi access points by default.

This one is controversial, but I think a visible always available back button is a huge accessibility win even if it's sometimes inconsistant in behaviour.

Also, the Google Assistant at this point is probably 10 times more accurate and understanding than Siri. I have a pretty standard midwestern accent and Siri understands almost nothing I say to a pathetic degree. I use Google Assistant to do probably about half of the quick things I want to do on my phone like set alarms and such. I don't trust Siri to do anything.

A lot of things of course are worse just because they vary between manufacturers and even individual phones.

The fact that many OS components are replaceable is a double edge sword. My dad for instance somehow installed a dialer that made him dismiss an advertisement before he could answer his phone. He had no idea how to get rid of it and assumed he had broke his phone.

<comment><USER105> >This one is controversial, but I think a visible always available back button is a huge accessibility win even if it's sometimes inconsistant in behaviour.

As a recent iPhone switcher I can't stand the "back" behavior. I was so happy to discover the swipe right to go back feature until I realized that it didn't apply to images and other full screen elements (where there's an "x" instead of "<back" in the top left corner). For those you swipe up to dismiss. So now I have to keep mental state for what type of content is currently displayed to know how to get back to where I was. This is more annoying than Android's inconsistent back button experience IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> > "Scroll to the top by tapping the clock. (Who would possibly discover that > by accident? Somebody had to tell me about it.)"

Dang, this finally explains a "bug" in one of our apps. (We primarily do web apps, so we don't have in-depth knowledge of platforms)

</comment><comment><USER107> Does anyone else notice the title attribute/tooltip on the <body>? Am I the only one wondering who Claudia is or why she was banned?

<comment><USER108> Also title: <body id="APOSTOPHES-body-id" title="Claudia, you are banned from here">

Claudia had to do something awful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> > _You really need to tell the phone, and /or Siri, who you are and who your > family members are. This involves creating a contact card (what's that?) for > yourself and linking to it. Then all your family members need their own > cards, and you have to laboriously specify their relationships to you.

I insist this is not an optional or nice-to-have feature._

For a usability expert, I'm surprised he cares so little about the actual intentions of people to use the phone. I can imagine a lot of non-technical users who would get pretty mad if their new phone blocked them from proceeding until they've personally asked aunt Betty to fill in her personal data.

<comment><USER109> I think he means the user should create/amend contact details for their family members.

<comment><USER101> That makes sense. But then how would this be possible to do as a "non- optional" feature?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> Title should have been "iPhones are hard to use - For old people", it's bad for them, but it's not the fault of the iPhone itself, I bet if you give them any other piece of technology it will be equally hard for them.

You are right in pointing out that it could be better, I think that the "Tips" app can have a dedicated section for accessibility features and video tutorials on how to use certain features of inbuilt apps.

They could also have an app dedicated to Accessibility features, pull out the existing accessibility settings from Settings app and show them one at a time in a UIPageViewController inside that app.

</comment><comment><USER111> This is just silly. News flash: software UX isn't perfect, and it never will be.

When you have a phone that can do 10,000 different things limited to a screen a few inches wide, of course it's going to be harder to do some things than others. And there will be some inconsistencies and some annoyances.

It's not like any other phone is obviously way better. Yes there are plenty of UX things that could be improved... but "iPhones are hard to use" is a clickbait title, and the content is just a totally random laundry list of one person's annoyances. Doesn't really seem like HN material.

<comment><USER82> This article and most of the comments just scream "I don't like new/different things!" or "I don't know how to do x therefore it's a terrible implementation"

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> Here is a recent annoyance. I use bluetooth headphones and a bluetooth speaker. I want my bluetooth headphones to never be louder than $x, I want my speaker to have the full volume range. There is only one volume control (under Settings > Music > Max Volume) for the whole phone, and that doesn't seem to control max volume for notifications/other apps. This frequently leads to me leaving the max volume on high, then shocking my ears with a super loud noise. I should be able to control max volume per device. I use Sony MDR-XB950B1 headphones btw.

<comment><USER113> Mine remembers volume per device when I switch between them.

Whatever level I left a speaker or headphones, that's where it starts next time I connect, completely separate from whatever I have the built-in speaker set to.

Mine doesn't have a cap per device, but I'd have to manually click up on that device to get louder than I left it.

First time I realized it was remembering all these different listening volumes, I was pretty amazed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> I've been thinking about the more general problem of feature/solution discoverability lately.

Sometimes people will stumble onto solutions, or someone they know will mention them, or they will actually be bothered enough to search for a solution. But it pains me to think of all the instances of problems that could be avoided if we could do a better job of bridging the knowledge gap.

That applies to me too when I discover something and wish I had known about it far earlier. I try to actively search for solutions, but sometimes you aren't even aware that something is a problem.

</comment><comment><USER115> Ask any owner of an iPhone X how to turn off their phone...bet most won't know how.

<comment><USER68> How often do most users have to turn off their phone?

<comment><USER115> There was one time my wife's iPhone would not turn off the light. It kept shining even if you turn on and off the flashlight feature. Told her to turn it off and on again.. She couldn't. I had to watch a YouTube video and do it for her.

I mentioned this to a colleague and he too had to turn it off one day but didn't know how.

The steps aren't intuitive and if you ask me again to do it, I would need to Google it again

Really it's not how often you need to do it, but the fact the most basic and fundamental step of turning off a device can't be accomplished with searching online.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER116> Smart phones are hard to use, not just iPhones. They are as bloated with features as an enterprise software that offers licenses by the seat.

</comment><comment><USER117> Apple could probably do a better job with some of their design decisions, but that's the nature of iteration and making decisions. Nothing is so absolutely perfect it literally fulfills a person's every wish and dream. Of course there's opportunity for improvement - that's why there's been 12 versions of iOS and things still change.

People are different. That's part of designing for an audience - <USER3> design needs to balance micro and macro level affordances. Extremely customizable isn't always extremely pleasing. 'You can please some people most of the time, but you can't please everyone all the time' (or something like that).

This is a case where someone isn't pleased. Some claims are true, while others are hot air. Based on the author's blog, they enjoy being a self-righteous asshat on the internet. If the author strives to bring points to light in an abrasive and inflammatory manner, rather than a sensible and constructive dialogue, then at least he has that working out well.

</comment><comment><USER118> I think Apple could do a better job onboarding people to iPhones. For example they could check to see if you're interested certain aspects and queue up tutorials that drive extracting settings that would help; but at the end of the day the iPhone does so much more than it did in 2007 & the 2007 version was so much more capable than all preceding phones. The biggest challenge Apple faces is figuring out how to explain thousands of features … and that's before you install any 3rd party apps.

Steve Jobs called it "an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator" … that was hard to swallow (or learn), but today that's just the tip of the iceberg.

If you're fortunate enough to understand the majority of the features you shouldn't be embarrassed by the ability to help someone figure out the myriad features and details …

Are iPhones hard to use: absolutely not … unless your expectations are off the charts and you think a device that complex should require no effort.

That said, it would be funny if Apple eventually launches a device called iPhone that only makes phone calls.

</comment><comment><USER119> My top 5 annoyances:

\- Too many features I'll never use, that mostly can't be removed. Less is more.

i.e. I'll never use Siri or facial recognition. Never owned a bluetooth device. "Screen Mirroring" What? in the Control Center. Yet those and more always in the way, sometimes draining battery.

\- When radios are off to save energy, constantly nags about connection with modal dialogs that prevent use of the home button.

\- Can't use it as a flash drive (w/o grudging workarounds)

\- Insists on using white backgrounds at night. Night mode saved my life but would prefer a dark theme at night. Clock is the opposite, hard to read in the day time. All hardcoded.

\- Can't disable the always accidental swipe from top stuff I'm never interested in.

Btw, thanks to the author for linking to how to disable apps in iMessage, just more clutter I didn't want. Totally unintuitve, BTW.

Bonus: There's App and Microphone icons in the iMessages entry field that take up 1/3 of the space. Don't use Apps there and might use the microphone button once a year. Hit it mistakenly often.

<comment><USER120> Can you even turn facial recognition off?

Open the Photos app, search for "people", and it will pull up photos of people's faces. Tap on one to make a full screen picture, and swipe it up , it will show "Related" people and pictures. You can tap on someone to find more photos of them.

Even if you never tagged them with names.

(You can also search Photos for general terms, like "flower" or "snow" or "food", it's doing image recognition on all pictures somewhere). iOS 11, 12 at least.

<comment><USER68> Just curious, why would you want to turn facial recognition off?

<comment><USER119> Or rather, why would one want devices recognizing and creating permanent records? Police can unlock by pointing it to your face. Apple may have a better track record than most, why I own an iphone, but unlocking a device was never a burden to me. It's a button press if you've done it recently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER121> People have the same sorts of problems with most non-trivial devices. In the extreme cases mentioned in the article the solution is the same that the author discovered: some who knows, teaches someone who can benefit. There isn't an obvious solution to this problem in general that wont make the system harder to use for intermediate/expert users.

</comment><comment><USER122> Bah. Dumb article. All phones are hard to use. Nothing is really mechanically intuitive anymore, except for some well-designed mechanical things.

Phones can only go so far to give use good, mechanical intuitiveness. Press a button, see what it does. Now make an object to 500 different things and obviously only the most important things for the majority of the population will be easy to access, even if it's not intuitive, because of icons.

Basically this forced us to move from mechanical thinking to something less concrete (digital, non-analog) which is something many older people and those with disabilities may have a harder time adapting to.

Android, iPhones, "smart" TVs, they are all confusing to some extent.

The problem isn't iphones or androids, the problem is how we design things. The digital world is still very bad at doing things intuitively for a brain that starts life in a very physical, mechanical world.

</comment><comment><USER123> A lot of this seems valid. At the same time, I think massive customer misuse/misunderstanding is the reality for almost all widely used software.

Maybe I'm projecting, but the "solutions people" at the company where I work have endless horror stories of how "people actually use our software".

</comment><comment><USER124> Apple clearly needs to hire this guy. The only thing I disagree with is forcing people to learn many features during the setup process when you get your new phone. Pretty much nobody I know likes to sit there and read user manuals or be forced to watch videos or however that'd be represented.

<comment><USER125> I don't think Apple need to hire someone so publicly transphobic. [https://blog.fawny.org/category/tranny/](https://blog.fawny.org/category/tranny/)

<comment><USER126> Holy crap I was not expecting to ever have to figure out a term for "like a TERF, except a man". I wonder if he is one of those straight-laced gay dudes who whines about how all the people out there being flamboyant for Pride celebrations give a bad name to all the gays.

"Trans-Exclusive Radical Faggot" springs to mind as a quick male alternate to "Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminist" but it does have the slight problem of containing a word that a lot of people currently put in the "slur" category.

<comment><USER125> TERF can still apply. Men can be feminist. (Feminism calls for equal rights, so men _should_ be feminist.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER127> Ok, so we put the change font button always in sight? What else are we going to put in the UI?

I also thought I needed the Gmail app? didn't Google stop with any open protocols? (xmpp, imap, carddav?)

An iTouch? Please... And should Apple change their core UI for everyone because some people are almost blind? Sure they can be accommodating, perhaps a button can be placed somewhere, or better a Siri instruction for people with poor sight to activated a more clear UI. But don't change the UI for everyone because of this.

Would Siri understand a mispronounced street name? Who asks their phone for directions anyway? And why does she need help when the street is already on her screen? What at that point would help her? Seems like the iPhone was pretty helpful.

Ok, I'm starting feel sorry I even gave this any attention so I'm going to stop.

</comment><comment><USER128> I think Apple intention was for people to grow with iOS. iOS has added more and more features, but if you started with an earlier version, and kept updating there are only minor changed to learn each time. Jumping into an iphone these days would be hard for someone coming from no smartphone.

<comment><USER129> I grew with IOS, loved 6 through 9, even 10 but with exceptions. I highly dislike the current version though

</comment></comment><comment><USER130> This article just outlines power-user features that most people don't know anyway. They aren't really important. Even then, most of the arguments that he makes are very anecdotal.

Take for example a senior using an iPhone:

My grandmother, 77 years old, has had her iPhone for 2 years. Prior to that, she had no mobile at all and has not used a ton of technology through her life.

She learned to use her crucial apps: Mail, Safari, Notes, Calendar and Contacts by herself.

She will only ask if there are different ways of doing things if she can't figure it out by herself—which is very rare.

I agree that Settings can be cluttered to navigate, but it's also assumed that it's not an app that people use every day. Taking that into account, the General tab is usually where you find what you need when it comes to changing most settings anyway.

</comment><comment><USER131> > If somebody told you your Home button was going to wear out, hence you > turned on AssistiveTouch, you were lied to.

Actually, this happened on my wife's iPhone 5. Granted, they don't actually exist anymore (or at least aren't buttons), but it very much did happen.

</comment><comment><USER132> Such a great point about diversity: they're not. Apple products allow you to live the life a 24 year old silicon valley hipster. Granted Apple is making a _ton_ of money off this target audience however, so it's hard to criticize their approach

</comment><comment><USER133> Completely agree with the objective usability points mentioned in this.

This is what Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman both of whom were first few interface designers are Apple, also wrote the Human Interface Guidelines. [https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/16/9743996/apple- designer-i...](https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/16/9743996/apple-designer- interview-bruce-tog-tognazzini-don-norman)

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving- desi...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-design-a-bad- name)

and also later Don Norman independently

</comment><comment><USER134> Both my parents and my grandmother use iPhones now and I do notice the limited functionality they are comfortable with but I believe the problem goes beyond the iPhone and into general tech literacy. I taught my dad to use 1Password then noticed he never uses the biometrics to log in, then reveals the password and memorizes it instead of copy pasting. He definitely set up touchID and has interacted with text before yet in this context forgot they both exist. I wonder if some of these examples like the map direction example are about the same. People who know better just forgetting parts of functionality depending on the context of the problem.

</comment><comment><USER135> What I find hardest about iPhones are the intentionally hidden/obscured things. If I want to access a file, or copy an arbitrary file to the iPhone, its response is "What are these 'files' you speak of?"

</comment><comment><USER136> These aren't necessarily only iPhone "issues", they apply to other mobile devices as well. Balancing which settings are visible and which aren't is tricky. But one thing I'm upset with and that's the death of the manual. I shouldn't have to rely on 3rd party life hack style videos and articles to figure out useful features. I'm not expecting (or wishing) to see 100+ page paper manuals to make a comeback, but I'm also not happy with flimsy, pretty support pages which only scratch the surface. I want to see detailed and well designed documentation with useful illustrations on how to do things.

</comment><comment><USER137> > seniors... chest pain...

Quick, if you could change one UX that would maximize the numbers of lives saved, what would it be?

(For the purposes of this thought experiment you get to force all users to watch a 30 second educational video one time.)

<comment><USER120> _Quick, if you could change one UX that would maximize the numbers of lives saved, what would it be?_

Change the human brain response to eating vegetables and exercise so they felt good, while any other "food" and lazing around was unbearable?

</comment></comment><comment><USER138> Reader mode for all sites is amazing - I never knew I could do this. My default behavior for anynweb article has been to hit the reader view icon in safari every single time.

My biggest gripe about iOS is how terrible autocorrect is. Even as I type this, iOS is aweful at predicting what I'm entering when I miss the letters. When I had an Android phone I was always delighted that big G was so good at getting my words right and at predicting what I would type next so I could speed up my input just by selecting the right words at the top of the keyboard. Impossible to do with iOS.

</comment><comment><USER139> Reading one of the referenced articles by Don Norman [1], I find this statement immediately true...

> "What kind of design philosophy requires millions of its users to have to > pretend they are disabled in order to be able to use the product? Apple > could have designed its phone so that the majority of people could read and > use the phone without having to label themselves as needy, disabled, and > requiring assistance."

...as just a few days ago I reluctantly traded in my iPhone 6 for the iPhone XS. So far, I cannot get over not having a home button. (since it was mentioned below, I just want to point out that my gripe isn't about not wanting to adapt to a new interface; it's about what Don brought up). After exploring the OS menus for a while I found that, I could add a button to the screen that mimics to a small degre, much of the functionality of the home button Apple previously entrained me on. Of course this option is tucked under the ___accessibility_ __preferences. In fact, I found a half-dozen 'features' under accessibility that I decided to turn on.

Pic: [http://bit.ly/iPhoneXS_accessibility](http://bit.ly/iPhoneXS_accessibility)

Note that the floating home button is labeled ___AssistiveTouch_ __. Here is a really short video I just made attempting to use this slippery-ass button...

[http://bit.ly/iPhoneXSdemo](http://bit.ly/iPhoneXSdemo)

Hopefully I can adapt to the default XS patterns soon, so I can turn off some of some of these ___accessible_ __features, apparently intended for the iPhoneXS-disabled. I 'm just wondering why these things, which to me just seem like user ___preferences_ __or __ _options_ __are nested under the __ _accessibility_ __tab. Then again, maybe Apple is trying to tell this 6th-year phd student that I 'm no spring chicken, so hurry up and graduate already.

[1] Don Norman article: [https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is- giving-desi...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving- design-a-bad-name)

<comment><USER140> Are you complaining that after getting a new device, it's taking you a while to get used to it?

<comment><USER139> No, I'm complaining that things which seem like 'features' are nested under 'accessibility'. But maybe I'm reading too much into it.

edit: Anyway that was Don's main point.

edit2: oh I also found this kinda funny, as another example: Note I've turned on ' _reachability_ ' in the ' _accessibility_ ' tab. This accessibility option allows people using their phone with one hand to swipe down at the bottom of the screen to shift icons from the top-half to the bottom-half, so if you're an 'inaccessible' like me who doesn't have thumbs that reach the top corners of the screen, you can still use those apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER141> "Apple never admits it makes mistakes." Best sentence on the page.

<comment><USER142> Hardly news. Most companies don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER143> My iPhone usability peeve is the lack of an authoritative, comprehensive reference manual. I know lots of intelligent people who lack "technical affinity" but are nevertheless perfectly capable of reading.

The iPhone gets a lot right in terms of discoverability and usability of 90% of its functionality, but that last 10% is frustratingly hard to find definitive answers for.

There's also a further 10%: The functionality you think the iPhone might or should have, but doesn't. Good luck getting any official source to confirm though. You are left to trawl helpless forums.

</comment><comment><USER84> I can see a few good points being made here. But I don't think if someone can't use a device properly, that it's the manufacturers fault for making it hard to use.

Also, I think there are many points being made that are either down to people being told incorrect information, or them just being plain wrong.

Regarding using Spotlight to search for apps/files: "Find a spot in Springboard (what's that?) with no apps or folders." This is wrong, you can swipe down even over apps or folders.

"The simplest task that is functionally impossible to do (also on Macintosh): Play exactly one song." Wrong

"Apple Pay. Inscrutable and scary even in countries that have had chip cards forever, like Canada." This is not Apple's fault. Here in the UK, we've had a very good chip&pin system, which was updated to wireless readers a few years ago. And Apple Pay just works with them automatically. You'll find it hard to find a place that doesn't support it. I've heard that it's completely the opposite in the US, but does that mean the iPhone is hard to use? Also, it prompts you to set this up when you first use the phone.

"Because Apple calls its passwords passcodes, nobody has any clue at all that you can use an alphanumeric password instead of a string of six digits." Oh really.

I could include many other quotes here, but it's getting boring. But there is one point that is just absolutely fundamentally stupid - "If Apple actually cared about accessibility (it does not)". There is no way you can say Apple doesn't care about accessibility.

Another point I'd like to make - Even if there's an "advanced" feature like AirDrop, using Siri to schedule a meeting, or using an Apple Watch to receive directions, on your phone, it doesn't mean you will know how to use it immediately. And that is not by default a bad thing. But anyway, I think a lot of these features are easy to use. For example, when using the share sheet, AirDrop automatically appears at the top of the view. With names and images of nearby devices/contacts. Surely it couldn't be more intuitive?

Maybe when people spend large amounts of money on something, they should put more effort into learning how to use it? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER144> > I don't think if someone can't use a device properly, that it's the > manufacturers fault for making it hard to use.

It absolutely, completely is. What pointers to the hidden features, or more information, are built into the very trivial onboarding phones provide? What quick reference leaflets are in the box? What brightly printed card with a QR code to the downloadable beginners guide, or full manual is there? What getting started app or link is there on the home screen?

None at all.

My microwave, stereo, car, kettle and lawnmower all included more get you going guides, links, sometimes PDFs, sometimes proper paper guides. For trivial often single purpose items.

Search for a user guide for a phone, or Android/iOS and you'll get shitty third party sites and/or programming guides for developing apps. Apple happen to have a really comprehensive one, that's not exactly mentioned anywhere, that you can download into books. They could include it on all phones for zero effort and loss of a tiny amount of storage.

Tech manufacturers should be deeply embarrassed.

No need to include a 3 volume printed manual set, just a card or two signposting current, relevant resources. A simple app on the home screen would suffice too.

> Maybe when people spend large amounts of money on something, they should put > more effort into learning how to use it?

Maybe the resources could be subtly telegraphed to the people when they spend large amounts of money on something. Like just about every other category of product in existence manages to a far fuller degree.

<comment><USER84> > None at all.

There's a mini user guide in every iPhone box.

Also, Apple includes the Tips app by default on iPhones, that continuously prompts about features, and guides on how to use them.

<comment><USER144> There's a card with the buttons named, and a few lines of small print on the back in silver grey print on grey, that is so short of contrast it's almost impossible to read in perfect light. 50% of the space is unused so a much larger font was possible. Hardly a mini user guide though - a card with one image and 3 or 4 sentences on the back.

Only other things in the box were a sticker or two, and a single sheet of absurdly microscopic print with warranty and regulatory info etc.

My recollection, which may be faulty as it's been a while, of the tips app is it included mostly bits of trivia but nothing particularly useful or substantive. Basically just tips - not especially surprising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER145> Most of the points in this article are just wrong (e.g. font size asked for and configured during initial setup; WiFi alerts are not enabled by default).

Apart from that, I agree that iOS has too many hidden features and — first and foremost — too many interactions that you must know exist and you can't find by just glancing at the screen (which is defined as mandatory in Apple's User Interface Guidelines).

So, yes, their products get worse. But, no, not like described in this article.

</comment><comment><USER146> When I think about iPhone useability issues I'm always reminded that it still doesn't have an easy way to undo autocorrect mistakes.

The best you can do is shake the phone and if you don't drop it it might undo for you ...or it might just redo the bogus autocorrect when you retype the word.

Whole websites are devoted to ridiculing people for sending text messages with "hilarious" autocorrect errors in. Still Apple can't or won't improve it.

</comment><comment><USER147> IPad Air 9.7". Notification centre on lock screen used to have two columns. I used to fill the screen with widgets and have it as a dashboard. Now due to various updates I'm stuck with one column and half the screen wasted. It's even worse on iPad Pro 12.9".

There's no apparent way to fix this bad UI design.

So now I have a raspberry pi do the same task with no issues. Bonus feature is that no update can remove this functionality again.

</comment><comment><USER148> "Apple could make their phones easier to by forcing you to go through a mandatory seven-hundred step process before you could start using one"

</comment><comment><USER149> 'Claudia, you are banned from here.'

Jesus christ talk about intrusive annoyances akin to dissociative anesthesia. Stop trying to be quirky and random.

</comment><comment><USER150> "Claudia, you are banned from here."?

Why is that popping up?

<comment><USER90> because it's in the title attribute for the page's body element. unless you mean "why would somebody do that to their website," which I don't have an answer for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER151> I think the big part of the problem is that people don't know what their device or software can do and what is possible to do with it.

Once you show people how to use a certain feature they get on quite easily.

Insane amount of productivity is lost because a lot of people don't feel comfortable with their digital tools and think they have to live with whatever default settings are.

</comment><comment><USER152> " Very advanced, very tuned-in people learn about, and learn how to use, new Apple features by watching them being demonstrated onstage during Apple keynote events.

Then there's everybody else. "

I've never cared to watch a keynote, but I am a fairly advanced user. Makes me feel like the author lives in a bubble...not that his many points aren't well taken aor wel stated.

</comment><comment><USER153> > They picked the bigger fonts they'd needed all along. They were so grateful > it was embarrassing.

They probably changed it back once he was gone.

</comment><comment><USER154> Is that true that mostly Chinese people use Assistive Touch? I've seen them doing it and I couldn't figure out why.

<comment><USER155> It's certainly not only Chinese, although perhaps the author lumps all asians into that category. It's certainly very common in China and South East Asia.

I actually find it quite interesting. At some point, it's true, the home button was a common point of failure on iphones - and a kind of memetic "folk wisdom" idea was born that everyone should use the assistive touch button instead. This idea, which "everyone knows", persisted (and persists) long after the actual issue had been fixed. I am still seeing it today with iPhone 8 users! Hopefully the advent of FaceID finally puts it to bed.

Another good example of the genre is the "common knowledge" that you let your phone/laptop battery run down before recharging, and don't keep it constantly plugged in. Might have had some validity back in the days of NiCad - <USER4> wrong advice in the age of LiOn. But the meme persists...

</comment></comment><comment><USER156> The term "Windows autism" is pretty repugnant.

</comment><comment><USER157> Smartphones have a new batch of kindergartners joining technology each year. There's also another group of beginners a little further down the river that never really received the best onboarding experiences that are available today.

Many of the items outlined in this article could be included in the phone setup wizard like other settings.

</comment><comment><USER158> I think the UX of the iPhone's text message app can be improved, in that after I come back from a conversation to the list, it has no visual clue for me to identify which was 'currently selected'. sometimes the text messages are similar and hard to distinguish them from each other in the list view.

</comment><comment><USER159> I have an iPhone 7s for work and a Xiaomi A2 for personal.

Not going to lie but the iPhone hands down is a pain in the ass. Battery life is shite compared to the China phone, the thing constantly goes to emergency menus in my pocket or tries to tap pay for shit.

Reception on it is AVG at best (both phones on same network) and it's general usability sucks. Like can't even just plug it in to transfer files, the fingerprint sensor has about 1/3rd the hit rate of my China phone, the thing can't shoot video while in a phone call, hell I can't use my earbuds for hands-free while it's on the charge because it has no headphone jack (oh and the stock headphones are about the tinniest worse quality sound I've had in half a decade). Christ I could rant for dayz but you get the point the list goes on.

Tbh all these things suprise me, I've avoided iPhones like the plague for moral reasons but I figured/assumed the phones would have decent usability. Apparently I was wrong as I have been forced to discover thanks to work.

I would have to agree with the article, shit that is simple and fairly easy to do elsewhere becomes a tedious task W/ iPhones.

</comment><comment><USER160> I don't mind if this gets shot down, but I completely agree with the article.

The level of complexity is far too much for me. What Apple seems to think are obvious things (Eg UI interaction elements) are not obvious to me.

A thoroughly frustrating experience.

</comment><comment><USER161> iPhones (and all smartphones and tablets) are magic wands. You have to know the spells.

Any of the hundreds of capabilities that are made easy and obvious, cause other capabilities to become more obscure and harder to enable and even know about.

</comment><comment><USER162> Meh, the article seems like a clickbait joke article, the advanced features in iphone are kept that way, that is how Mac has always been. Easy for most and special features tucked in plain sight.

</comment><comment><USER163> There are so many different ways to control silence/non-silence/vibrate, I have to admit I don't get it at all:

\- Main volume control

\- Ringers and alerts volume control

\- switch on side of phone

\- Do Not Disturb mode

\- Sounds => Vibrate on Ring

\- Sounds => Vibrate on Silent

</comment><comment><USER164> An article full of on the subway anecdotes rings pretty hollow to me.

</comment><comment><USER165> > The gold standard here is Undo. You have to shake your iPhone (or giant iPad > Pro) to undo an action.

The most useless of the bunch, maybe that's why nobody even bother to mention it?

</comment><comment><USER166> "the Apple "ecosystem" reeks of the kind of Windows autism that repels Macintosh supremacists". Damn. What did Apple users or autism ever do to you?

</comment><comment><USER167> Does iphone/ios have a notification history, where one can see past notifications and revive any notifications that had been dismissed by mistake?

</comment><comment><USER168> Sounds like these people need Windows Mobile™ phones.

</comment><comment><USER169> They failed to mention the flattening of the UI and the textualization of everything, which served nothing other than make things harder to find.

</comment><comment><USER170> ios phones, android phones, windows phones, mobile phones are ageist. No ifs or buts. I was happy to read this, it needs more attention. mobile phones have forgotten that they are phones. I find that 'contacts' apps, which you'd think would be the heart of the whole thing, quite unintuitive. User interfaces in general have a long way to go, imho!

</comment><comment><USER171> I use Android for everything mobile. (nix based). MacOS for everything else.(nix based) Whatever is nix based works ;) Questions?

<comment><USER47> iOS is just as nix based as macOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER172> LOL

Anyone who wants to add more steps you cannot skip during setup is completely lacking in credibility when it comes to user interface. QED.

</comment><comment><USER173> My biggest gripe, how about a standardized back button, that is always in the same place and works the same in all places.

</comment><comment><USER174> iPhones don't come with comprehensive instruction manuals, do they? (I know my Android didn't)

</comment><comment><USER175> I wonder if the FaceID technology can eventually detect squinting and suggest a font size increase?

</comment><comment><USER176> Couldn't Apple A/B test a feature in a client subset before releasing it wildly ?

</comment><comment><USER177> That title font is hard to read.

</comment><comment><USER178> In summary, people do not RTFM. If people RTFM, the phone would be easy to them.

</comment><comment><USER179> Substitute the word "Samsung" in place of Apple and you get the same article.

</comment><comment><USER180> No, they are not. By design.

</comment><comment><USER181> > Windows autism

yikes

</comment><comment><USER182> I'm not sure about that! But I'm pretty sure it's hard to buy :D :D

</comment><comment><USER183> After 10 years of using iphones android is hard to use for me.

</comment><comment><USER184> There is some horrible ableism in that post.

</comment><comment><USER185> iPhones have hit the point that their main target audience is people who have 4+ years of experience using iPhones.

</comment><comment><USER141> >it stands to reason that passwords don't have to use the characters on an American computer keyboard. Even Apple did not know that for a time.

Is this true?

</comment><comment><USER132> It's 2018 and iPhones can't send a high res message to the vast majority of smart phone users. It's a joke perform.

</comment><comment><USER186> Click Bait Article.

</comment><comment><USER187> Is this satire?

</comment><comment><USER188> Why don't experts need two factor authentication?

</comment><comment><USER189> As others have said, whatever the author has written could apply to any smartphone from any vendor and any OS. And there's a whole lot of room for improvement in iOS (only Apple has to decide that these are priorities). The small screens and touch interface pose many limitations on how to convey things to users and enhance discoverability. I doubt if anyone wants a phone that bothers them for an entire hour teaching them how to do certain things. It's already quite painful setting up a new iOS device and having to re- download all apps on a slow connection (with the removal of app transfer from device to iTunes about two years ago).

Some more observations:

1\. The author mentions the manual on the Apple Books Store but doesn't even mention the Tips app that's been around a few years and shows some neat tips to discover _some_ (not all) features. Apple ought to expand on this one more.

2\. Some of the issues that the author lists are not easy to solve without having a long, tedious and difficult to use onboarding process when the device is first powered on. It also sounds like some of the examples he quotes are about people where someone else did the onboarding and forgot to setup certain things correctly when handing the device over to someone else. How can iOS or any OS solve these issues? The onboarding process, by some measures, is already long and incomprehensible by many lay people. For example, what exactly is "Location services" or "Notifications"? Taken to an extreme, some concepts (not these) are almost impossible for a device to explain to people. They're _only a little bit more easier_ for people to explain to people. Computers are difficult for most people. Not everyone needs to know everything or every feature. _But people learn over time because there are others who teach them things._

3\. Also, telling people that they can ask the iPhone for directions and that Apple should make sure people know about it is a catch 22. In India, Apple Maps cannot even find well known locations in major cities or provide directions to many places. Siri doesn't understand the Indian English accents (yeah, there are different accents depending on where the user is from within the country) well. Apple would have to know how good some of its services are and decide to tell people or not tell people or completely disable them in certain places. In this example, should Apple not tell users in India about Apple Maps or about Siri? Should it wait until another major release when these services are better? What defines "good enough" or "better"? Maps is almost useless in India, but Siri is not completely useless. It has some utility.

4\. While writing a rant is easy, I wish the author had also spent some time on providing some suggestions or solutions for at least some, if not all, of the issues.

5\. Email this to people at senior executives at Apple. That's something the author could've done after writing this post.

</comment><comment><USER190> >What can press-and-hold do that people don't know about? >Directly move a scrollbar. (Fails most of the time due to tiny narrow hotspots you're expected to hit on the first go.)

I couldn't get this to work.

>Show a magnified absolute-centred duplicate of nearly anything onscreen you cannot actually manipulate, like whatever is in the title bar. (Try pressing and holding on the battery icon.)

Neither this one.

Do I need some obscure accessibility setting for these?

<comment><USER191> I couldn't get either to work too. Maybe they took them out in iOS 12? I have scrollbarred before on prior Ios releases

<comment><USER192> I'm on 11.2.1 and I can't get it to work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER193> You can put it in control center and have it be about as easily adjustable as brightness. It's not there by default and hard to discover, but adjusting your text size all the time really is a bit of a niche feature. I'm really not sure what else Apple could do other than:

\- Asking during onboarding

<comment><USER194> I assume if I want to see if it's possible to change the font size I'd go to the Settings and look there.

Not sure how much hidden there it is. It could be more obvious, but I'm not sure how.

BTW pushing every setting in your face is also a design anti-pattern, so the complaint has to be taken lightly. (Also the "Apple doesn't care about usability" is just cheap words)

</comment></comment><comment><USER195> No shit, Sherlock. Welcome to the 21st century.</comment>