Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11 | Hacker News Reader

Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11

ericasadun.com

50 pointslonelycoder259 comments

I have a couple of problems with this article, the first and most glaring of which is the fact that the author is conflating the new iPad UI with the iPhone UI. The second problem is that the author went out of her way to turn on every possible option for the control center, then complains that can’t tell what things are - using specific examples that aren’t even on by default.

I personally like the new iPad UI - it makes it a lot easier to task switch to an app that may be several apps back in my history, and enables great drag-and-drop capabilities.

I agree, it's better than iOS 10. Though quitting apps does feel worse, but maybe that's intentional?

Users aren't meant to manually manage apps. Perhaps it should not even be offered as an option in the first place, except as something like "force quit" of last resort.

Apps are shown by recent-use, so that takes care of "which I'm using for this task now".

Users have to do what users have to do though. Apple may not mean for them to "manually manage apps" (i.e. killing apps; not some monumental task), but there are plenty of reasons for users to need to do it which are listed here and in the article comments.

So why are we making it harder for them to do things that they definitely need to do? I think the only opinion we've heard so far has been "because that's what Apple wants users to do".

This is typical Apple - they are totally ignoring what users actually need to do and acting like it's a superior design. Next thing you know, they'll provide no means to resize a window by any corner or edge on Macs. Then Apple evangelists will defend that decision for years and years as if it were somehow better (or "just different"...but definitely not worse than anything else!)

The Control Center's little control panel (reminiscent of the one in macOS 1, by the by) is an accelerator—a bunch of non-canonical secondary ways to reach items that have canonical locations in Preferences. Accelerators are about recall, not recognition. They're intended for touch-typing, not discoverability.

The app close buttons are indeed too small, though. Maybe they only tested them on the iPad Pro with the Pencil? (Or they're trying to discourage people from closing apps, so as to put the pressure back on developers to make sure their apps aren't bringing the system to a crawl even when in the background.)

eh, the X's are the same as the "delete" icons on the Springboard. I like the conceptual and design consistency.

Really I like everything about this change.

They should at least make the close button touch target bigger, even if they don't change its visual size.

they might be an accelerator, but they are also most people's primary means of accessing the tools. i've never seen anyone go to the settings menu to access the torch. people probably discover many of those settings from the control centre because they're just right there

Why not just have the same "swipe up to close" as iOS 10? It'd be instant. I guess regular people must "close" apps all of the time and Apple wants to hide that.

Drag and drop. The new iPad UI (this doesn’t exist on the iPhone BTW) enables all kinds of drag and drop features, including dragging an app onto another for split screen use. Swiping to kill an app could lead to a bad experience if you were expecting to open an app beside another and killed it by accident.

Here's my problem with the app close button.

It's EXACTLY the same visual design as the delete app button.

When designing anything you should keep the extremes in mind. In this case that would be my 60+yo mum and dad. I'm almost certain that they'll see that black X and think it will delete their solitaire game/Facebook etc.

Another anecdote, my dad got an iPhone recently from an old feature phone. One month he got a big data bill, supposedly because of background data. Now he religiously opens the task switcher and kills apps when he's done with them. It gives him a sense of control.

Apple had amazing people working on the UX for iOS. Once there wasn't a challenge any more these guys moved to new problems, leaving others who weren't as passionate driving the UX.

I wonder if this is a reaction to the belief that you need to keep on killing apps as soon as your phone is perceived to be running slowly? iOS will background kill apps under memory pressure but leaves an screenshot of the interface up in the task list. As people rarely need to manually kill apps and presumably rarely use the task switcher to jump back in the history more than a few places, having easy access to killing them is likely an antipattern.

Probably, but in using it on my iPad it is my biggest annoyance. If they don’t keep the swipe up to close they should at least have a drag to rearrange. The reason I want to be able to remove it is because I usually have a few things going on when using my iPad now. Mail, slack, Twitter, notes, messages. Then I open some random app and want to get it out of my “working space” but the new system makes that quite slow.

Then don’t bother. Unless an app has a pretty bad bug, you don’t need to force-kill it, and that’s what you’re doing here.

Furthermore didn't they add some sort of option in iOS 11 to get rid of things that haven't been used recently… thus automatically keeping things clean?

The new feature removed old installed apps to free up storage.

What about Maps? Leave it (or Google Maps) open in the background and battery life suffers.

Only if you’re actively navigating somewhere.

I need to kill apps quite often because the app has a bug and killing it, whether it actually kills it or not, ends up making the app redisplay or resync etc...

Sure, absolutely not saying it doesn’t happen. But one extra long press to kill the current app isn’t problematic given that ideally you shouldn’t have to do it at all, and no-one needs to kill every recently used app (or rather, if you’re finding problems in multiple apps you really need to reboot your phone instead).

Often I want to properly exit the app because I don't want it starting next time where I left off, but instead from its default opening state, starting screen, initial menu, a clean slate. A one tap exit button in the app is perfect for that, but sadly missing from many apps.

Swiping up from app list was next best thing and its sad to hear this has been removed.

The idea that exit buttons are redundant is completely missing the point. Reset, restart, save, quit - it's fundamental to software design but somehow these concepts have been demoted.

>Often I want to properly exit the app because I don't want it starting next time where I left off, but instead from its default opening state, starting screen, initial menu, a clean slate.

That might be legit as a wish, but it's not an encouraged (or expected) use case in iOS though. The default is "return where one had left", so this is in some way an abuse of the system to do something it can manage, but wasn't designed to offer.

In which case it's expected that it might clash with other UI choices.

A "session" ought to have a beginning and end rather than be stuck as CPU-managed neverending story. I'm only asking for the option to control things, not one or the other.

Open a few browser tabs for example, you're shopping for new shoes. Find shoes. Close browser. Makes no sense that tomorrow you open the browser and your 15 shoe tabs from yesterday's session are still there when all you want is your home page.

Ever tried closing 15 tabs in iOS Safari? That's 15 taps.

Likewise, the "don't need to save" idea is flawed too, with plenty of examples why a good old save button actually makes more sense that having the OS save every single change you make, even the mistakes.

I'm also with the OP on icon confusion. The one that always gets me is the bookmarks icon in iOS Safari. I always press the little book icon when I want to save a bookmark. No... that's not right. Must press the '+' button to add a bookmark. The actual bookmark icon is for retrieving bookmarks, not saving them. I'm only human though, so I reach for the book when I want to perform a bookmark action. I guess I'm wrong every single time.

Anecdotal: I’ve had numerous instances in iOS 10.3 where background apps have caused noticeable pauses on the main UI thread in the current app; closing all background apps makes things run smoothly again. My theory is that the increased RAM on the new iPad Pro is causing iOS to not suspend apps properly.

Maybe next weekend I’ll spend the time to write a CADisplayLink debugging app to demonstrate the performance penalty of leaving apps open in the background...

The stacked-card app switcher in iOS is the worst thing ever. It scrolls to the side instead of flinging an app "up" and closing it. You can see maybe a fraction of the most recent app, and barely any of another two, and then you have to scroll through a list of apps that have been open since I last rebooted my phone.

How anyone can think the iOS app switcher is the pinnacle of design baffles me.

Yeah I find it extremely inefficient. When I want to switch between apps, I'd almost rather just have a short list of the apps that are open or even just the icons (like Command + Tab on OSX)

(Not a defense, just an FYI) If you turn on Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion, it makes the app switcher a bit easier to use.

Which one?

iOS 10

>> In my opinion, this new design doesn’t work for the young, the old, the millenial, the seasoned pro, the able, the dis, the hawkeyed, or the near blind.

My absolute favorite change with iOS 11 was the removal of unnecessary labels. As a young millennial who has been using iOS for almost half of my life those tiny little blips of text scattered everywhere are completely redundant and simply add noise to an otherwise clean looking OS. You could replace every icon with a blank oval and I could navigate my phone just from the locations of the buttons.

> You could replace every icon with a blank oval and I could navigate my phone just from the locations of the buttons.

This may well turn out to be the new "touch typing". "Who looks at their phones to drive them? It's all in finger memory." (It's only old people like me who need to watch where their fingers are going...)

If you have a jailbroken device you can actually remove all app labels completely - it's gorgeous. I picked up a friend's iphone and felt completely overwhelmed by all the useless text everywhere.

iOS 10 is pretty tricky to jailbreak, but I got lucky and was on the 10.1.2 when qwertyoruiop finished Yalu. I went a step further and took all the letters off the keyboard - it’s perfection.

FWIW, haven't beta tested since iOS 7...Control Center swipe-up on lock screen or in-app is awfully inaccurate in general, coupled with being left-handed and equally non-dexterous on mobile with either hand as a touch screen isn't a mouse which I have used right-handed for over a decade.

I welcome the double home-tap to bring all that crap to foreground. Swiping left or right from there (even on iPhone SE) I welcome wholeheartedly but honestly I rarely "kill" an app from there anyway unless network changes.

Flipping back and forth from this writing, every grievance can be supplemented with "if you're natively right-handed" I guess. And that last sentence, much like my comment; why even fucking write this...

>In iOS 11, Apple redesigned. It decided to combine this recently used apps list with the control center, so that you could put as much information on-screen at once as possible. This produced an interface with teeny tiny images, and lots of user confusion overload.

The provided screenshot doesn't show that. Rather it shows large window icons and big enough targets for everything.

The rest of the post goes downhill fast.

Not to mention that it fails to account for all the ways in which the new app switcher (and assorted options mentioned, control center, etc) make iOS 11 a much more powerful machine.

Apple wants to keep positioning iOS on iPad as the de-facto post-pc "get work done" platform and to do so the UI needs to feel less constrained, more capable and appeal slightly more to "post-pc power users". Choosing to add UI like this to the iPad form-factor while omitting it from the iPhone screen size is likely proof that Apple believes the iPhone still needs a more constrained, more friendly and extremely low cognitive overhead UX while the iPad will start dabbling into more "multi-task enabling" UX.

One other thought: I think the author is a bit harsh on this particular UX on iPad primarily because the author is omitting (or forgetting) the fact that when a user enters the app switcher he or she will likely already be anticipating the primary area of focus on the screen that appears and will tunnel-vision his/her focus to only that region of the screen. In other words, after using the new app switcher a dozen or so times the user will unconsciously focus on only the region of that screen they know contains the actions he/she is looking for and they will do this in a anticipatory fashion since we are, after all, relentless pattern recognition machines. So I argue that what the designers have done here is to maximize instantaneously available information density while simultaneously utilizing classic visual design cues (such as "items in closer proximity to each other have similar purpose") to create 3 primary regions in which, per any given usage of the app switcher, a user is likely only focusing on one region. Here's a quick visualization I've done, a sort of heatmap of how user's would likely process this UI:

http://imgur.com/a/FC1k5

The light areas are the areas which users are most likely to focus on and they'll only be focusing on one of three regions most the time. The darker areas are there as increased available information density but the overall UI design is done well enough so that these darker areas should not negatively impact the "80% of the time" lighter areas but instead only serve to help the user during the "20% of the time" scenarios.

Why compare the iPad interface to the iPhone interface?

A bit of a senseless comparison. I think the app switcher works better for iPad than previous generations as it uses more of the available screen real estate and makes the iPad seem less of a jumbo iPhone. This is a first iteration and I think we will see it refined in the years to come.

I assumed that (like me) she put the iOS 11 beta on her less life-critical iPad and left her phone on iOS 10. I wouldn't trust iOS 11 on my primary device quite yet. Several apps I use on my iPad have critical issues that make them unusable.

I think people are making the incorrect assumption that the ios 11 beta’s UI is the final UI. If anyone else did the iOS 7 beta when Ive made huge changes, it looked/operated alot like is right now, devoid of proper functions… But hints at what they wanted to finish with.

There's a big problem in design which is that everything needs to change over time, just because change is good.

So even when a design is perfect, it just has to be changed eventually because everything has to be reviewed and modified.

>So even when a design is perfect, it just has to be changed eventually because everything has to be reviewed and modified.

a) which design is perfect?

b) which elements do users not complain of it being "stale" when it hasn't been changed in a while?

Sure, it's a minor annoyance to have to hold down a pane to be able to close apps, but in the end, closing an app is only necessary when an app is malfunctioning, which doesn't happen that often. (Yes, it's happening more right now, - but it's an early beta. What do you expect?)

I still find way too many people who are convinced that every app shown in the app switcher is using up their battery or actively running. I suspect this is the audience that will be most annoyed by the change.

I've long held, without any real concrete evidence, that Apple puts its best and most powerful iOS UI behind modern hardware/device capabilities as a ploy to coerce sales of newer devices. So much stuff is hiding behind Force Touch, which is a relatively recent hardware upgrade to their device fleet.

I can't stand force touch, and hate the apple compromised on the design to implement it.

2 years later and it's completely frigging useless, nobody's been able to demonstrate a useful feature for it and outside of techy Internet forums I've yet to meet anyone who uses it on their phone. Every time I ask ~50% of people have it turned off because the incredibly laggy, counter-intuitive, and downright annoying "actions" were bothering them so they turned it off in settings.

Force touch belongs in the dust bin of history with wood grain UI and horizontal sliders on horizontal swipe interfaces.

Disagree. Have been using this for a week on my iPad and like it a lot better.

There's so much more information on screen, you can configure what buttons appear in control center, and it's much harder to accidentally kill an app (I did this on accident with an upward swipe on iOS 10).

As someone who've used iPhone since the first version of it, usablitlity has been on decline since iOS 9. They removed very simple two step gestures like swipe-delete in music player. In the iOS10 search bar, if you search an app and start that app, the 'search button' remains active on the top left, press on which leads you back to search. (Why would I want to go back to search after I've found my app?" In iOS9, they removed the feature to create a new playlist by adding songs from another playlist. But this got fixed in iOS10. As someone who listens to music wherever I go, I liked the music control access on lock screen. But in iOS 10, they put AirDrop and Airplay controls on the first tab of control centre and music control is on second tab, requiring a second swipe(I'm walking on road and I'd like least amount of distraction). Few more iOS iterations, and I think I'll switch to Android.

Things change. For example...

> But in iOS 10, they put AirDrop and Airplay controls on the first tab of control centre and music control is on second tab...

...in iOS 11, it's not. But those (generally) aren't usability declines as much as necessary rethinks about how apps and OS functionality should work. It's unfortunate that they sometimes break muscle memory, but I'd be much more worried if the iPhone still worked like the first version of it.

> Few more iOS iterations, and I think I'll switch to Android.

That will probably solve everything. /s

> > Few more iOS iterations, and I think I'll switch to Android.

> That will probably solve everything. /s

It actually could. On Android, he can make his own LineageOS-based build and implement a completely custom UI.

I've used Android since v1.5, and it's really not much better in terms of changing things im used to, heh. It's saving grace is there's usually a way of going back to the way it was, but that usually means running old software. Security-wise that's sort of a no-no... in summary, I miss my Nokia N9 and Meego Harmattan, and all other mobile OSes are frustrating to me!

> and music control is on second tab, requiring a second swipe

This is fixed in iOS 11, everything is now on the first tab (and it's customizable).

> usablitlity has been on decline since iOS 9

In your opinion.

The global back button e.g. Search was specifically added to make the device more usable. You may not get lost and wonder how to get back but many users do.

And as for Swipe to Delete for music playlists I don't think Apple has ever used that paradigm when there is an button (cloud download) on the right side. If you think about it when a user is trying to download a song and they slightly move the table cell they might accidentally delete the song.

> usablitlity [sic] has been on decline since iOS 9

I actually disagree. Some things I don't like, but overall I think Apple's been making worthwhile improvements.

>They removed very simple two step gestures like swipe-delete in music player

Thank god for that. I hate swipe to delete anywhere, very easy to accidentally trigger AND confirm.

(I also hate the "shake to undo" -- and I hate to imagine someone with disability/arthritis etc having to go through that, but I digress).

>In the iOS10 search bar, if you search an app and start that app, the 'search button' remains active on the top left, press on which leads you back to search. (Why would I want to go back to search after I've found my app?"

Because multitasking. I often want to launch several apps.

>As someone who listens to music wherever I go, I liked the music control access on lock screen. But in iOS 10, they put AirDrop and Airplay controls on the first tab of control centre and music control is on second tab, requiring a second swipe(I'm walking on road and I'd like least amount of distraction)

Then just use the headphone controls?

I love it. Erica is a dev as far as I know, not sure if she has much idea about design.

Why can't a dev have much idea about design?

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Because then she'd be a designer.

It’s pretty bad on iPad. Still fine on iPhone though.

Boo fucking hoo.. look at me

Reply on news.ycombinator.com