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Comment by tammer | Hacker News Reader

Eh it sounds to me that this is a great quick fix for the "I'm slightly too far from the AP to have bandwidth but I'm still maintaining a connection" problem I have almost daily. Will make an obscure security concern you've identified slightly more difficult to deal with. If you don't prefer trade offs like this, Apple likely isn't the best digital provider for you.

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You’re right it’s an excellent solution to that issue and sometimes it’s exactly what I want. I’m worried about the security aspect because a stock iphone is what you should get if you care about privacy and security yet the UI actively misleads you on the purpose of the toggle.

If they wanted a disconnect button they could have designed a new icon for it. Maybe a toast so that people understand what just happened.

I found this out the hard way because my phone kept trying to connect to the subway APs and aside from giving them a nice transit map I lost about 30% battery.

The most common use case is toggling WiFi to drop a bad connection, and then forgetting to turn it back on, costing you who knows how much in LTE data when you’re back at home thinking you’re on WiFi.

This UX change is like cash money to most users.

Although they did the exact same change for the Bluetooth toggle in the Control Center, and that one has less of a financial benefit.

I don't mind the change, but I do wish that the force touch "pop" menu toggles would completely turn off those radios instead of simply disconnecting.

For those who haven't used iOS 11, you can force touch the Control Center icons to pop in a full menu with additional toggles.

Apple also randomizes your MAC address when probing to alleviate that privacy concern.

WiFi should take hours to drain 30% of your phone battery. Did you check the battery usage in Settings?

repeating failing reconnects can cause some quick draining, or constant connect/disconnect, as is often the case with public wifi.

Who's a better digital device provider than Apple for security & privacy?

Nobody. I think a better statement would of been maybe this "feature" isn't for you. Head to settings and turn it off.

They could have built a nice ui for that, like cough windows phone. Turn wifi off now, but turn it back on in 1/4/8 hours/when I ask for it/when I get to a 'favorite place'. This was great when wifi at work mostly worked, but had bad days (turn it off until I probably left, maybe it'll work tomorrow). It's much less convenient on Android, because there's a good chance I'll forget to turn it on when I get home.

Humans aren't that good at estimating time related to future actions, so building a UI that asks them to do so isn't a very good UI. Sure power users might appreciate it but it's quite a bit of cognitive load and still error prone. Much better to just leave it a toggle.

For me the more common case for switching off Wifi is that I'm gonna connect to a network that is slower than the cellular network.

And no, I'm not turning on the Apple "feature" where it drains out my cellular data limits even when I am connected to excellent Wifi at home.

I was under the impression that the feature you are referring to wouldn't take cellular data unless you were not getting a good signal from the WiFi connection, or if you are moving fast enough to be dropped off the network.

Fix for this use case is also in Android 8 - you can turn off wifi, but turn it back on once you're in proximity of known network. Helps save battery too, I suppose

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