Two main reasons (1) If you disable Wi-Fi its re-enabled when you goto a new location. Very often I disable wifi to temporarily get off a bad network in an area, and then curse when I get home and stream a 1GB video over 3G
(2) Much more user friendly for initiated actions
(3) You can still fully disable it by going into settings, but the quick-off is more like you expect.
Great work, Apple.
This is not fantastic, my phone is lying to me. I was wondering what the bug was because I turned off Bluetooth and it kept turning back on every damn time I got near my car. I want it on when I want it on and not anytime else.
Icons and OSes that lie to user make it tougher to understand what's going on. I expect the control center to tell the truth and do what I want. There is no indication that the settings and control center are different. This is a user hostile decision.
Cruddy work, Apple... now I get to answer questions about this psychotic crud.
If you force touch the UI, it does say "Not Connected" when you hit the button, not "Disabled."
I can understand the confusion, because they have re-used an old UI element for a new purpose, but there's no reason the button should mean "Disable Radio" rather than "Disconnect." And as cptide mentions, the button now has three states: blue for connected, grey for disconnected, grey with a line through for disabled. Once you know this, I think it makes a lot of sense.
If you want the old behavior, it's still there in settings, where the on-off toggle will turn off the radio itself.
Personally, I much prefer the new system (I far more often just want to disconnect from the current network/devices than disable it entirely), and think the new control center is much improved over the old one.
Additionally, it should be noted that leaving Bluetooth always on just add another attack surface to my phone and consumes unnecessary energy since I don’t own any Bluetooth accessories. Really wondering what the heck Apple was thinking here not making this a setting and enabling it by default.
Looking at this popup control though, the only indication that, for example, wifi is merely no longer connected versus turned off is the text under the icon, which, had I not been aware of this issue, I would probably not have bothered to read.
However, even reading the text under the button, "Not Connected" is ambiguous given the previous behavior of the button. In other words, without additional context, "Not Connected" probably means "Turned Off" to the majority of users. It's only when you get pedantic about things that it becomes clear that tapping the wifi icon in the Control Center in iOS 11 and seeing the text "Not Connected" means my wifi is still on and that I'm just no longer connected to a wifi network.
^^ Furthermore, I'd be 100% OK with this change if I'd at least been made aware of it. However, the more I think about the way this was handled by Apple, the more it really just seems like UX arrogance: Someone decided that my phone's Bluetooth and wifi should always be on, and they changed existing functionality accordingly and with no indication to me as the user that things are different now.
Not sure how else this can be taken??
Could a setting to revert the behavior not have been provided? Instead of forcing an entirely new behavior on existing users? Now I'm trying to figure out how to ensure my phone doesn't auto update to 11.
The set-up process for a new iPhone is also reaching crazy levels, with so many decisions for new users to make.
Don't really know what the solution to this is to be honest -- Linux-style config files maybe? :P
The other thing you can do is install a tvOS beta configuration profile. This will make your phone look for tvOS updates rather than iOS updates, which it will not install because they're not for ios. I won't post a link here, but it should be fairly straightforward to find.
Isn't the Apple approach that you just don't have to understand because the OS and their inventors know what's good for you? The main argument I hear from Apple users is that they don't have to care about anything and it works.
If you would really want to understand your mobiles OS, you would surely look towards other OSes.
I know i will
For me, I expect off to be off. What annoys me about this change is that the on\off behaviour is now asymmetric. If I turn off Wi-Fi in Settings, I can turn it back on via Control Centre but I now can't turn it off via Control Centre.
My preference is always to leave Wi-Fi off, turn it on when I want to use it, and then turn it off when I'm finished. This change makes doing that slower and clumsier.
It's exactly this micro-management that they try to obliterate, similar to this:
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/closing-apps-save-battery-make...
I think for the majority of users this is a really insightful change that addresses one of the biggest use cases the switch had (temporarily disable WiFi to get away from a bad connection) and one of the biggest issues it had for that use case (it was easy to turn it off and waste large amounts of relatively expensive wireless data)
Right!
But the good Apple developers believe that this way your experience will be somehow inferior:
From the article: >For the best experience on your iOS device, try to keep Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on.
In my parking garage the car charger needs to be activated via an app, and it needs to detect your location as within 100ft of the charger. Without WiFi, my location accuracy shows up as almost +-1 mile and I can't turn it on. As soon as I turn on WiFi it instantly snaps to exit of the garage (probably from correlating detecting apartment wifi hotspots along with my car's hotspot and my location as I leave the garage)
Which is a good example of a specific case where the feature is useful, and noone - I believe - is contrary to it in an absolute way.
But the parent commenter surely has his reasons to keep Wi-Fi off unless he wants it used, and this change does create an asimmetry in the way the thing is managed in the (now three) states of on/off/almost on.
Which was really funny, because I was downloading craploads of music specifically before I left the office so I wouldn't chew up my mobile data cap.
I didn't know the "switch to 4G if the wifi is bad" option even existed, much less was enabled.
Edit: Found it. "Wi-Fi Assist" in Settings > Cellular / Mobile Data > Scroll past all the apps > "Wi-Fi Assist"
Why are you accepting that there can be a concept of “picking up WiFi” but at the same time “doesn’t load anything”? That state is fundamentally flawed and shouldn’t even exist.
You should be able to connect to "broken" Wifi networks because you might actually want to access devices on the wifi network. For example, I want to be able to print things (my printer is on my home network) even if the cable modem is down. So my phone should just use cellular modem for internet, but still connect to the "broken" wifi.
I make it forget bad networks, so it wont connect to them by default. your workflow is poor.Posts consisting solely of grammar advice where there was no chance of miscommunication aren't helpful and just adds noise. It appears as if the intent is to project ones own superiority instead of educating.
Any other behavior is dark UX.
Ignoring the security implications, it has implications on battery life.
I get that if you're used to the previous meaning it could be annoying, but it's not like it's actually saying one thing and doing another.
It's also not the same button technically: they've redesigned the whole panel.
There's a balance to be made between least surprise and the benefits of being able to evolve a design. (Another factor with any OS is there's a constant stream of new users coming to it for the first time)
Not sure what you mean by this. iOS 11 was released on 09-19-2017, so not sure what you're saying is still awaiting a public release?
Regarding your second point, definitely agreed. However, to me this seems almost beyond the scope of Least Surprise and more akin to the Windows 10 fiasco where clicking the red X close button actually accepted the update and installed Windows 10. [1]
Bottom line: there are certain established UI conventions (i.e., an on/off button turns things on and off) that you really can't change without causing a lot of issues and user frustration. And if you do change them, please alert your users. Otherwise, it seems shady and is definitely a UX faux pas.
[1] http://bgr.com/2016/05/25/microsoft-windows-10-upgrade-trick...
> Not sure what you mean by this. iOS 11 was released on 09-19-2017, so not sure what you're saying is still awaiting a public release?
I meant that I thought it hadn't but wasn't sure -- I haven't been following it closely.
Instead of fixing the UI to make you empowered, it will decide what is better for you? great!
For example, on a daily basis, I usually spend my time in one of 4 places: - A location with good WiFi and good LTE reception (expectation: all services on) - A location with bad WiFi and good LTE reception (expectation: WiFi off) - A location with excellent WiFi and atrocious LTE reception (expectation: cellular off) - A location with bad WiFi and zero LTE reception (expectation: all off)
Previously, I had to manually toggle WiFi, cellular, or airplane mode on or off in these various locations, nearly always forgetting to change it again later. This is mainly a problem with turning things off - if I'm in airplane mode, I might not notice that I'm incommunicado for an hour or more if I'm engrossed in a task, whereas leaving everything on when I'm in the metaphorical dungeon will only cost me a few % of battery, at most.
However, by defaulting services to on after I move locations, my phone reverts to a communication device at the expense of a marginal amount of battery life. Think of it as a 4-square: 1) services on, actively using; 2) services off, actively using; 3) services on, not using; 4) services off, not using.
In cases 1 & 2, I'm actively using it and I don't care what it does as long as it functions (i.e. I can manually disconnect from shitty WiFi myself, so data will load again). In case 3, I lose some battery life for my inattention, but no big deal - I can still easily make it all day on a charge. In case 4, I'm SOL until I remember to turn them on again.
This behavioral change in iOS 11 moves some of my time from case 4 to case 3, which is a tradeoff I am willing to make.
I hope this helps to illustrate the alternative perspective to yours a bit more clearly.
Why are you not insisting that the OS simply disconnect on its own quickly in such scenarios? Why do you accept that manual user action is the right solution? If the phone automatically and quickly dropped a WiFi the instant it doesn’t support data, this problem wouldn’t exist. Instead Apple expects users to get involved in that problem and has now overcomplicated what should be a very simple switch.
Its a UI anti-pattern, because they're changing the definition of off from 'its off, end of topic' to 'well, its not really off, only disconnected, and you can not really tell what is what' ..
So, no big deal. Until you get hacked over wifi when you thought it was off all the time ... or your battery discharges 20% faster than you thought it should, etc.
If you can get hacked "over wifi" then you have bigger problems than whether the toggle makes it on or off. Assuming that you turn it on, ever, that is.
Besides, you can tell if it's on and off. Off has a strikethrough over the icon.
I don't think this is as positive as some people think. I'll "turn off Wifi", but packets can still flow. The device can still be observed remotely.
Regardless of this particular implementation, isn't that the whole point of computing? To get the software to be smarter and decide what's better -- all the way to AI assistants.