iOS 11's Misleading "Off-Ish" Setting for Radios Is Bad for User Security
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No. It is in an attempt to resolve the real loss of money experienced by everyday users who turn off WiFi when it’s flakey and then forget to turn it back on, costing them cash on their cellular data plan. (And the very real frustration when things don’t work they expect to work, and they don’t know why.)
Meanwhile, the security motivated user will figure out she can 3D Touch or go into settings and meet her more sophisticated use cases.
Consider the normal user’s scenarios and do the math. This saves more users from more loss.
Note how they even use privacy as one of the main (at least, in my opinion) selling point for Apple devices[0] ("Every Apple product is designed from the ground up to protect that information.").
If you just pull up control center and tap the button is says “Disconnected from ‘WiFiNetwork’”.
If you expand the panel with 3D Touch or a long press under the WiFi icon it either says WiFiName or Not Connected.
On the other hand the cellular radio says Off if you toggle it.
This isn’t completely hidden. The information is there. And I agree with the other posters that this is a far better setting considering how many people have run up ridiculous cellular bills because of bad Wi-Fi and forgetting about the setting.
At this point I’m not sure there’s a need for normal users to actually turn off Wi-Fi. The only real case would be something like airplane mode which already has its own setting.
That's exactly what happened to me when I was desperately trying to save battery and turn off services.
I'll admit that this behavior is what I want 99% of the time, so it also doesn't bother me.
I do think the new behavior is better for me as a user 99% of the time, but at the same time i also want to know what is happening and how to override it.
Silent mode on android shows how to do it correctly, there you get a popup when activating it asking for how long you want it to be silent. It has a few presets so you just need one extra tap. That is the correct behaviour, if that's to much for an Apple mind to handle, the very least they should do is to inform of the actual state with a more descriptive label.
I like this change because when I turn just wifi off it was always because of an acting up network. Now that I don't have to remember to turn it back on is a good thing. My guess is that Apple has a lot of data, and found that this behavior is what most people want.
Edit: I originally said that having wifi on "at least doubles" the power drain on my phone but since I haven't actually taken hard stats on that, I'll just say "greatly increases."
I thought the basic mobile connection was active all the time (unless there was no signal). Are you saying if I turn WiFi on, and I receive an SMS (not through iMessage) or a phone call, it's actually coming through WiFi and the mobile connection is totally off? Surely not.
I have a generous data plan, so I don't need to use wifi to preserve it.
It's on par with OSX's "some menu items change if you hold down alt while they're open" behavior. Aggressively obscured.
Maybe I’ll get used to it but right now I’m old man grumpy.
(The other problem is the light touch/hard touch thing)
Although lacking discoverability, I personally find it very quick, useful and natural in a couple of use cases: acting on notifications, keyboard cursor movement and selection, (sadly defunct) app switching, on Apple Music track listings.
Haven't found a single other place where it does anything I find useful.
Can you take a screenshot of where this is explained?
I ran into a use case for turning off wifi the other day. My ISP was having problems and the wifi network could not reach the internet. Turning off wifi saved me the trouble of forgetting my wifi network, and then looking up / typing in the password when I rejoined.
This is backed up by people's previous experiences with the toggle, which did actually turn off the wifi.
I do it all the time when my home wi-fi is slow and I want to use 4G to quickly access something. My home internet is crap; my phone 4G is fast but with a low bandwidth cap.
You can’t have it both ways. Apple either miscommunicated this ever since Control center was added till today or they are miscommunication pang today.
I would lean in the direction of miscommunicating today because Apple has spent years teaching its customers that this behavior means X and now it’s been changed to Y.
And that's the expected outcome of me turning off wifi. Something I deliberately tried to do through clicking the on/off toggle.
I agree with parent poster: Either apple has been miscommunication the whole time, or they are miscommunication now. You can't have it both ways.
I appreciate the feature is a nice one, that the wifi will turn back on sometimes. I've been caught out. But I can't know what hidden features exist and how to distinguish them.
Moreover, "Disconnected from WifiNetwork" only communicates what you say it does once you know what the feature does. Until then, you don't know. There's also nothing that says "the network has been disabled until you go home" or whenever it's going to turn back on.
Apple used to care about their products being useful to power uses and beginners alike. Now they care about their products being useful to beginners and capable of letting the elite know who they are — the power users who are not amongst the elite know that too. It's really not very nice.
I was really happy with it when I first got my iPhone. It was awesome. I'd never used one, and it kept telling me what to do next. If I guessed wrong, it was like "haha, no you've gotta do this instead". But it is not going to be replaced with another iPhone. I just can't stand it any more.
Maybe a lighter shade of blue? Or a white background with the icon colored vivid blue?
Seems fine for me /shrug
Or anyone who doesn’t want to be tracked by random retailers. I worked for one such company, so I know intimately how it works, including how MAC address randomization doesn’t actually work in the real world at completely obscuring your device.
Battery life, esp. if the battery is low and you need to ensure you'll be able to use it until you can get to a charger.
To preserve battery. I don't know about iPhones, but on my Android phone, Wi-Fi is certainly the largest battery hog, if I leave Wi-Fi location scanning on.
Just checked again to make sure. Wifi 0%, Bluetooth 0%
Right now wifi is at 8%, and I used it for maybe 15 minutes this morning, that's it.
Motorola Moto X Play, Android 6.0.1, for what it's worth.
As far as I know, Marshmallow has a battery drain issue, but Motorola (now Lenovo) does not seem to be interested in updating their software anymore.
I get around 1.5 days normally, less than a day if I use wifi and BT.
This really sounds like members of my dev team trying to explain why their terrible UX is actually quite clever.
Define 'normal'. After I educated my (retired, nontechnical) mother about wifi and bluetooth tracking, she started turning them off when she left the house.
I think the folks who think this is just peachy are in their own bubble. 'Normal' (by my working definition) people do care about this stuff if they understand it. Thankfully, Apple gets this stuff right-ish more often than not, but in this case, I think they blew it.
If they made this change I imagine the number of people who actually toggle the radios on and off a lot (manually, not airplane mode) must be very small.
I’m sure th know how many people have written them about the ‘I ran up my cellular bill and it’s your fault’ thing too. I know I’ve heard that from people.
It’s a change from what it’s been doing for 10 years but I think it makes sense.
Folks who worry about, say, wifi and bluetooth walk-buy surveillance are going to be much more likely to opt-out of just about anything they can, including usage instrumentation. So of course they'll be underrepresented in statistics generated from that data.
"Decent" means easy-to-access without jumping through a ton of hoops, being reliable after you jump through those hoops, and being faster than cellular data. Yes, my own wifi at home is decent, but when I'm away from home, I just assume there's no such thing as public wifi and use cellular data. My stress is lower that way.
Well, there IS a strike-over in the icon when you fully disable wifi.
And since a state between on and off is not intuitive and cannot be imagined out of the blue by end users, the onus is on the implementing party to leave no room for confusion. The current vagueness with the control has no logical explanation.
"So Android spontaneously turns your Wi-Fi off? How silly. Why, you know what? Ours will spontaneously turn on, take that!!"
Yes.
It's not just because people forget to turn Wi-Fi back on.
Radios are "off-ish" because they remain on for other Apple devices and services, but off for other uses.
What actually happens in iOS 11 when you toggle your quick settings to "off" is that the phone will disconnect from Wi-Fi networks and some devices, but remain on for Apple services.
Location Services is still enabled, Apple devices (like Apple Watch and Pencil) stay connected, and services such as Handoff and Instant Hotspot stay on.
I think they just fucked up.
HN audience doesn't represent the typical iphone user. The typical iphone user appreciates privacy but is less concerned about transmitting devices than about the phone bill. I'm sure there are people who always remember switching wifi back on (or have a true unlimited contract) but most (including me) are not part of that. I see why this feature can be viewed as critical but think it'll be an improvement for the vast majority of users.
Ideally, they would've provided a switch in the settings to allow iOS10 behaviour. Maybe they'll bring that with a later version.
Is there a source for this, or is this your opinion?
Is the solution here not simply to turn off mobile data when you don’t want to use it, if you’re on such a restrictive mobile plan?
The fact is, the behaviour changed in a way that wasn’t made clear at all. That WiFi will reconnect by itself after being off for a period is a security and privacy issue, and is a frustrating change.
Hiding things behind 3D Touch is not very intuitive or user friendly. What was once a toggle - on or off - is now a three state option where one of the stares can only be accessed from the settings app.
Or add warning and cut-off thresholds, isn't that alredy possible?
Either it doesn't work that way, or it's well hidden and appears not great in terms of UX.
Overall, I agree with you though. I'm personally not clear on the utility of turning off just wifi or just bluetooth. I assume (hope) airplane mode turns everything off. But in any other scenario you're still leaking location and other information.
This feature has been driving me NUTS because I’m surround by about a 1000 google Starbucks and TCWifi hotspots at home and at work and I connect to them magically and suddenly my phone stops working because I haven’t logged into their service.
The way I've run every smartphone I've owned is to turn off mobile data, WiFi, and Bluetooth and only turn them on as and when I need them. I prefer it to work that way.
The way this works in iOS 11 is now inconsistent and confusing. I can turn mobile data on and off via Control Centre. But, while I can turn WiFi on in Control Centre, I can't turn it off again. The mobile data icon in Control Centre has two states: highlighted for on and non-highlighted for off. The WiFi icon in Control Centre has three states: highlighted for on, non-highlighted for disconnected, and non-highlighted with a line through it for off. For consistency the mobile data icon should also have a line through it.
I can turn WiFi off via Settings, but doing it this way is slower and clumsier than it used to be in iOS 10. As a workaround, I've added Settings to my phone's taskbar. Force pressing the Settings icon pops up a menu which lets you get to the WiFi settings directly.
Okay, but you have to accept that this is a ridiculously small minority use case.
If the icons were consistent and there was a setting to toggle the behaviour of Control Centre then it would be a non-issue. I could set it up the way I want and it would work as it used to in iOS 10. But the icons are inconsistent and, as far as I know, there's no such setting.
"I don't accept that."
Addressing the strongest possible reading and all that.
> a non sequitur about it being a "common sense approach."
Just read "common sense approach" as "that makes sense to me" and it fits perfectly. As for common sense, ask random people on the street what they think turning something "off" means. Do you think you'll find even ONE person who says "oh, that probably means it'll stay off until I change location, or until 5 AM, whatever comes sooner?". That's the elephant on the couch.
The use case of what you or most would find convenient, and would prefer to have available with one touch instead of more, is completely orthogonal to what all of this is about -- the common sense of what any normal person who isn't bent on defending Apple just because would respond with 1000 times out of 1000: of how to read UI in this case. Consider it a use case for the UI, and to even suggest just one person actually has the use case you declare to be such a majority they must be catered to without any further investigation (e.g. if the majority is wrong, that should strengthen, not weaken your resolve) truly is ridiculous.
I'm a bit dubious about this - in fact, turning off WiFi would actually harm battery life, surely, compared to LTE?
I'm kind of fascinated to hear from people who spend money on things only to disable all of the things that make the thing worth spending money on.
If someone tried to tell me that the default behavior of a product should be to not function, I think I would go through the roof.
I have a smartphone that offers reasonable controls on cellular data use on a per-app basis, in addition to easy system-wide toggles for WiFi and cellular data. It's easy for me to keep cellular data off most of the time, as I'm usually within WiFi range or taking short trips (eg. grocery shopping) where there's no inconvenience to being offline for a while. As a result, I get great battery life out of my phone and don't need a multi-GB data plan unless I'm traveling for most of the month. The TCO for my smartphone is a small fraction of what's typical with an iPhone on a major carrier, but I have full access to the capabilities of my smartphone and its LTE connection, when I decide to use them.
I hate to point this out, because it seems pedantic and patronizing, but honestly you might need the reminder, that there are other people out there, and no, they aren't all like you.
In the same vain I regularly visit shopping malls. If I go in the week the WiFi usually works no issue, but at weekends when they are busy it can be very slow, so I usually turn off WiFi. With this feature I can still get location accuracy without using GPS (which saves battery) and don’t need to remember to turn it on when I’m home.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with the feature, but more the UI and feedback surrounding it. Someone else suggested pressing the button shows a pop up asking if you want to disconnect from the network, or turn off WiFi completely.
Please tell me why this behaviour is better:
- the indicator clearly indicates WiFi is off (it's grayed out, like any other icon that show off state)
- the phone drops my perfectly working stable 4G connection and randomly tries to connect to any shitty wi-fi it can find: a random cafe I pass by, a random hotspot on a random phone eenabled by random people on the train, random public wi-fi spots in public areas
- despite the fact that I told it to disconnect from wifi, it doesn't, and randomly connects to all these shitty networks, often popping up a "hey, select a wifi to connect to"
- And then it just reverts to "always on" at 5AM
How is this better?
See? It cuts both ways, you can't make blanket statements like that - either way - when they're subjective to each user's own use case. I legitimately prefer this toggle, because I so rarely care about wifi being actually, fully off that I'll go to settings.app for that, and the benefit of being able to easily toggle disconnect but keep wifi on for location accuracy easily outweighs that.
I agree that a setting to toggle between both is better but I also default to more settings being better. However, I realise that that's often counter to the Apple Way because they try to strip away all the unnecessary* cruft to try to focus the user into a certain use case and so understand why Apple did it this way, even though it's not my preferred way.
* as in literally not necessary, i.e. nice to have, rather than 'unnecessary' aka 'not useful'
I really don't see how the apologists can deny this.
In iOS every UI control to toggle something on or off toggles things on or off... They all have the same UI presentation, and shows the same affordances, leading the user to expect the same behaviour.
And that they have. Everywhere except for wifi. Who in their right mind though this was a good idea?
How is it possible to argue this inconsistency is not a source of confusion?
I can't wait for my next flight, to hear how the in-flight personnel are going to explain this to Apple users.
"If you have electrical equipment with a radio transmitter, please turn it off now. If you have a Note 8, please let us know now, so we won't have to call the bomb-squad. And lastly if you have an wifi-only iPad running iOS 11, please make sure you turn wifi off using the special settings app because flight-mode doesn't work".
This is getting ridiculous. I bet the airliners are really happy about this change.
And with Apple now being inconsistent about what a on/off toggle actually does... It's hard to tell what toggling flight-mode actually results in.
And if I were in the airline business, I would take an issue with that.
EDIT: This is what Airplane Mode looks like https://i.imgur.com/mEMYdL6.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4L3uZmm.jpg
Now it no longer is. Why did Apple have to cause this needless confusion?
Enabling/disabling Location in the quick settings menu only changes Location settings between Low Accuracy and High Accuracy.
I have to open the phone settings, then go into Location, to then be able to completely turn it off.
Naked apologism. So unthoughtful, and delivered with such a righteous tone.
If this was their intention, they could have implemented the feature honestly, informing users about what was happening, and offering a clear choice, such as an immediate popup, between "turn off for this location" and "turn off completely." That would have been fine.
But the existence of this "pro" to the deceptive and confusing behavior does not justify it.
The UI (mis)informs the user that wifi has been turned off by greying it out, at the very least it's inconsistent with other toggle buttons. Or are there other things apple decides that you don't really want turned off?
I'm honestly confused... Do you really believe that most users have distinct concepts in their mental model for "wifi off" and "disconnected from a network"? They look at the button, it's not blue anymore, it's off. Then later they think... "Wait how did this randomly turn on again?" I believe this will be the experience even of the majority of tech savvy users, let alone typical ones.
The new control center behaves in the way that most people actually use the buttons. More importantly it solves a major problem in that it no longer requires the user to know what radios need to be on for various features they use to work. Apple probably has all the support call stats they need to decide this was a better behavior.
It always matters if you're trying to minimize user frustration and confusion. The mental model determines what the user expects their actions to do.
> because the user shouldn't be responsible for managing the radios in their phone. > The new control center behaves in the way that most people actually use the buttons. More importantly it solves a major problem in that it no longer requires the user to know what radios need to be on for various features they use to work.
I don't think anyone (certainly not me) is arguing that this isn't a useful feature for the phone to have and is what many people want, at least some of the time. The argument is that the feature's behavior should be clear rather than misleading.
> Apple probably has all the support call stats they need to decide this was a better behavior.
Again, fine, but don't suggest one thing and silently do the "better" thing. Either allow the user to confirm the behavior, or create a UI that clarifies the behavior so people aren't misled into believing that "off until 5am" or "off until you move" means "off."
So if most iPhone users are using these buttons to disconnect from their current network, or to disconnect the current bluetooth device, then I understand why they'd change them to have that meaning.
Disconnecting from the current wifi network or disconnecting the current bluetooth device probably comes up somewhat frequently as a task the user wants to accomplish, whereas actually disabling the radios likely does not come up much at all outside of airplane mode. So I get what Apple is doing. I wonder why they chose to maintain the button UI though. Perhaps it's because people are expecting it, and are used to it?
If Apple wants to change this paradigm, they have to be very very careful about it. And they obviously haven't been.
Nobody cares about this other than technical people, who really only care because they perceive it to be Apple Arrogance. Nearly 40% of the installed base is on iOS 11, if there were complaints about this we'd have heard about it by now (just like we hear about everything else).
Tech blogs and the EFF might write about it, but aside from the HN threads about it, no one in the real world will ever care because the change is an improvement over what it used to do.
Deliberately changing how a well known function works is stupid, especially the part about it not being immediately obvious that it now works differently from literally every other phone out there.
This is a statement that must have links confirming that most people actually do use it that way.
Meanwhile the new shitty toggle leads to my phone randomly dropping perfectly stable 4G connection in an attempt to connect to random Wi-Fi hotspots on the train
I'm not getting into the rest of your discussion, but I think you completely missed that you can indeed actually turn them off via 3D touch. Even on non-3D touch devices like the iPad mini, you can get to the "actually off" toggles by long-pressing the icons. Sure, it's somewhat of an extra step, but it's misleading to claim that the option doesn't exist when it clearly does.
edit: but you can definitely turn them off through the Settings app.
You can still switch off the radios if you want in settings.
Every single time I've wanted to turn off Wifi and Bluetooth, it's because I know I'm going to struggle to get my battery to last till I can charge it again. I'm going to be out and on the move, so Wifi has no value to me except as a battery drain.
In fact, I struggle to think of any other ordinary use for disabling Wifi and Bluetooth. The real exceptions are like (I have this one now) I don't have ADSL at home but I haven't been bothered to turn off the modem or my mate who's paranoid of being stalked by companies. But those are exceptional. I wouldn't write a feature to deal with them. Except to keep the battery going, who turns wifi off?
It sounds like I've lost a real feature and I don't know how to get it back any more. If I want to be able to send and receive data but I want my phone to last all day[], what can I do?
[]: NB. The only reason I want my phone to last all day is because I want to use it. Consequently, saying "my phone lasts all day no problem" isn't an answer. You probably don't use your phone like I do.
This. We can’t turn off BlueTooth/WiFi from the swipe-up screen anymore. Full stop.
When the user is presented with the current control center button that turns the WiFi symbol from blue to gray, the user has a reasonable expectation (actually, I'd say more than that in this case) that it means "off." That's the point of the original article. As a completely general rule, if your UI is does something that may reasonably be misinterpreted, it is your responsibility to inform the user of that. You could take the principle almost as a definition of good usability.
How hard would it have been to emulate what they did with f.lux, I mean Night Shift and say "Bluetooth, off until 5am (tap for more options)" or "Wi-Fi, off at this location (tap for more options)"
> It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'
-- You Know Who
And that's not "offering" the plans, is it? When I ask you if you want a piece of chewing gum, I'm offering you a piece of chewing gum. If I have some chewing gum in my pocket and it's possible for someone -- not everybody, just someone -- to overpower me, that's not quite the same as offering. And yes, that's an extreme example, Apple isn't hiding the option on a planet full of killer robots in another galaxy. But it's also not quite "offering" it.
My iPhone SE doesn't have 3D touch, or if it does, I have no idea what it is.
So as far as I know, no, I don't have that option.
I think this whole argument just lends more support to the idea that Apple is being deceptive with this UI.
However, after all the feedback here I did some testing and it appears the GP was wrong: The submenu obtained by 3D touch/long-press doesn't actually turn WiFi off. My apologies for repeating his claim without backing it up.
And, of course, voted up to the very top of the comments section here, as usual. The Apple apologists here are a bit of a plague.
I want to turn it off.
The fact that this is front-page on HN means something.
I can also see users frequently being confused by things like their Apple Pencil not working.
I love this change. You can still turn it off properly in settings. I generally trust Apple with frequent and speedy security updates. Their security track record is industry leading. I'm not remotely concerned.
Also most of the time people tell me they want this option they really mean they want to save battery life. I'd suggest just using low power mode for that, it's what it's designed for.
Also, are you proposing that low power mode with wifi uses the same amount of power as lower power mode without wifi? If I know I'm not going to see a power point for many hours, I turn my phone onto low power mode and turn wifi off (and the brightness right down and some other things). I might do it as I leave the house in the morning when I still have 95% battery. In these cases, I very often need my phone most in precisely when the battery will be weakest.
Having had this discussion a few times, I'd love to do a solid battery life investigation of turning off wi-fi properly versus this toggle.. given it disables auto-join I imagine the scanning frequency is significantly reduced and thus the power usage is probably relatively comparable (close enough). But that's just a guess, I don't know for sure, but I'd sure love to know.
I'd also love to know the battery impact of turning bluetooth off entirely. These things all seem like antipatterns to do as a regular usage thing and I think that, in most cases without actual research, they're a bad idea for people to get into the habbit of. For precisely the reasons outlined here and by apple.. later using mobile data accidentally, being confused your apple pencil works, etc.
Are the "security motivated" also expected to know if iMessage or FaceTime stopped using end-to-end encryption, too?
These things should be communicated. Also, all Apple had to do was make it a 3-toggle button instead of a 2-toggle one. Just keep the normal way of turning-off Wi-Fi and add a new one for Disconnect Wi-Fi, too. Nothing could be simpler. But no, Apple has to be "courageous" in pissing off a large portion of their users each time they do something, rather than implementing a UX change as simple as that without disturbing well learned UX behaviors for their users.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208086
The problems with this change are:
It is surprising - grey buttons usually mean disabled permanently, not disabled except for some uses or for some indeterminate length of time.
It changes established behaviour without a clear warning to the user.
It is inconsistent - disabling bluetooth now disconnects from all devices (except Apple ones!), and it says 'Not Connected' when it is in fact connected to an Apple Watch say.
It is inconsistent - other buttons like airplane mode or mobile data do turn off permanently.
It's not a huge deal and everyone will adapt, but you shouldn't be apologising for Apple here - this was badly done and not well thought out.
Indeed, the detailed block of controls does not present the three possible states to the user. In the same zoomed in block, the Airdrop toggle does. Conversely, going to Settings is binary and allows only for On/Off, not that very practical Disconnect state. The difference between Off and Disconnected is a light bar across the icon, which is inconsistently not the case for the Off state of Mobile Data and Airplane mode.
The "dumbed down" UI concerns are valid, yet the intersection between security minded folks that will proactively act to disable WiFi/BT upon a security advisory and the ones who won’t know the difference between the two ways to toggle that is close to zero. To me it looks like people are up in arms without even defining the personas and threat models. Get real, this feature is downright awesome and the slight UI hiccup is certainly no ShellShock.
There are also a few other reasons for disabling wifi - battery life, tracking, debugging connections, and of course security as well (not in response to specific vulnerabilities, but on the principle of less attack surface being safer).
Until the next Broadcom WiFi radio vulnerability.
Before the command center existed people weren’t saying having a WiFi toggle hidden in the settings app is a security vunurability.
Your smartphone screen uses several orders of magnitude more energy lighting up than btle and wifi use while idle.
I was surprised by this, so I just tested it. Tapping the button immediately disconnected from my Apple bluetooth AirPods.
Is excess data usage severely penalized financially in other countries?
I believe it depends on ISP and on specific plan.
My mom has an iPad with a limited to 3 Gb/month dataplan (Italy), a couple of times she managed to go beyond the limit (due to some updates she did when not Wi-Fi connected), since it is a sort of pre-paid account, what happened was that the device became slow as molasses, as bandwidth was reduced to the speed of an analogic modem or something like that.
She still had connection, but to access a web page it took like 3 minutes.
On the other hand, she changed phone from a "normal" phone to a "smart" Android one (she was totally unaware of this and didn't realize that the cellular data was on) but her SIM (also pre-paid) did have an on-demand dataplan (never used before on the old phone), very, very costly and she managed to burn 30 out of 50 € of credit in a couple days (without using the internet at all, just through the "pings" (or whatever) the Android did in background).
What is also true, however, is that most basic plans include between 10 and 20 GB of data. You have a really bad plan if you only get 3 GB.
[1]The rules are a bit different for company plans.
This. I read this EFF list of "Terrible things" and thought "neat!" for every single one of these items.
The nearly 100% use cases for me turning wifi 'off' is because whatever it's connected to is slow/unresponsive, or some really annoying auto-connection to a pay-wifi in the location I'm currently in. My cell connection is normally good, so sometimes it's days before I notice, or when I get a message telling me that I've used up my allowance, or try to connect to the hotspot/talk to other devices at home.
With iOS 11, without reading these complaints, I'd probably never have noticed that this problem had silently solved itself and stopped annoying me.
Can we make sure that we're talking about the same thing? Can we compare global data prices? What are you basing your assumption on?
Talking about assumptions: My assumption is that people that buy a recent/new iPhone either
a) get it with a (reasonably sized) contract and have enough data
b) have a bit of disposable income to pay for data for all these places where you might need it
Another fun assumption: Basically ~nowhere~ (not true ofc, but we're both generalizing) in Germany you have hotspots or free wifi. Why would a phone need constant wifi, if you only ever connect it at home, mayyyyyybe at work?
Essentially, i've left tethering on more times accidentally than ever before since upgrading to iOS 11, and used up my entire data allowance without realising it.
While cycling, I reach to my phone and switch it "off" again just to be again connected to some other access point at the next crossing.
I really hope for a setting in the next version so that off means off again.
For privacy/security, I feel like it's only really going to help to turn off all radios (airplane mode).
But I guess at least the UI shows that Wifi and Bluetooth are on. I assume that if after activating airplane mode you disconnect bluetooth and wifi from the control center, it really does turn all radios off...
[1] http://www.redmondpie.com/new-in-ios-11-airplane-mode-no-lon...
Moreover, going to the Settings app is laborious. There's a lot of stuff there. When you open it, you don't always "start from the start", so that pulling it up requires working out where it is in the app you are in order to navigate appropriately. Instead of focusing on the task of disabling wifi and going somewhere, you have to focus on the task of navigating an app. And also if you have a phone that wasn't bought yesterday, it will probably close some other app you were running because it's run out of RAM.
All so that some weird usecase I can't understand is available. This fellow is the only person who's described a usecase for disconnecting from wifi networks while leaving wifi on, insofar as leaving the radio on won't have upsetting results for him. But the feature doesn't work for him.
For me, sometimes I need my battery to last all day not just till dinner. I want the radio off.
I can't think of a non-technical/non-exceptional use that is benefited by this feature.
(NB. I quite like the idea that my wifi will spontaneously turn back on again when the battery is charged adequately, or at 5am or some such. It would've saved my data on numerous occasions. But that's a different feature that hasn't been implemented.)
I forget all wifi points except for any place I regularly go. LTE is good enough for cafes and the like.
Presumably they are cycling past places they visit.
Changing defaults is bad enough, but not giving users a choice to change them back is incredibly frustrating, especially for a device with such a diverse range of users and use cases.
Apple (and Google, in their own way) seem to think they can push users towards a lowest common denominator use case. It just doesn’t work.
Take “Do Not Disturb While Driving” for example, which kept activating when I was taking the train. I don’t drive. I set the option to manual yet it still continued to activate whenever I moved above a certain speed. I feel like the folks at Apple have decided “well, since we all drive, it’s probably true of most people”.
Strangely enough it was actually much nicer using my Android phone as the hotspot for my MacBook instead of the iPhone, because (recognizing the iPhone) it refused to auto-connect (probably those "charges" again eh?), and it would turn off the hotspot whenever the last person disconnected (so I'd have to keep my phone on all night, or be woken early by data-hungry housemates), probably for power saving.
I do understand these are sensible defaults for most people. But it stops being sensible when the defaults are inappropriate, get in the way constantly, and cannot be changed.
I guess their philosophy is something like, "Make 80% of people happy and totally disregard everyone else."
Which probably makes sense financially...
You can warn 3 times and people would still agree and complain later. Disallowing options that are costly for the vast majority is the only option. The number of iphone users with true unlimited data is probably <5%.
That was not pleasant.
Also, most never even look at warning / question popup texts and impatiently press "Yes", "OK", "I agree" buttons.
Maybe calling them "dumb sheep" is too much but they aren't intellectually illuminated individuals either.
Or just say "Hey Siri, turn off WiFi."
Yeah: press Home button, tap Settings, tap Wi-Fi, tap the toggle.
A lot of digging indeed.
Like, come on.
I'll again say it's not intuitive at all and it's not communicated well (if at all), but for us here that go the extra mile to research, having two separate such options is handy.
Or label the damned things.
But no, they fundamentally changed how an important UI widget worked with no obvious indication that anything is different.
This meant they got a reputation for building easy-to-use tools.
This meant they got a reputation for building things for people who want their stuff to just work.
This meant that they believed their role should be to remove things that are ugly or powerful, hiding features.
This means that they're no longer building easy-to-use tools. You don't know what your phone is going to do any more. You can't predict if wifi is off or not. There's two ways to turn wifi off, one of them doesn't work. One of them allegedly works. There's no way to know this without reading documentation or relying on word of mouth.
There's a good reason to want wifi to only be pseudo-off, but there's other ways they could have implemented this feature that would have been empowering. They opted for this one not because it's the right option, but because they've given up on the spirit that made them great in the first place.
RTFM. It's the new motto of the Apple apologist. Soon we'll be saying "next year will be the year of Apple on the desktop".
Is really HN so hostile to statements critical of anything Apple does that you actually need to create a throwaway for it?
To me, that seems a bit extreme.
Edit: Not so throwaway after all then. Didn't consider checking.
created: 228 days agoThe Wi-Fi will turn back full-on if you drive or walk to a new location. And both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth will turn back on at 5:00 AM. This is not clearly explained to users, nor left to them to choose, which makes security-aware users vulnerable as well.
Why 5:00 AM, and why only WiFi when location changes (and how far must the location change? That is not mentioned even on the Apple support page)? This set of conditions reminds me of the decisions taken by aircraft automation systems --- read how the Boeing autothrottle works, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autothrottle#Usage
Of course, the majority of iOS users have nowhere near that ability to memorise how this "automatic wireless control" works, so Apple doesn't bother to make the explanation prominent; which brings me to the next point: Apple products aren't designed for you. They're designed for the user Apple wants, and by not giving any choices to change the behaviour, Apple is gradually "creating an average user" by forcing them into compliance and causing the rest to a different platform.
To continue the analogy, Apple's design has all the complexity of aircraft automation, and works well for the ideal use case, but none of the transparency and predictability, nor the ability to turn it all off and "fly manually" when it fails.
Also, the original item on HN about this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15297387 , was rather ironically accompanied by this one submitted around roughly the same time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15299165
The security aspect is not just a theoretical one.
> the WiFi actually has 3 states: ... Most people have experienced all 3 states, but it seems Apple is under the impression that users are too stupid to know the difference between them.
...
Of course, the majority of iOS users have nowhere near that ability to memorise how this "automatic wireleas control" works
Hypocrisy much? It sounds like you're trying to seize any opportunity you can to bash Apple.
In exchange for triggering the OCD of some techies, Apple is going to save 99% of their customers time they would have spent troubleshooting why their Apple Watch or AirDrop or Handoff never work. And they'll probably save them money on their data bills as well.
This is a classic "Apple knows best" move and the only people who have a problem with it are the people who have always had a problem with Apple's SOP.
What’s the use case where you want to completely kill WiFi but not Bluetooth for “security?” If I am in a security sensitive environment, I use airplane mode. That’s it’s purpose: to completely shut down all radios.
Personally, I only want Bluetooth on when I'm intentionally using it, but having to go into settings to turn it on and off is cumbersome when I used to be able to toggle it from the control panel.
I guess you and most of the rest of the planet have very different opinion about what "clearly" means then, otherwise we woulnd't be having this discussion now.
I feel the same way about the "Do Not Disturb While Driving" feature. I like the feature a lot, and I've been using it, but I wish it was a parallel feature as well. My "Do Not Disturb" patterns are different in the car from when I'm not and I'd like to be able to configure it as such.
The "off" setting these days only indicates that the device will not associate with any WiFi network, but it keeps the radio on for location services.
Without commenting whether this is actually bad for security, articles on the matter should point out that Android phones are doing the same to raise awareness.
Edit: iOS enables WiFi on switching location, but re-enabling WiFi based on known locations is only a new feature of Android 8 Oreo. So for most Android users WiFi will at least not be turned back on automatically yet.
>> This isn't going to sit well with everyone, and thankfully Google included a way to disable the feature, it's just a bit hidden.
Settings -> tap on the Wi-Fi -> tap on the menu button in the lower-right hand corner and select "Advanced", Uncheck "Scanning always available"
So sure, it's "a bit hidden" as the article points out, but , at least at the time the article was written, it's possible to disable this.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/how-to/stop-android-4-3-from-always-sca...
> The "off" setting these days only indicates that the device will not associate with any WiFi network, but it keeps the radio on for location services.
That's not true. This is provenly and factually false.
On All Android devices I've had (and I've had all version from 2.2. through to 8.0), turning wifi off causes lots of apps to nag you about turning it back on, exactly because of they wish to use location services.
As far as I know, the feature came disabled by default, and Android asked you the first time you turned off Wi-Fi if you wanted it on, so it's not really the same as iOS. On the other hand, some people have complained that upgrading to Android 6 has turned it on for them, but that might have been a bug.
In any case, this is a passive scan, it didn't connect you again after you moved places or during the night.
This change might be inconvenient for you personally, but I suspect there's no way in hell Apple would have made this change if they didn't have robust data on the way their average customer uses their device and didn't believe that this was a positive change.
Five words isn't much beyond a simple toggle. :)
I agree with the EFF on this one, at no time was any of how this works communicated, particularly not the "turns back on at 5 am" quirk. These features aren't inherently bad, but lack of communication is bad.
It’s definitely settle. But it is there.
> “But the plans were on display…” > “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” > “That’s the display department.” > “With a flashlight.” > “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” > “So had the stairs.” > “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” > “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
That’s all.
People can vote with their feet but they like what they get with an iPhone. The number of people that want to compile their own OS is very limited.
Interesting time we live in friends.
It seems like you have to observe every application, every update, and monitor everything if you want your software to do what you expect it to do by using it. Passing it down to the user I suppose.
I used to assume that options and controls meant something for the user.
I like the feature, I just want a three state switch in the UI.
The only real problem here is that this could have been explained to the user on first use.
However. It seems that there is a clear divide on how this button should work, and this usually means that there should be an option to set the behavior. Apple hates settings but I do believe that they will do something about this in a few releases.
The toggle is too close to previous versions to have a different behavior. I'm not opposed to the behavior itself, necessarily, and it seems like some people might find it useful. But implementing it as a bait-and-switch was the wrong call.
I learned the dangers of hi-power devices even at 10ft away - I prefer to turn off the wifi/bluetooth (at least) when possible.
Apple has made airplane mode really easy and quick until now, even when the phone is locked.
Connected state = Blue background color
Disconnected state = Gray background color (Force Touch shows "Not Connected")
Off state = Gray background with gray slash across the icon (Force Touch shows "Off")
Hello Pixel 2
Like removing the headphone jack to underhandedly force people into Bluetooth headphones(with Apple conveniently owning Beats, who has the biggest market share of aforementioned headphones) and insultingly excusing it with "innovation" and non-reasons. Yet people will crawl out of the woodwork to arbitrarily defend their phone brand, which is apparently really important for their identity.
> Location Services is still enabled, Apple devices (like Apple Watch and Pencil) stay connected, and services such as Handoff and Instant Hotspot stay on.
> The only way to turn off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios...
The GP is right that it's weird that Apple Watch stays connected when you ask for a disconnect, but Apple Earbuds do not.
TFA wasn't only talking about the wifi radio.
I love this feature. Fringe wifi areas are where I turn wifi off, and often I’m not turning wifi back on. It affects cellular data consumption, location accuracy and also the battery.
I don’t understand how is this affecting the security of the device.
Or it should.
Many people forget to re-enable Wi-Fi after they turned off due to a spotty connection. This feature saves them money.
The security-minded users have zero trouble going to the real control panel -- it's quite honestly one Home button press and one one tap away! -- and do the real disabling of Wi-Fi / Bluetooth.
Come on. This is not a grand conspiracy. It's an attempt to make all sides happy. I agree it could've been communicated better -- that's very obvious -- but everything above that is just Apple hate.