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Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

> In an attempt to keep you connected to Apple devices and services, iOS 11 compromises users' security.

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.

View on HN

This change would be absolutely fine to me if it were communicated to the user in any way whatsoever. The fact that I can upgrade and have no idea the behaviour unless I happen to read an EFF blogpost in the few hours it appears on HN isn't acceptable.

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.").

[0] https://www.apple.com/uk/privacy/

It IS communicated.

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.

This is not communicated and is completely bogus, do you expect users to "expand" the panel and read carefully the small text under which says "Not connected" and map it to, "hey this is me Apple, royally screwing with you, even though you wanted to turn off Wifi, and you just did that, I won't turn it off, I am gonna lie to you and keep eating your battery till your phone die"

That's exactly what happened to me when I was desperately trying to save battery and turn off services.

You don't have to expand the panel or 3d touch or anything.

https://m.imgur.com/SSeZQUC

I'll admit that this behavior is what I want 99% of the time, so it also doesn't bother me.

Ehhhhh, so now "disconnected from ssid" + gray wifi-button means "wifi temporarily turned off"? That is not clearly communicated. At all.

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.

The communication isn't great, but the "off-ish" setting is visually distinct from the true off setting (the latter showing a struck-through icon.)

While I agree that the UI is a bit subtle in the difference, Apple isn't trying to screw anyone. If you're really trying to save battery life, Airplane mode is the way to go. It totally turns off the wifi and the LTE radio (which is very battery draining).

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.

Having WiFi greatly increases the battery drain on my iPhone 5C, so I always turn it off when I'm not using it. I'm not using the phone all the time so there are long periods where it doesn't need to be on, but I still want to receive messages etc (and hence can't use Airplane mode).

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."

The WiFi radio uses less power than the LTE one, so if you’re in range of WiFi you save battery by leaving it on.

I don't have a data plan so I always have mobile data off.

That doesn't turn off your LTE radio though...

But djrogers was saying that if I had WiFi on it'd save power because LTE would be off. Surely they only mean the data component?

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.

It’s possible, depending on your carrier, that it uses Wi-Fi for calls, but doubt that’s what he meant. Either way, in your specific use case, I agree, turning off Wi-Fi would save power, I just don’t believe it’s 2x difference though.

I just looked it up and found the official page on Wifi calling[1], but yeah, that option isn't there on my phone.

[1]https://support.apple.com/en-nz/HT203032

That's a pretty rare use case, and not one that I expect most smartphone makers to optimize for.

Not on my Android phone, a Motorola Moto X Play. Wifi is by far the largest battery hog.

lol man. thats because it is used the most. in order to determine which uses more energy you would need to run a series of controlled tests where you transfer specific amounts of data over time with one radio or the other.

I did do that. Using my phone normally, it uses a lot more battery to have wifi on.

I have a generous data plan, so I don't need to use wifi to preserve it.

I have a phone that is 3D Touch capable and I never use 3D Touch at all. In fact I mostly avoid using it; it's Those Useless Options That Sometimes Pop Up If I Press Too hard On A Thing.

It's on par with OSX's "some menu items change if you hold down alt while they're open" behavior. Aggressively obscured.

You're missing out. 3D Touch is pretty powerful and provides access to more than "Useless Options" now.

It still bugs me as very undiscoverable. I don’t want to press things I don’t intend to toggle just to see whats underneath them.

Maybe I’ll get used to it but right now I’m old man grumpy.

sometimes an app shows a popup, sometimes you show the delete icon for all app. wonderful interface.

It always shows a pop-up.

*depending on how hard/lightly you press you get a different interaction. nice uh? and you have to remember which is which or try both

How do I know when I can use it? and if my phone doesn't have 3D Touch, how can I access the same features? (I don't know if my phone has 3D Touch, but I guess it doesn't because I've never been able to make it do something different. Except once when I long clicked the control centre and it did something different. I don't know if that's 3D Touch though. My iPhone used to teach me how to use it, now it just hides things because it makes someone else feel like an elegant designer.)

You don’t, which is one of the two big issues. You can only try it everywhere and try to remember what happens.

(The other problem is the light touch/hard touch thing)

Then turn it off (Settings, General, Accessibility)

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.

Oh right, I use the keyboard cursor movement all the time.

Haven't found a single other place where it does anything I find useful.

I didn't know that panel expanded because Apple didn't communicate that fact either... But I just tried it with long press and still don't see what I am meant to be reading in the pop-out.

Can you take a screenshot of where this is explained?

>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.

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 happened to me the other day as well. I’m using an 8 Plus, and it worked exactly as I would hope, too.

The current behavior would do the same thing for you. You didn’t have to turn WiFi off, you just needed to do on next from the flaky WiFi.

It seems to be pretty clearly communicated to me when disconnecting...

https://imgur.com/oh7diHn

That looks to me like it is communicating that the network was disconnected as a result of turning off the wifi.

This is backed up by people's previous experiences with the toggle, which did actually turn off the wifi.

"At this point I’m not sure there’s a need for normal users to actually turn off Wi-Fi."

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.

That use case is satisfied by the iOS 11 toggle, which disconnects from the current network and disables connecting to new networks for the next few hours.

So all these years when Apple showed basically the same visual cues triggered by the same action they were miscommunications to us?

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.

I believe when they changed the behaviour from turning off WiFi to disconnecting from WiFi, they added the text "Disconnected from networkname". But I don't entirely disagree they should communicate the change better

That only tells me I'm no longer connected to the wifi-network I used to be.

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.

A hidden feature isn't communicated. I don't know why features are going to do something weird if I short click vs long click. There's simply no communication. Maybe some shadow (3D) effect on something which you can 3D touch would make a huge difference. (It's probably ugly, but the feature itself is ugly, so you'd expect the UI should reflect that.) A right click menu was considered a hidden feature by Apple in the olden days, but at least you knew there was a right mouse button to click. Nowadays you don't know whether a feature exists or whether you just haven't clicked long enough.

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.

It's more than a hidden feature though. Pressing the wifi button (where you would normally expect it to turn the radio off) literally brings up a text saying "Disconnected from {SSID}"

And if I turned off wifi, I'd expect the device to disconnect from amy networks, so that messaage doesn't really tell me much if I don't already know its significance.

I'm sure many people would think that message confirms they turned off the WiFi.

My thought was the WiFi icon should turn into a progress indicator to show that its snoozing, maybe like how apps show they are installing by graying it out in a circular sweep.

That would make me think it's trying to connect. I don't think motion would be appropriate for the intermediate state of a tri-state indicator.

Maybe a lighter shade of blue? Or a white background with the icon colored vivid blue?

Grey out the icon, and add a "zzz" indicator to it?

They actually have a way to show this. If you play around with the other buttons and modes they seem to use colored for on/connected, grey for on/disconnected, and grey with a line through it for radio off.

If you put your iPhone in "Airplane" mode, the wifi shows "OFF" (with a slash through it) vs toggling the wifi button just grays it out and shows "not connected"

Seems fine for me /shrug

> At this point I’m not sure there’s a need for normal users to actually turn off Wi-Fi.

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.

Would you mind sharing the details of how MAC address randomization is being defeated in the real world?

This is an analysis of the workaround https://m.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/10/mac_address_randomiza...

@pmontra already provided you with one good link, let me know if you'd like more info. Happy to share peer reviewed articles as well as what I can from the work I did.

Does this work even if my device newer connects to the retailer's "free" WiFi?

As long as the wifi radio is enabled, yes.

It makes it trivially simple if you did connect, but even if you don’t, just having the Wi-Fi radio on is enough.

> At this point I’m not sure there’s a need for normal users to actually turn off Wi-Fi.

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.

"At this point I’m not sure there’s a need for normal users to actually turn off Wi-Fi"

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.

That's strange. I have used Nexus phones since the first one that came out and I have never experienced any significant battery drain from either wifi or bluetooth. First was always screen, second Android system.

Just checked again to make sure. Wifi 0%, Bluetooth 0%

Mine is usually wifi, then screen.

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 just wanted to mention that I've done a full factory reset of my phone now, and it seems that wifi is using a lot less battery, even with wifi scanning etc. switched on.

I would LOVE to see someone run benchmarks about how much battery WiFi and BT use on modern iPhones (when disconnected). I would be amazed if the difference was more than negligable.

It is absolutely not negligible on my Moto X Play.

I get around 1.5 days normally, less than a day if I use wifi and BT.

I’m completely flummoxed as to why you believe the phrase “Disconnected from {A WiFi}” communicates the complex idea that it’s only partially and temporarily disabled?

This really sounds like members of my dev team trying to explain why their terrible UX is actually quite clever.

> At this point I’m not sure there’s a need for normal users to actually turn off Wi-Fi.

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.

Apple must have statistics about this (from people who opt in to it like me).

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.

You indirectly raise an interesting point - I wonder by how much Apple's feedback stats on these topics are biased.

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.

I have Verizon unlimited data and I keep wifi turned off always. Decent wifi is hard to find these days but Verizon usually works and is faster, even when they throttle me after my initial 15GB is used up.

"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.

>This change would be absolutely fine to me if it were communicated to the user in any way whatsoever.

Well, there IS a strike-over in the icon when you fully disable wifi.

As long as you discover how to fully disable WiFi. At the very least, they should have applied 3D Touch to it...

This is so unlike Apple. If there is a 'state' between on and off it should be visually explicit. No one can reasonably argue otherwise.

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.

You can't use 3D touch to turn off wifi. According to Apple you have go into settings to do so.

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.

> You can't use 3D touch to turn off wifi. According to Apple you have go into settings to do so.

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.

I agree it's not a huge security vulnerability, just bad design by Apple.

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).

> I agree it's not a huge security vulnerability

Until the next Broadcom WiFi radio vulnerability.

But people who know about that will disable it in settings, and the majority of the world will go on using WiFi fully oblivious.

Before the command center existed people weren’t saying having a WiFi toggle hidden in the settings app is a security vunurability.

If that's our threat model then we're already hosed. It's not like "turn off your wireless" is a solution to vulnerabilities like this outside of security circles.

Sure we're already hosed, but turn off your WiFi is a fair suggestion. By making it more difficult to determine if the WiFi radio is off and more difficult to disable, Apple is further pushing this solution into "security circles".

Manually managing your radio state is almost certainly going to have a net negative impact on your battery life.

Your smartphone screen uses several orders of magnitude more energy lighting up than btle and wifi use while idle.

You can 3D Touch the Settings icon to jump to the WiFi settings.

Only if you are using a phone with a 3D Touch sensor, which the SE does not contain.

I'm on an iPhone 6, before 3D touch was introduced. Usually a long press is equivalent, but not here apparently. I just cannot get to this setting.

I noted the same thing in another thread, and was downvoted for some reason! Why should this be 3D touch only, if a long press also brings up a menu?

not the point, the talk is about the control center options.

> It is inconsistent - disabling bluetooth now disconnects from all devices (except Apple ones!)

I was surprised by this, so I just tested it. Tapping the button immediately disconnected from my Apple bluetooth AirPods.

The exceptions are listed in that Apple article.

I also just tested it. When I click off the bluetooth button it says "disconnecting from [apple watch name]". I don't know if the writer of that article actually tested this stuff, but it clearly disconnects from my apple watch (and says so) when I turn off bluetooth from the slide up menu.

> No. It is in an attempt to resolve the real loss of money...

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.

They did inform users.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208086

I fail to see how dumping documentation for a cryptic feature at such an unfriendly URL counts as "informing".

The UI informs the user directly that they're disconnecting from a network. This support document explains the change and how it all works in-depth for anyone who will actually care to know (everyone who reads HN or tech blogs and pretty much no one else).

> The UI informs the user directly that they're disconnecting from a network.

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?

Can you describe a reasonable scenario where a layperson would see the support document prior to encountering some sort of frustration with the feature in question?

> The UI informs the user directly that they're disconnecting from a network.

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.

Most users when turning "off" Wi-Fi, particularly from the control center, are doing so to get them off whatever network they're on. What their mental model is for what "Wi-Fi off" is doesn't matter because the user shouldn't be responsible for managing the radios in their phone. And any of them that do try to are probably under the impression that it saves them battery life, when it actually doesn't (unless connected and transmitting).

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.

> What their mental model is for what "Wi-Fi off" is doesn't matter

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."

I will concede that I almost always used the "bluetooth off" button in order to disconnect my current bluetooth device. I did this because it was faster and more convenient than going into the Settings menu and disconnecting that device specifically. It's fewer clicks this way.

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?

When I manually disconnect from a network or a bluetooth device, I want it to stay off until I specifically ask it to reconnect.

Nonsense. Literally every single smartphone before iOS 11 had a simple toggle switch for wifi on/off. This is now the expected behavior, this is what people expect to happen. They are conditioned by now, to switch off wifi by pressing the wifi button, and to have to turn it back on manually.

If Apple wants to change this paradigm, they have to be very very careful about it. And they obviously haven't been.

Apple removed the Home button after 10 years in the iPhone X and replaced it with a little bar drawn in software at the bottom of the phone. Just like users will learn new behaviors to exit apps, they will learn that the control center behaves in a new way.

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.

Virtual home buttons have been a thing on phones long before the iPhone X.

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.

> The new control center behaves in the way that most people actually use the buttons.

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

"offering the option to actually turn the services off."

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.

You can? On my phone, deep pressing on the 'block' in Control Center containing the Wi-Fi icon gets me to a submenu, which adds text labels to the existing toggles and adds two more toggles (AirDrop and Personal Hotspot). However, pressing the Wi-Fi button from that submenu seems to have the same effect as outside of it, and deep pressing it (as well as long pressing it) has no effect.

edit: but you can definitely turn them off through the Settings app.

I can't, it's complete bullshit as I don't even have any devices paired. The long press is useless, it does nothing.

As I said elsewhere, I repeated the GP's claim without testing it myself, assuming good faith on his part. After testing I found it wasn't true. Unfortunately I can't edit my original comment now, so I've been apologizing throughout the thread.

Apple changed the behaviour of something that people have been using since the first smartphone (before, even), without indicating that to the user. Saying that the option is there when it's poorly-discoverable doesn't really counter the GP's point.

I think there is a valid point that while this is changing what is happening under the hood, the behaviour is effectively identical for the vast majority of users, and arguably improved for most use cases (most non-technical users wouldn't understand that that switch would stop airdrop working, and even as an extremely technical user I have accidentally forgotten to switch my WiFi back on after needing to temporarily disconnect, and have ended up using a fair bit of 4G data. Luckily I have a lot of included data on my plan, but for some they might have to pay extra).

You can still switch off the radios if you want in settings.

Honestly I don't think it's effectively identical for the vast majority of users.

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.

> It sounds like I've lost a real feature and I don't know how to get it back

This. We can’t turn off BlueTooth/WiFi from the swipe-up screen anymore. Full stop.

I understood. What I meant by "option" in that context (and I updated the post to clarify this) is something like a popup when I turn off my WiFi in the control center that says: "Your wifi will automatically turn back on when you leave this location," followed by an "Ok" button and a "Do not turn it back on" button.

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.

3D touch and long-press are such awful places to bury any sort of functionality. There are no visual cues, no material cues, and the only way you'd know about those things are to watch Apple keynotes.

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)"

Not to mention that 3D Touch isn’t available on all currently sold models.

Which I’ve long held is a wedge they use to force the obsoletion of otherwise suitable devices.

There's nothing magical about 3D touch. Assuming you have iOS 10 or greater, you can achieve the same results on older devices with a long press on the screen. The only thing I've found 3D touch to handle differently between newer and older devices is moving icons on the springboard.

The obvious result is hidden under non-obvious action, and pointing that out isn't being misleading, quite the opposite. And you managed to equate the "offering a clear choice" present in the actual comment into "offering the option" as in not making it technically impossible. They're not equal.

> 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.

> I think you completely missed that you can indeed actually turn them off via 3D touch

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.

As I said, long-press on non 3D touch devices opens the same box.

This is patently false (I have just done the very thing you said, then confirmed that the wifi was in fact still on).

I think this whole argument just lends more support to the idea that Apple is being deceptive with this UI.

It's not false that a long press on a non-3D touch device opens the same box as using 3D touch on a device that supports it.

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.

no you can't - or please step-by-step explain how you achieve this

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.

> Naked apologism. So unthoughtful, and delivered with such a righteous tone.

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 thought Apple fanboism was a dying breed around here. I guess I was wrong.

More clarification, it's a plague of fanbois bringing down the tone of the neighbourhood. Engage in reasoned debate? Agree to disagree? Wonder if there's a point to their opinion at all? Nope, maybe we should drive them out of the neighbourhood into a ghetto somewhere else so Hackernews can be nice and pure instead.

Disagreeing with you makes someone part of a plague. Got it. Reasoned argument failed to convince everyone everywhere, so now let's impugn their humanity. I'm sure that will work!

Prompting the user every time for a nuance they likely don't understand instead of just doing the thing they want 99% of the time is bad UX.

> resolve the real loss of money experienced by everyday users who turn off WiFi

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.

>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

Okay, but you have to accept that this is a ridiculously small minority use case.

I don't accept that. I think it's a common sense approach. I don't want my phone connecting to things without my involvement.

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.

You don't accept it on what possible grounds? Do you really think the majority of iOS users, or even a sizeable minority, use their phones in the way you do?

That it's ridiculous. Reread what I have written. I made no comment on what the majority of iOS users do. I'm talking about what I do.

I'm sorry but you absolutely did. You were asked whether you "accept that [turning off mobile data, wifi, and bluetooth and only re-enabling them when you explicitly need them] is a ridiculously small minority use case", to which you replied "I don't accept that", and then followed on with a non sequitur about it being a "common sense approach."

"shit has to taste good, millions of flies eat it every day"

"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.

For the record that's how I do it too. Saves lots of battery and I'm not actively using the phone that frequently.

Are you actually sure it affects battery life that much?

I'm a bit dubious about this - in fact, turning off WiFi would actually harm battery life, surely, compared to LTE?

If by LTE you mean mobile data, I have that off too as I don't have a data plan. I can say the battery definitely runs down a lot faster with WiFi on but I don't have specific hard stats to back that up.

Everyone benefits from longer battery life.

Wow. This exchange is one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen on HN.

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.

That isn't fair. My microwave "doesn't work" until I press some buttons. I leave my bluetooth, wifi and data on most days because I have bluetooth headphones and I want people to be able to send me messages and stuff. Sometimes I turn them off to get the battery to last longer. It seems like it could be quite reasonable for a large group of non-technical users to be quite happy with a phone that turns off the radios when the screen is off.

Can you show me the use case for turning it ack on at 5 in the morning every 24 hours even though you have not changed location? Until then you have nothing, in defense of something that shouldn't be defended. Would it kill you to say "yeah, Apple should make it more obvious" and move on? What's with the kool-aid?

It's not a minority use case. It's just a use case that is poorly accommodated by a large majority of smartphones. This leads to much higher data usage and higher revenue for carriers than would be the case if smartphones were a little more on the user's side.

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.

Ya, so accept that Apple decided your hyper aware use case doesn't need to be the default. Seems like you know what is up, so they are working to prevent unnecessary charges to the far larger, far less aware segment of the population. All seems good, no?

No, not good. The old behaviour was better. If there was a setting to have the option of the old behaviour then it would be all good.

no, the old behavior was better for you.

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.

It is patronizing and I need no such reminder.

Then stop acting as if your use case is what the majority of users want. If you really care about a toggle that actually turns off the radio, get an Android

Reread what I have written. Your misdirected anger is your problem, not mine.

Here is a common enough non-techie use-case where this new behaviour is clearly a regression: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15413902

This use case should be solved by enabling the “Wi-Fi Assist” feature (which I believe is on by default) or avoided in the first place by turning off “Auto Join” for these networks - then you don’t even need to toggle WiFi.

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.

I turn off (sorry, disconnect from, in new parlance) WiFi.

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?

Yes, good. The new behaviour is 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'

> The way this works in iOS 11 is now inconsistent and confusing

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.

When you get on a plane, enabling Airplane Mode should turn off all the radios on an iPhone or iPad. You say flight mode doesn't work, so is this no longer the case?

I believe flight mode actually works, but people with wifi-only devices have been conditioned to believe disabling wifi is sufficient.

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.

I am actually quite surprised by this and to me it looks like people are just overcomplicating things. You get on a plane, you turn on Airplane Mode. Simple. It would never ever occur to me in a million years to turn on Airplane Mode on my phone, but then go ahead and just turn off the wifi on my iPad. Also, isn't Bluetooth also supposed to be off, which Airplane Mode would take care of?

EDIT: This is what Airplane Mode looks like https://i.imgur.com/mEMYdL6.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4L3uZmm.jpg

As an opposing viewpoint, turning off wifi is exactly what I used to do when boarding a plane - my bluetooth radio is always off.

This is just totally false. Airplane mode is still airplane mode and turns everything off.

My point is that on wifi-only devices, people have been conditioned into believing that turning wifi off effectively is the same as flight mode.

Now it no longer is. Why did Apple have to cause this needless confusion?

Interestingly, my stock HTC One M7 suffers the same problem, but in regards to Location.

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.

> No.

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 disconnect from Bluetooth daily because my TV soundbar or wife’s car in the driveway picks up my audio output. I’ve never intended that action to disconnect my Apple Watch. iOS 11 is an improvement for me in that regard.

Since it turns back on automatically at 5am, I have to remember to hard turn it off, otherwise it connects my alarm to my living room bluetooth speaker. Took me a couple days to figure out what was happening. Frustrating for me.

I don't have any other Apple devices. And no, long pressing and toggling is not disabling it on < 6s.

I think they just fucked up.

> Yes.

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.

I just spent a couple of minutes trying to 3D touch to properly disable wifi, then googling how to do this with 3d touch and came up empty.

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.

There is no way to 3D touch the bluetooth and wireless radios all the way off in iOS11. You have to manually go all the way into settings.app now which takes quite a bit more effort not to mention longer than the old control center

You can 3D Touch the settings app which provides shortcuts to both bluetooth settings and wifi settings.

Sounds like terrible UX. iOS has only gotten downhill since iOS7 in terms of UX.

Ironically, the UI they added for hotspots (which has a similar off-ish setting) actually cost me money, and resulted in several days without internet.

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.

Or it's a jab at the competition.

"So Android spontaneously turns your Wi-Fi off? How silly. Why, you know what? Ours will spontaneously turn on, take that!!"

I don't believe there's any way to turn off the wifi from Control Center, even with 3D touch. You must flip the toggle in Settings (TFA seems to say the same thing). Happy to be wrong here, I just couldn't figure it out while fiddling with it.

You can turn on Airplane Mode then turn back on the services you want (except cellular data)

> 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.

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.

> 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?

Or add warning and cut-off thresholds, isn't that alredy possible?

50 (SG, less than USD) dollars. 24 GB of data.

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?

> 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

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.

Question: Is there some reason the phone can't have some mode where it automatically determines which of mobile data or WiFi is providing the better connection at the moment, rather than having to manually toggle WiFi on and off as using the internet becomes frustrating?

It does (wifi assist for example) but until the phone has established if the connection works or not, the user already switched it off. When I leave the house I get ~10 sec with wifi but no actual connection. That's long enough for me to notice it but probably not enough for the iphone to detect if Wifi is really not available.

No. It’s not.

I want to turn it off.

The fact that this is front-page on HN means something.

It means that the minority of techies that read HN found it interesting. There’s nothing to suggest any conclusion broader than that.

Exactly. The average iPhone user is oblivious to the change.

I don't understand why they don't just fix that specific problem.

There is no normal user. I've got unlimited LTE data and leave WiFi off PERMANENTLY. I'm still on iOS 10.

Shouldn't a company focus on Security of Normal users ? because advanced ones know to take care of it

Is there a source for this, or is this your opinion?

So, is this a US only feature?

Is excess data usage severely penalized financially in other countries?

>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).

In Denmark, what happens when you reach the limit (on private plans[1]) is that your speed is limited to something between 64-256kbit/sec depending on the provider. You will never be financially penalized for going over.

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.

Apparently the "security motivated" have to discover when Apple has completely changed how their apps and settings work, too.

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.

It was communicated, Apple has a page on that. It just wasn't a big part of the announcement. And the tech press covered it well enough so that it's hard to argue that users didn't know about it (at least those who are interested).

For users with flakey wifi, there is wifi-assist, where the phone uses cellular data along with wifi.

Windows phones has ability to turn off for a hour/2/4 . Really miss this thing on android

Iphone se doesn’t have 3d touch. So there’s no way to change this quickly on those devices.

The security motivated user probably wouldn't be using an iPhone in the first place. Or any smartphone for that matter.

This is such a backwards approach to security in an age where the average user is only less and less informed

That’s straight garbage town. There are other ways to remind users that their WiFi is off than tricking users into thinking it is off when it really isn’t. Standard “engineers know best” mentality. Off means off. As in the opposite of on. This nonsense feeds into people (rightful) distrust of technology.

I'm a generally well educated person in both security, radios, etc. I can tell you that the control Centre Wi-Fi is basically always used by me to disconnect from the current network. And it persistently infuriated me when I would later forget and was on mobile data.

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.

Hi Lathiat. Why do you need to disconnect from the current network? I can think of many alternatively implementations which would meet most requirements that have been proposed, like turning the wifi back on when the battery is charging or at 5am. All the proposals involve compromises, but it seems much easier to make a notice that clearly says "Wifi will reconnect at 5am" then to say "Wifi is still using your battery, but we've disconnected from the current network". I mean, the message itself fits in the same space as the current message, and the icon itself could have a timer band counting down till 5am so you know that it's only temporarily disabled. (I too have accidentally used up all my month's data because I left the wifi off for a few days. It's not nice. I'd appreciate a feature which deals with it. But this one is unpredictable, unreadable and confusing.)

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.

Not who you asked but: Public wifis tend to stop working if too many users log in. For me that frequently happens at airports. They still broadcast and pretend to have a connection but no throughput. So switching it off is the only solution. When I then go somewhere else (esp abroad), I'd still like to join the next wifi. Having it switched off for the rest of the day can be very expensive.

Disconnecting from the current network is usually because something is broken about that network for some reason (or in some cases, 4G is just much faster). Having said that, the number of times I do this has been significantly reduced by "Wi-Fi Assist" (which turns off the wifi network automatically if the connection seems poor/broken). People also complained about this feature (because it uses my mobile data!!!) -- but I imagine the majority of people are now blissfully unaware when their iPhone saves them from apps or pages not loading and the general experience is much better.

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.

Is that really a concern anymore? (Anecdote alert) I roll over several gigs a month that I don’t use ...

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.

Go to the Wi-Fi submenu in the Settings, tap the chevron on the Starbucks network and tap “Forget this network”

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