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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Why did Apple make it harder to turn off the WiFi radio in iOS11?

I think it’s safe to assume that most people turn off wifi when there is a wifi network that sucks and they want to switch to cellular. This is by far the most common reason, and it’s also what they think they accomplished.

What they instead achieved up to iOS 10 was:

* worse location data in maps * airdrop does not work * AirPlay might not work (doesn’t work across networks) * Handoff doesn’t work * phone call and sms forwarding doesn’t work * applications don’t auto update in background anymore * system updates are not downloaded in background anymore * might waste their data plan

I think it’s impossible to have people know and be aware of all these side effects. It’s much better to change the UI: have the common button do what people think of and know it does: get off a network. And have the more comprehensive shut down button a couple of taps deeper in settings.

No, what pressing the wifi icon button on every single wifi-capable phone ever made until iOS 11 is to turn off wifi. Not just temporarily, but specifically until the user decides to turn it on again.

This is how it was even before smartphones. Android keeps wifi location scanning and various other things running, even if you turn off wifi, so it actually accomplishes what people want: to turn off wifi networking until they turn it on again.

The change made in iOS 11 is a clear regression.

But that's just not how human goals actually work. Nobody - except maybe a wireless radio engineer - wants to "turn off wifi". Nobody has that as their actual goal - turning off wifi is a way to accomplish some goal. That goal might be "make the internet work better (by using LTE instead)" or maybe "stop distracting me with notifications from the internet" or something else. But "turn off wifi" doesn't make sense as a goal in and of itself, and so Apple is trying to do something that better maps to what people want.

Now, whether they've done so correctly - both from the perspective of what actually happens, and how it is communicated to the user - that's certainly an issue and it's clear they haven't executed this well.

Wow, I think this is a really awful perspective to have.

Maybe the reason people have trouble connecting cause and effect (if that's even true) is that UI designers keep lying to them about what their system is doing.

my main sorrow with the clearly misleading wifi-switch is to fall prey to those nasty mac-adress tracker in shops.

the other reasons you list are minor issues, who needs constant update possibilities, phone call forwarding to your Mac, airplay and handoff on the way? yes, I also forgot switch off wifi and burned through my volume, but we shouldn’t dumb systems down. People need to understand cause and effect, especially in IT.

> my main sorrow with the clearly misleading wifi-switch is to fall prey to those nasty mac-adress tracker in shops.

Aren't they randomized now?

Because people would turn off WiFi from Control Center and then forget about it, resulting in expensive cellular overages. (This cost me about $30, for example.)

I think the pertinent question is: why didn't they make the change more clear?

On Android 7.0, the cellular icon in the status bar makes it very clear when you are not on WiFi. The icon serves as a reminder for me since I usually switch off WiFi in the morning and re-enable it at home. I don't recall ever forgetting cellular on.

Regardless, I think Apple could have come up with a more user-friendly solution. This just looks like a lazy hack to be honest.

It would have taken you 10 seconds to Google and find out that iOS also has an icon in the status bar that shows you whether you’re on Wi-Fi or cellular.

Why thank you! I would truly be lost without your wisdom.

Unfortunately, that still doesn't explain Apple's decision to make it harder to switch off WiFi. Do iPhone users simply not notice the status bar?

I'm not defending nor evangelising Apples current solution.

I'm lead to believe it's not iPhone users specifically, but people in general.

I've worked in IT, but qualified as a tradesmen nearly a decade before, and I occasionally forget to turn wifi back on when I get home. I currently work for a large steel fabrication company. One of the project managers here doesn't even use email.

It's way too easy for the average person to forget to turn wifi on and blow all your mobile data / get slogged with overage.

In a similar fashion, it's not hard to see and feel when a / the tyres on your car need a bit of air, but we mandate tyre pressure monitoring systems.

We are, for good or bad, reluctant to regulate software system. So, I guess, as always, if we think of a better design we should probably make a demo or promote it, maybe iOS / Android will pick it up along the way.

In 5 years we're gonna wonder how we got to the point where you can't easily turn off wifi, slowly dumbing down devices for all of us for the sake of your project manager and the like.

You can still easily turn off WiFi. It's two or three taps, depending on how you want to get to the setting and what you count as a "tap".

The problem isn't that Apple made it hard to turn off WiFi, it's that they changed one of the controls without making it clear that it had changed.

@mikeash it takes a minimum of 4 or 5 taps and button presses.

On my 6+, the sequence is: press home button, tap Settings, Wi-Fi, Off. That's 3-4 depending on whether you count the home button.

On a 6s or newer, with 3D touch, you can cut it down to 2-3: unlock, force touch on Settings and toggle WiFi from the menu that appears. (That might be 1-2, I forget whether you can force touch and drag to what you want to activate, or whether it has to be a separate tap.)

I didn't know about using force touch on the settings app. However when I tap on the wifi menu entry that appears, I still need yet another tap to disable wifi.

Anyway, here's my count: 1. use touch-id to unlock the phone 2. press home to get to first screen with the settings app (if you aren't already) 3. tap Wifi 4. turn it off

You then need to navigate back to where you were previously.

A better way would be to: (1) use either GPS or cell towers to specify some sort of geographical area (with user input of course), and then (2) allow the user to specify what happens to WiFi/3G when entering and/or exiting that area.

Llama on Android has been doing this for years, but the UX was a mess in my opinion. Apple could streamline the setup process, throw in some "amazing"s and "revolutionary"s, mix that with Touch/FaceID, and voila, you have a viable solution.

It does sadden me there aren't a bunch more advanced options a level or two below the standard options on iPhones.

I didn't down vote you by the way.

Android does the same thing, more or less, now. For quite a while Wi-Fi has not been truly off unless you access a buried setting—it's scanning for access points for location data. Now in the latest release the Wi-Fi will turn itself back on after having been turned off once you're near a known access point. I never really had an issue with this, as you say it is not that hard to notice the icon in the status bar, but I will admit it is a nice touch. Granted, I have already signed my soul over to Google so I have little to care about.

Most users notice very little, ever.

If you want to avoid cellular charges, shouldn't you be turning off cellular?

The problematic scenario goes like this:

1. You're in a coffee shop. The WiFi sucks today. You turn off WiFi so you can use your cellular connection instead.

2. Many hours later, you go home, having forgotten about #1.

3. You binge-watch the entirety of Doctor Who streaming on your phone, not realizing the phone is still using cellular.

4. Large bill from your provider.

I want to see the problem solved, but this feels like the wrong solution.

Reminds me of the time where I couldn't trust what the UI says about the audio of my desktop computer running Linux circa 2005

Many apps will prompt before doing a large download over data. Spotify has separate settings for mobile data and Wi-Fi streaming quality. One could imagine a video app would prompt before streaming on mobile data. I'm pretty sure this is the solution—perhaps the Android or iPhone media framework itself could implement something that would warn people if app developers are often forgetting to add this feature?

Android even goes too far here. "Download waiting for wifi", for a 20MB download. I use more data than that simply by opening certain apps!

You can disallow cellular data on a per-app basis on iOS, so you could for example disable it for just Netflix.

I think they're close to a good solution but not quite there. A tri-state button, where it's on/on-but-disconnected/off might have done it, or at least some indicator that "off" doesn't mean off.

The correct solution is "always turn on wi-fi when I get home". The phone knows when this happens, you can set reminders around it.

No, it does not if the Wifi Chipset is disabled, because it uses wifi for location services (GPS would use way too much battery). That's exactly the problem: The wifi chipset is used for much more than just connecting to the internet.

You can also use the GSM Cell ID for this purpose. Once the user marks his/her home, grab the IDs of the surrounding cell towers and use these as trigger.

It's exactly what my phone does (Nexus 5X with Android 8), likely by listening to wifi passively ("which SSIDs are around?")

That doesn't sound like a disabled chipset...

Didn't iOS 10 or whichever add cellular assist to WiFi? I know some people raged about it, but I find it useful for the scenario you just mentioned.

It did, but I'm not sure how well it really works. In my own experience, I still see lots of networking failures if I'm far enough from my house for the network to be dodgy but not so far that it disconnects, or if I connect to crappy public WiFi.

5. Realize you should have gotten a subscription with an adequate data plan.

6. Get said subscription.

7. Stop worrying.

I'm not aware of any option in this country (edit: the US) that will handle massive use of streaming video. All of the plans without overage charges have a soft limit where they start throttling you.

In any case, I'm not going to pay a bunch of extra money every month just in case I forget about the WiFi.

Most people don't live in countries such as Kuwait where it is normal (and affordable) to watch 4k netflix streams via LTE.

Kuwait? I live in northern Europe, and I have 45GB on my perfectly ordinary ~$27 plan.

In Kuwait the typical mobile plan includes 1TB of traffic.

With 45GB you can watch a mere 10 hours of 4k TV per month.

Isn't another reason that some of iOS features (hand-off? airdrop?) rely on WiFi or Bluetooth?

That seems likely. If you turn off WiFi or Bluetooth and forget to turn it back on, it can be quite confusing as to why some functions suddenly stopped working.

Apple thinks for its users in all the wrong ways.

Several people in my family have had overage issues by forgetting about WiFi being off. They are certainly not technically inclined.

Get them a subscription with an adequate data plan, then?

What do you mean? The same button is there in the Control Center.

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