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Comment by giovannibajo1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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