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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

The worst thing for me is the Camera. If I want to take a photo of something that's just happening I don't even bother anymore since I can expect it to take 10 seconds to wake the phone, get into the camera, and have the shutter button respond and have it actually take a photo (sometimes it looks like it took a photo but it actually didn't save!).

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Interesting. Bored before bed so ran a quick test using my iphone7 and Ios 11.x, Google's stopwatch.

The time from wake to photo was ~2seconds (using the lockscreen short cut).

The time from wake to home screen photo app to photo was ~5 seconds.

I had to start the timer myself then go back to using the phone so I believe I could cut ~500ms.

Since I have Live Photo enabled, the 2-second shots actually have a few frames that are sub 2 seconds.

Going to the homescreen was accidental. In each attempt, I attempted to use the lock-screen camera shortcut.

As a whole, the experience using the iphone is too unpredictable to be reliable for quick reaction shots (< 3 seconds). A number of times I either: bypassed the lock screen, didnt get passed the lock screen, unlocked my phone to a different app, and on one occasion, the camera app paused for a few seconds before focusing.

I really miss Samsung's 'double-click home button to use camera' on the Galaxy S6 and S7. Probably the most convenient implementation of a camera shortcut I've seen.

Double-power on the Nexus 6P on Oreo - it's very nice.

I like the Motorola double twist for camera gesture, you can start the gesture just as you take it out of your pocket.

I miss my Sony Ericsson that had an actual shutter button you could hold down to activate the camera from sleep.

OnePlus (five here) uses double power button for that and it feels quite fast/is very reliable.

If I try it several times in a row it's quick, since presumably everything is cached in memory. If I've been doing other stuff and pick my phone up hours later (exactly when I want that split-second shot of my kid or the license plate of the car that almost ran over me), that's when the phone and camera take ages to get ready.

Yes! Especially if what I'm wanting to do is take a video of my kid. By the time I get the photo app to respond well enough to swipe over to video and let it readjust itself, I have missed the moment by seconds.

This is one of the major pains that tore me away from Android (where I had several ‘flagship’ phones and kept them free of crap). If iOS keeps heading this way, what’s left?

Back in the 90s I decided we needed a real-time UX - hard real-time guarantees. I had no idea how to even start with this, especially as the only OSes I knew well were UNIX-like, none of which did real-time. There was QNX(?) but I didn’t have access to play with it.

So do we need an effort to make a new real-time phone OS? Kinda like the Firefox phone OS project but built on an OS that allows guarantees?

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