Gotta love the dark pattern. I remember when they made the change, I was pretty frustrated with that.
It's fixing the annoying issue of today's AirPods failing because of something I did yesterday afternoon which I forgot.
Your phone will locate and report bluetooth ibeacons, and allow apple to update their crowdsourced location databases.
The same thing with wifi (which has the same behavior in control panel)
It would have been SO SIMPLE to have a nicer pattern. short press to disconnect, long press to turn off.
Indeed, this is exactly what I expected would happen when I long pressed and I was disappointed when it didn’t. There are definitely times like this when Apple’s UX gets more credit than it deserves.
Which is one of the reasons why I'd always leave Bluetooth/WiFi off by default, and only turned them on when I actually need them: Cut way down on the battery draw.
That option is now gone, instead the default has become "everything is always on", drawing on the battery, thus forcing you to recharge more often, cutting down on the lifespan of your battery.
Not saying that was Apple's plan all along, but it's one of the outcomes of this pointless change. When the solution to this could be as simple as "double-tapping the icon will turn it off permanently, tapping once temporary".
....No, it's really not.
You can still turn WiFi and Bluetooth off (really off) from the Settings app, and they will stay off until you turn them back on.
You can even turn them back on from Control Center.
My family loves their iPhones but I don't think anyone knows how to swipe up from the bottom to check the control panel, much less what the bluetooth symbol is and how they should reenable it if their fat-finger disabled it one day. Or how to even troubleshoot that as a possibility.
Calling it a "dark pattern" is a bit silly and dramatic. This simple feature saves users a bunch of headache.
If you want to perma-disable bluetooth, you can toggle it off from the phone options instead of the quick menu. It's a great UI trade-off.
It's not really a great UI trade-off.
It made the usability for a whole lot of users worse, all on the basis of other users forgetting what hardware they previously disabled/enabled.
Now you are forcing everybody who doesn't want BT to be always on, to always deep-dive into the options if they still want to use it for a moment. Which is something that the quick menu originally was supposed to be there for. So overall it's pretty much a step back.
Which is kinda sad, because there are more than one solutions to that which could have made everybody happy. Like giving a setting that defines the quick menu icons behavior (temporary vs permanent disable), or the ability to press to icons several times to at least toggle between temp/permanent disabled and on.