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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

In fairness, iOS these days is wildly unintuitive, and I'm not yet thirty. It's positively littered with hidden gestures and features that you'd never discover during normal usage. Many of them are really slick once you learn about them! But discoverability is worse not only compared to previous Apple software, but even to other systems like Android. And from what I've read, iPadOS is even worse.

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I switched from iOS to Android in the iPhone 4 days, and switched back last month.

The new iOS UI/UX is horrible and it's extremely difficult to understand how the hell to navigate anything. Part of this is the obsession over gestures in place of buttons, the size of the screens and distance of the swipes also makes it difficult to use with one hand (I can't use my thumb to unlock the device), apps are completely unintuitive, and there seems to be an obsession with presenting new data at you rather than keeping the same pathways to find previous data giving me a sense of always being lost in every app.

The Podcasts app might be the best example of a horribly designed product. I can't believe anyone at Apple is actually using that app.

I'm going to stick with Apple due to privacy concerns for the time being, but I'm really upset with my purchase.

I've gotten to where I really enjoy using it (for the most part: the notifications list stands out as feeling terrible compared to Android), but only after, like, reading guides on the internet. Which is the kind of thing Apple products have traditionally prided themselves on not requiring.

re: notifications

Is there a way to dismiss them with a single gesture like on Android? I haven't figured that part out, it's weird since swiping it right opens it, but so does tapping it, and swiping left opens a Manage | View | Clear All (x) menu.

It's so hard to use this thing with one hand...

Just tried it and it looks like you can long-press then swipe down to dismiss.

how intuitive and appropriate for that action.

edit: it takes me about 2.5 seconds to dismiss a notification with that action. I don't know about y'all but I dismiss notifications way more often than open them. Seems like it should be just as quick to dismiss it as open it.

swipe left 2x, or hold down the X and "clear all notifications". still not as fast as Android, but can't say I've ever been bothered by it.

ahh thank you.

See I've had an iPhone for a year now and I didn't know that

If you keep swiping left past the Manage | View | Clear menu, Clear expands to fill the width of the notification. If you release your finger then, it’ll trigger Clear. It’s pretty hard to do reliably, though.

There’s a similar behavior with the swipe gestures throughout iOS. In the Phone app, swipe left on a voicemail to show a Delete option. Keep swiping, and Delete fills the whole cell. Release when it’s expanded to trigger Delete without an extra tap.

If you tap the X on a stack there's a "Clear All" button

I would recommend to try Overcast instead of the default podcasts app: https://overcast.fm/

is there a list of features somewhere and are the two listed possible to be disabled? DSP-by-default is an anti-pattern for audio products and I don't want to install an app without seeing what it does...

Pretty much all I care about in an app is discovery (does it list related podcasts?), organization (does it keep my listening history), and playback ordering (does it support chronological | reverse chronological | custom playback ordering for episodes of the same podcast?).

Podcasts, Music, and News were designed by Satan's minions in a brilliant effort to confuse and depress the public.

> The new iOS UI/UX is horrible and it's extremely difficult to understand how the hell to navigate anything

Meta comment. It's interesting to see the debate on HN between optimizing for power users versus lay users. For the latter, we cryptic settings and/or hidden functionality. For the latter, we get a limited set of communicated functions.

What's weird is that Apple products used to be for lay users (and still pretty much market themselves that way), but their UX design is now much more power-user-friendly. Personally I'm mostly fine with it, it's just a weird source of dissonance.

> The Podcasts app might be the best example of a horribly designed product. I can't believe anyone at Apple is actually using that app.

Every time I start an episode I immediately just to the nice "jump 15sec" button that's in the lower right so that I can skip the lead-in ads. But I've found that button to be terribly unreliable. As I find myself jamming it over and over trying to skip the ads that I'm hearing.

What I discovered is the contact patch for the button is actually quite small, so you have to just delicately tap it with the tip of your finger so that it doesn't register touch outside of it boundary. Super frustrating when the clear boundaries of buttons disappears back in the dawn of "all things flat".

Note this may have improved in iOS 13 but I have yet to upgrade.

The podcast app has always been bad - since iOS 4/5. Just use Overcast.

They end of the skeuomorphic interface was the end of usability. UI design went from functional for a wide audience to "looks good in a demo". This coincided with the rise of web apps because unlike desktop apps using native widget sets web apps are a "blank slate" as far as UI design goes.

I've been using computers religiously since I got my Vic20 at 9 or 10, after working for it for a year.

Almost every time I need to change something on son's aging iPad (2012 issue, updated to latest iOS but is before cut off point for iPad OS) it seriously risks defenestration.

Parental setup including App store restrictions is the absolute worst, followed closely by the scattered application settings.

If only there was an Android tablet that was as well physical engineered. Unfortunately they don't really come close.

So his iPad is for educational apps only, and I got him the newly issued Switch for gaming. The quality of the A grade titles is astounding, well worth paying; none of the ad ridden crap that's par of the course on the iPad. And even though I'm missing some granularity, their parental controls are a textbook case of fantastic UX work by comparison.

The companion Android app lets me easily define and monitor daily limits; it just works.

This is how it always was. They always have secret keyboard shortcuts that don't have a menu option. Still, to this day, it's hard to even find your hard drive folder by default in Finder. Apple's UX is incredible if all you need to do is look at photos.

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