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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

Oh, you want to updates your apps? That's easy. Open up the App Store and then click on your profile picture.

Wait, what?

Hold the App Store icon until a menu appears. Choose "Updates" and done.

I'm not defending Apple here. I only accidentally discovered this shortcut. I feel that designers these days expect users to explore a lot of things out of blind faith in order to discover functionality.

only works if you know where your app store icon is. i dont use the icons from the launcher screens anymore, everything goes in one folder bar the 'sticky apps'

find it much faster to just pull down and search for apps

On the Iphone it works when long pressing in the search results too. (iOS 13.3)

Am curious what you mean by the 'sticky apps'.

Thanks for the tip. I always forget how to do it the couple times I've updated.

Somehow we've unlearned all those lessons about styling links to look like text and making users play Minesweeper on the screen

Wow, that's seriously dysfunctional. I get that Apple doesn't do UX testing but maybe they could do some UX testing?

Getting at least one user's opinion about a redesign might have nipped some of this in the bud

Yeah I think exactly one would be enough lol

THIS right there is what seems to be the core issue at Apple these days:

It doesn't feel like they have anyone who uses their own products anymore (dogfooding.)

The one thing about Steve Jobs was that he was a user like us, sharing most of the same annoyances and frustrations and in a position to make the engineers do something about them.

on the contrary, to me it feels like they have people who only use the latest product, and know it 100%. So when something new comes along, nobody is confused.

Just all of us who don't live at apple 24/7.

You got that right! I'm all for dogfooding, but at some point, it can turn into kool-aiding, if you don't take a look at how people out on the street are actually using your products (or trying to.)

The following, classic comic speaks more to Windows-style UI pathologies, but it seems appropriate here as well:

http://okcancel.com/comic/4.html

Haha I have for the past few months wondered where the "update" list had gone in the new App Store. Thanks for the help :) That is of course the most natural place to put that information - said no one ever.

“Upcoming Automatic Upgrades > 82”

Something must be going wrong here. It doesn’t appear the ‘automatic’ part of that is working :P

Yeah I've been having that issue.

Along with the email inbox bug they claim to have fixed but is still very much live and well on my iPhone 7 Plus.

A constant barrage of application update notifications, and the process of doing the same, was an unnecessary chore that led to update fatigue. Apple moved to defaulting to automatic updates, removed the various signals and notifications about updates pending, and now the average person just has updated apps within a reasonable window of consideration.

e.g. This was definitely a change for the better. They're pushing something that shouldn't be first class into the background, in the same way that you don't manage memory or decide which apps in the background to close.

I feel that this is a dark-pattern to force users to enable automatics updates.

They just needed the space previously occupied by "Updates" to promote their "Arcade"

Clearly, the solution would be to place Arcade under Profile. Easily accessible!

iOS 13 defaults to automatic app updates. How in the world is that a "dark pattern"? I get that people got accustomed to manual updates [1], and some illusion that this gave them some control, but from a rational evaluation it makes no sense.

[1] - I remember when Google first added enabled automatic app updates and one of the most common retorts, including on here, was "can you say bricked" and similar nonsense.

iOS updates apps automatically; system updates still require explicit user approval. I think it 's a decent trade-off, given that the options are "don't update", "update now", and a default of "update overnight, when/if the device is plugged in".

More stuff should allow for the latter option.

Google and Netflix are horrible for this.

Want to switch which user account you're using? No problem, simply find the picture of the current user account that you definitely don't want to use, and click on it.

Clicking your user account picture to access actions related to your user account (such as, change account, logout, change this picture etc) actually seems pretty intuitive. Where would you expect to find this functionality instead?

I was expecting to find it there, but older people who I've walked through these interfaces would expect it to be under something like "settings" or "switch account" rather than "this account".

Also, it's really a stretch to say that an action related to account x is "switch to account y."

It makes way more sense when you have multiple profiles with a different set of apps for each of them.

If N updates are available, they put a red badge with an N in it on top of the profile picture, the App Store icon, and if you have moved the App Store icon to a folder on top of that folder.

The inclusion of the Arcade tab on the App Store has pushed this change. I'm guessing that Apple feels like most people don't really update apps manually and just do an auto-update.

Presumably they have real stats not just guesses, but still, seems like a dumb place to move it to without any indication/affordance.

They could put an Update Applications pane in the Settings application - like next to the Software Update pane...

Yea this is awkward. It will then often show you a “partial” list of the available updates so you might have to swipe down a couple times to see the full list.

I also know the long press shortcut to get to updates, but often forget that. As well as the copy/paste swipe gestures.

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