iOS 14 is available today
apple.com
apple.com
...and it's stunning. Seriously. It's actually three separate features in one. First, all the audio is outside of you rather than stuck between your ears. Second, it's surround sound so that dialog actually comes from your iPad, while music comes from all around. And third, it tracks, so if you look left the dialog all comes from your right AirPod -- and it's positively disconcerting it's so real. I thought for a second all the sound was actually coming out of my iPad and, oh crap, I have to turn it down not to bother the neighbors! Before realizing... oh my god it's actually that realistic.
So not only does it blow me away technologically, but also that I got it as a free upgrade almost a year after buying the headphones! People love to criticize Apple, but man do they do some wonderful things for their customers.
Now I'm just so disappointed the feature is iOS-only, and not for Macs. I watch all my TV on a projector hooked up to my Mac, and man... if I had spatial audio while viewing that... I can't even imagine. It would beat any movie theater I've ever been to. (And sadly, iPad HDMI output is low-quality, as it heavily compresses the output.)
My understanding is they don't support Macs because they don't have accelerometers/gyroscopes so the AirPods wouldn't know what they were relative to spatially. But man, I'd be happy just for a button I could click that says "my head is looking directly at the screen now". Wouldn't that be enough? But there's no mention of it being in Big Sur, so oh well...
LifeHacker put out a guide a few hours ago about which streaming services support it on their iOS app [1], the upshot being:
Supported: Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max
Not yet supported: Netflix, Prime Video, Showtime Anytime, PBS, TNT
[1] https://lifehacker.com/which-apple-devices-and-video-service...
What about when using the AppleTV? (This question isn't really for crazygringo who wouldn't be using the Mac to watch video if they owned an appleTV.)
Edit: after more reading I believe the main difference is the sensors in the Airpods Pro track head movement. For instance the virtual center (dialog speaker) would always appear to be coming from the display device, even if you move or tilt your head.
As for comparing the two... the iOS one is absolutely better, but the VLC one is still a really nice improvement. But it's definitely not just the head tracking. The VLC one somehow feels like it spreads the audio out "horizontally", so background sound comes from outside the head, but people speaking still sound "between my ears". Whereas with iOS, the people speaking genuinely sound like they're in front of me -- it puts the center audio forwards -- and nothing sounds "between my ears".
I would guess Apple can produce something superior because they know the exact shape and positioning of their own headphones, as opposed to a generic stereo headphone plugin?
Not to mention, of course, the lack of head tracking in VLC. I just researched Dolby Atmos for Headphones to compare, and it looks intriguing but appears to be Windows only.
Sony's Mark Cerny had a fascinating talk on PS5's spatial audio implementation. Sony might even support importing a custom-measured HRTF for even greater sound placement accuracy. No idea where you'd get it measured though!
You can buy silicon flaps that slip over the top and will keep them comfortably in your ear. The problem is that they don’t fit in the case with the flaps on.
I haven’t tried AirPod Pros but I assume they are better in this regard.
That earbud style just fundamentally doesn’t work for some anatomical reason in a percentage of the population.
Does anybody else with "wrong" ears used to get awful outside ear pain with the old all plastic iPhone earbuds? I physically cringe in pain just looking at them.
I actually have no problem with the origin AirPods, but the AirPod Pros always slip out of my ear. The former relies on the shape of your ear to hold it in, the latter relies on friction of the insert in your ear canal; and I guess my ears are just unusually slippery. I've tried all the different sizes, and not found anything that works. When I'm working out or cycling I always use the original AirPods.
YMMV of course.
But the worst is that sometimes my own voice resonates back in my ear, its hard to describe but very unpleasant and disturbing in a conversation.
Like you it’s worse in my left ear too.
I've tried cheap ones, I've tried expensive ones, I've tried swappable tips. Nope.
I also hate the Darth Vader soundtrack I get when I shove in-ear plugs in my head. I can hear every single breath I take.
Regular old AirPods though? They stick to my ears like glue.
People have different shaped ears, no one model can fit everyone. Even over the ear headphones differ on how they fit people with glasses. PortaPros are a complete no-no for me for example. Great headphones, absolute nope with glasses.
Airpods Pro are awesome in terms of sound and features, but no matter which of the included eartips I use for it, they always tend to wiggle out. Never fully to the point of falling out, but plenty of times it got to that weird in-between stage of falling out and staying in. No idea why. Hopefully there are more third party eartips available for Airpods Pro now as opposed to the last time I checked (which was just a month or two after the release), so I can finally find a pair that makes them stay in.
I agree. Some solutions from Apple are uniquely wonderful.
Imagine if they opened up this feature for 3p companies like Netflix. And let’s suppose Netflix commissions original content that is tailor made to take advantage of this type of audio. Of course, Netflix would benefit from increased subscribers and one could argue Apple would benefit from the availability of the content too — more people likely to buy airpods.
However, I’m personally convinced that Apple’s 30% commission charge to Netflix is completely justified. After all, they’re taking advantage of an end to end solution built by Apple. But of course, Netflix could bypass the IAP policy and not past the benefits into Apple. But I’m just using Netflix as an example. Any 3p app such as game or music app or movie app would benefit from this feature.
I only bring up the 30% point because it’s been make headlines recently and the hn community also has been vocal on the topic.
(Disclaimer: I don’t know enough about the spatial audio feature to say if it works with apps like Netflix or not. I’m presuming it doesn’t for illustrating my argument.)
People rarely criticize Apple for the products themselves. Apple gets criticism because of the "weird" (for lack of a better word) restrictions on the products. I've stopped using a Mac for quite a while now - but I recall examples - when the first Macbooks came without a optical drive you could buy an external one. But it will only work with _that particular Macbook model_ (after googling around I found that you could send a magic SCSI string to make it work). There is no iPhone with a SD card slot - my dad _LOVED_ iOS and his iPhone 6S but he had to switch to an Android phone so that he can use a 500GB SD card to store all his photos (he wants _ALL_ his photos available locally on the phone, so cloud sync is not an option).
I could go on. Apple makes some amazing products, but then adds quirks that makes the amaze short lived.
The headphone jack on the phone, I can actually see it. Not a lot of real estate inside a phone, and they wanted people to try AirPods (which I love, and might not have tried if it weren't for the missing jack).
But... no headphone jack on a 13" tablet? I edit movies on there sometimes and I grumble every time I dust off the dongle to plug in a mic for voiceovers.
But, no, people criticize Apple for everything they can think of. It's one of those companies where there's a set of people who, for whatever weird reason, have decided it's the enemy. They're against Apple and everything it stands for.
It's strange, I think the only company I feel that way about is Facebook. Maybe because phones are the most intimate things we own, they become part of our identities?
iPhone got thicker and bigger when they removed the headphone jack.
This is especially dumb from Apple considering the number of pro audio apps marketed for the iPad that require the use of a wired connection for latency reasons. (no, Bluetooth audio will never have low enough latency for music production)
I think it's because Apple competitors try to copy the look and feel (round corners, hiding stuff away, make it convoluted to get to advanced settings to make the settings look less "intimidating") to try to pull Apple userbase and it waters down the experience for the people who are against Apple.
Even the immense photo and video/graphics userbase of Apple wasn't enough to stop the SD card slot removal. :-(
Although personally i think there still should be one, and a headphone jack!
Apple prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrducts smetimes prrrrrevent them frrrrrrrrrm ding s
Being pedantic here: it is not actually free for you. The costs of improvements delivered through software updates are built into the original price you paid for it through deferred revenues and "subscription accounting". [1] In other words, Apple is not subsidizing new feature delivery from other sources of revenue or from debts. This came from the collective AirPod Pro users' pockets.
Accounting (and the related legality) aside, it is great to see hardware products get enhancements and a longer useful life through such means (whenever it happens).
[1]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/11/01/apple-now-sitting...
Maybe it comes with Big Sur?
In general, I love how accessibility features on iOS are so useful even for the average person who wouldn’t be considered or classified as disabled.
This feature is not intended as a "night mode", it's very extreme. It also makes anything that has no red channel in its color disappear (although this is rare). I found it's a better night mode than actual night modes. But it's best if you're just reading text, for video or games it's probably too extreme.
Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters
This is super important. People who don't need accomodation sometimes complain about the ADA rules for buildings but at some point everybody takes advantage of things like crash bars to open a door (when your hands are full, or are just on the phone), ramps (perhaps you're pulling something, have a kid, or are on crutches for a few days), handrails (momentary distraction) etc.
And ditto for the phone. I consider the label on the "accessibility" settings just there to make them easy to find; they aren't there for a small number of people (even if most people change at most one default setting).
Things like:
The triple-tap-to-zoom feature has a “low light” filter that works on top of your brightness setting so you can use it to get a lower-than-lowest-brightness for reading in bed at night (even the lowest brightness isn’t low enough sometimes).
Reachability setting if you have a big phone and small hands let’s you drag the entire interface down with 1 finger and reach buttons at the top of the UI.
LED Flash for Alerts gives you a visual notification if you work somewhere where you need your phone on silent but also can’t use vibration alerts (she works in a medical field and her phone sits across the room on a table).
Lots of interesting ideas in an area of Settings 99% of people never touch.
Thanks for sharing! (and the same to your other half!)
... which doesn't help the mayor annoyance that safari still doesn't support dark mode! (FF to the rescue)
I really love the new app drawer. My hundred barely-used apps are now neatly stowed there while I keep a single (Yes, one) Home Screen.
Widgets are nice but from what I understand they’re updated only once every 5 minutes, which makes them a lot less useful.
I don’t anymore. Eventually the regular reinstalls became too much effort re-setting all of my endless customisations. Trained me well for the modern era of “photos app not working right? Have you tried erasing all contents and settings and not restoring from backup?”
This way is easily faster if you have a reasonable number of apps. Typing to find things would only be faster if you had more than say 220 apps. Even if I have to tap, swipe, tap - that would be faster than swipe, type, tap.
The difference between a phone and a computer is that one has a keyboard, and the other doesn't. Ever since the end of the BlackBerry era, typing on my phone is a slow, error-prone activity, so searching takes longer than the two taps it takes to just select it manually (typing on a BlackBerry was slow too, but at least it was error-free).
I have all my apps categorized in folders in my app drawer (I use Nova Launcher, which lets you create folders there). Then I have two home screen pages, one with all my most-used applications, and the other with all my media players: podcasts, music, Kindle, Libby, YouTube, etc. I use large icons (4x5 per page), so it makes it both easy to find and select any app.
It does have trouble with some apps, though. Authy does not work at all when pronounced the way I expect it to be pronounced ("auth" as in "authorize"). Siri just says that there is no app named "Offie". And no, I do not pronounce "th" anything at all like "ff".
If I try pronouncing Authy as "oathy" is works maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of the time.
For nearly everything else I've tried, though, it is fine.
Taking the time to manually organize all my apps just isn't worth it any more, especially after a few updates/restores exploded it all. Now, I keep the first home page clean with only the essential apps, and everything else is pushed off into the memory hole on the right with spotlight/siri wrangling it all for me.
Excited to see how this might improve with widgets and app library!
It's not that much of a problem on my phone or iPad, because I can just ask it to open Authenticator (Microsoft's authentication app). When I set up TOTP for a site, I scan the QR code in both.
It's on my Apple Watch that it is annoying. Microsoft Authenticator on the watch doesn't do TOTP. It's just for authenticating with Microsoft sites. So on the watch I need to use Authy if I need a TOTP code for a site.
On the watch, I don't see any option to edit a command that Siri gets wrong.
I’d try to do it each time, hopefully won’t take too long to get it.
(On iOS 14, enable Siri - Siri Responses - Always show speech. On previous iOS, Siri is full screen and I think tap to edit is always available.)
Not sure about watch. However, I assume it should sync if you enable Siri to sync in iCloud. Settings - your name icon - iCloud - toggle Siri.
It is most aggravating and utterly perplexing. Whilst I like the app library for hiding all the stuff I don't use, it's a massive pain to use for finding apps...
I used to keep the third and beyond pages in folders, but on my last phone I got lazy and just use spotlight search as an app launcher.
My motive is that I want to see my beautiful wallpaper, which in this case a picture of my daughter.
That's weird, I would expect them to be able to get updates via push notifications. Even so that seems like a pretty minimal limitation. For almost anything other than messaging a 5 minute resolution is probably fine.
I hop between Android and iOS every few years and was quite excited for iOS to check this basic functionality box right as I came back. Shame they had to ruin it by forcing the absolutely nonsensical categories on you with no option for a plain alphabetical list.
Just give me the UI that shows up when you tap the app drawer search button, but as soon as I swipe to the drawer and without showing the keyboard. It's right there, the functionality I want is available, but as usual Apple screws it up for power users.
In fact: do regular users like searching their app drawer for a possibly relevant category and hoping it has what they want? It doesn't help that the available categories and their ordering change every few days and/or whenever you install a new app. And worse yet is that the same application can show up in 3-4 different categories crowding out the one app you're looking for that only exists in one.
*in default view, I can tap on the larger icons to open the app right away. Or I can tap on the smaller ones to get all the apps in that category. Then, there aren't that many categories and the predictiveness actually seems quite good
Sure, I've heard of homescreen icons before.
> or alphabetical order - which you can also get by swiping down in the app drawer.
Which means three gestures to get to the alphabetical one including hiding the keyboard.
> tap and hold scrollbar to get to the position you need.
Yep, that's a positive. Just wish I could get straight there.
The app drawer is for the apps I use infrequently. Which means I'm less likely to have internalized their app icons, and I can't view the text in the default view so I have no idea what I'm looking for.
The only text I get is the category name, like Other for Phillips Hue or Creativity for Twitch. YouTube? Entertainment. Twitch? Creativity. And Podcasts goes under Entertainment despite the fact that I have an Education category already.
The categories make no sense to me and I have no way to rectify that, I already use homescreen folders for categorization, and without text it's a pain to find what I'm after, especially if it's hidden inside the "fourth slot".
Swipe down on the app library screen and you get the alphabetical list. Same gesture you used to do a search from any screen.
> Just give me the UI that shows up when you tap the app drawer search button, but as soon as I swipe to the drawer and without showing the keyboard.
I’m curious if it fixed some of the unpleasant behaviour and bugs that were never fixed in iOS 13.
Things like Mail not displaying new emails properly unless your went out and back into the mailbox. The keyboard autocorrecting to random names aggressively and inserting capital letters if you dare move the cursor. All new behaviours introduced with iOS 13 that adversely affect the user experience.
Hopefully they'll be able to remediate that in the future and separate the core OS deployment from the vendor-specific files. Let Google pushes the OS, and the vendor could update their own stuff separately / through the Play Store. At least there is "Project Mainline" that helps keeping those devices secure.
> App store updates won't magically make the mail app devs work faster or produce more.
Definitely, but it would make it easier to deploy a patch without having to wait for the next iOS update.
I just assumed it's because I've got both English and German enabled and well Germans like their capital letters
Holy shit how many times has my phone thought I was trying to say "Amit" instead of "about"? It's not like there's even anyone named Amit in my contacts.
I swear, if they dumb down iOS any further, I'll have to rent a monkey to troubleshoot it.
(I imagine that what it's really complaining about is the size of the .mov attachment, but I keep it around for amusement's sake and to remind me to be considerate of my own users' needs.)
You step into the river but the water has moved on
Your data is no more
Pro tip, Apple: when a Google search for "disable $FEATURE_XYZ" returns over one million hits, it's time to walk it back, and possibly fire the product manager pour encourager les autres.
https://9to5mac.com/2020/06/22/ios-14-incoming-call-ui/
I always hated that. I hate phone calls, period, and I certainly don’t want that phone call to take over my entire phone.
It’s fantastic. So much nicer.
> I hate phone calls, period
We're kindred spirits. That's the only reason why I can't give up call screening.
I have no idea why anyone thought it would be a good user experience to be typINCOMING CALL
Phone calls are not rude as a general statement. When my dad calls me it is not rude.
There are very few people I'd expect to give me a call out of the blue these days rather than texting or emailing. But for that circle, I'm in the same boat as you.
i find it rude if people text me something important/urgent and expect me to note or even react timely.
I need to copy'n'paste numbers (super clunky) to google them (spammy results). And then "Siri" sees I have a number in my clipboard, and assumes we're BFFs now and keeps giving me widget suggestions to call and message the spammer!
edit: callscreen seems to be Pixel only. Can't find it for my S10.
I'm actually planning to use my phone less and less because I am trapped bad habits and that results in unnecessarily wasted time.
If it is music, i found iTunes Match is the solution. Like $40/year.
Honestly, that's just good policy on all Apple updates lately. It seems that more and more of them have been plagued with issues and are trailed by hotfixes. I've learned to just wait a while. Other people can be the test guinea pigs!
Ironically, a company that understands that model is Microsoft. It's a pity they aren't competition for Apple in this space yet. As an iPhone/Macbook Pro/iPad user, I am eyeing the Surface Go 2 w/WSL as a potential future replacement for the iPad.
And before you complain "it's insane that I have to do that", you've already done that: just you picked Apple.
The mistake people make is in thinking of Android as some monolithic, consistent thing. It's not, and can't and won't be. Buy a Google phone, or a Samsung phone, or whatever, and stick with a manufacturer you like. At least if they start doing things you don't like, you have options in the same ecosystem. If Apple does something you don't like, you have no other options without jumping ship.
So the manufacturer with the longest update period, whose products also retain the most resale price to boot?
Well, the Android branding is all over the place. No one thinks “I’m going to switch to Samsung”. It’s “I’m going to switch to Android”. Android phones are commodity devices.
I use a Blackberry for my black box phone, so I don't really care about security on my Android stuff - Google or China can have all that's in there. What I do care about are having options, and Android does provide me a lot of options. For instance, my first Android phone was a Samsung and while the phone was awesome and lasted a solid 4 years, I hated the customer service offered. Then thought I'd have a cheaper Android, so decided to go with a Motorola. Then once I joined the workforce, it was the BB + Honor combo, because Honors are so much resilient. Just because Android has so much more options doesn't mean they are commodity devices, unless you look at phones as a status symbol, which is a thinking I've honestly grown out of.
I don’t think you’re representative of the general market...
I’ve never heard of people talking about the “Samsung experience”, or the “Huawei experience”. These devices are interchangeable. People talk about specs or price or getting longer term support.
Appleistas are the only ones who talk about the Apple experience because clearly it's only Apple which came up with that marketing gimmick. There's nothing different or even superbly superior of the Apple experience compared to the Huawei or Samsung experience. On the contrary, it's effectively much easier for most people I've met to get familiar with Android over Apple. Like most people mention here regularly, most people buy Apple only because of the green chat box stigma.
Absolute horse crap, unless you speak for the market. I don’t have to carry two phones and also don’t have to worry about privacy. In fact I have a phone made by a company who could really give two craps about the ad market and feeding it more data. Second is you can be sure if it’s Apple you’ll get quality. With other android phones you’ll get mostly cheap. The user interface style on android is also ugly, cards are old, material is boring, but this is subjective, just like you saying Apple provides no better experience than Samshit or Chinawei
Being on Blackberry, or any non-Google phone really, allows me to segregate my really important stuff from my every day stuff. Equating Apple's security to that kind of segregated security is a bunch of absolute horse crap.
TLDR, if your phone passes network traffic then it can be “hacked” too.
Security through obscurity is also horse crap, but hey carry your two phones if it makes you feel safer!
Needless to say I don't update until the last minute with most releases any longer.
People often have some bad personal experience and deduce from that the OS is objectively and generally a "sshow", but it can often be some specific third party program, service, extension, or hardware -- or some genuine Apple bug that doesn't affect all devices/users/use cases.
The impact is often about something a user cares heavily about, but might not generalize to the OS. E.g. one might have a problem with Outlook servers (I don't have to use it at work, so never had the chance to have such an issue). But that doesn't mean it's necessarily (a) the OS's problem, or (b) something that affects anyone else who uses Catalina without needing Outlook.
Which was often also the reason people didn't upgrade Windows. (or try MacOS or Linux)
iOS 13 was particularly bad and I waited until January. I hope they did a better job with 14.
I always here some complains here and there. but, as with Catalina, never had any issue. Is it specific apps?
I had an issue on my iPhone X where it was connected to wifi without showing the icon. But there’s plenty written on iOS 13’s bugginess and Apple admitted as much. I would not be surprised that iOS 14 is solid. I rather wait a month to see if that’s the case.
Waking up a Macbook Pro with two USB-C monitors plugged in, only one monitor comes on. I have to fiddle around by opening the laptop's lid or pressing Ctrl-Shift-Eject and waking it up again from scratch for all the monitors to respond.
Leave Catalina running too long, its Watchdog process times out and it has a kernel panic. During the night every two or three days. After booting and reporting to Apple (again), it's time to rearrange all the windows and reopen all the documents I was working on, again.
Inadequate is the polite way of describing it.
I have uptimes in the months (only rebooting for the ocassional update).
But if "dual monitors have issues" is the biggest issue that comes up when someone is asked to describe their problems with an OS, I wouldn't exactly call it a "dumpster fire". More like "smooth sailing". Doubly so if it's not experienced for everybody hooking two monitors but just for e.g. that specific brand or laptop run / monitor combination.
I've become more annoyed trying to develop on it though, and outside of iOS, I do my development mainly on Linux now.
Who or what sanctioning body determines who is a “top dev”.
I’m using it on my phone, have been for a bit, and have had no issues. Zero. I must be reachable at all times. So whoever Rambo is, is wrong.
I think it's probably one of the more stable iOS releases I've seen.
I just told my team to go ahead and update to 14 because at the least our app will open and run through some basic scenarios without any issues. Now I just need everyone to exercise all the code paths over the next week to be sure.
To be very clear, our app is not on the public store and is distributed using the enterprise program. This allows us some freedom as the Apple devices running our app are exclusively for the app and we have some leeway in telling our customers to hold off on the latest iOS if we need to. They have MDM and policy which allows for this level of control.
If we had this app on the public store, I would be in a state of total panic right now.
I assumed a lot of people with AirPods would want to switch the audio seamlessly between their iPhone and an iPad or Mac.
Any idea why it took so long to ship this feature?
I recently got some bone conducting headphones which have the dual bluetooth built in, and that is even more seamless - literally just plays the audio from the active device, though it's not perfectly accurate, and gets really confused by Spotify doing off-device play, but it's clearly nicer than even having to choose the output channel.
Looking forward to trying this out w/ my AirPods though.
At least going the other way I only have to select the airpods once in the phones bluetooth device list.
Edit: Also apparently this device switching feature for Airpod Pro is good only for Apple devices, and Apple devices on the same iCloud account.
Do you have to choose which device you are listening on by interacting with the headset, or is there a way to toggle that from the source devices?
Finally!
Right now you can set Chrome or Edge as default Browser, and Outlook as default Mail.
Many people don't care about Privacy, Ecology, etc... yet it will have catastrophic consequences down the line.
Similarly here, yes it's true people don't care about the web engine, yet given Mozilla situation and Microsoft who switched to chromium, the web is seriously not in a good shape and it will have consequences on the long term.
Bugs present in iOS browsers, won't be present in Android browsers even if the browser version is the same which makes debugging harder.
For example, it turns having 3 targets (Chrome, Firefox, Safari...) into 5 targets (Chrome Android, Chrome ioS, Firefox Android, Firefox iOS, Safari iOS).
Differences between mobile/desktop browser are relatively minor in comparison.
On the Chrome side, there's fragmentation from all the browser that just wrap Chrome like Samsung Internet and QQ, but those are greatly mitigated by having up to date apps or are region specific so won't apply if your business doesn't do business in China.
If that's all they wanted they would buy an Android.
> PWAs let companies skip the app store and therefore skip paying apple 30% of their transactions which means cheaper prices for users.
Exactly, this is what this is all about: companies wanting to milk users for more money and maximize their own profits, not that they actually care about the users.
I think one of the reasons may be to enforce the global settings for parent controls and privacy etc. which would be hard with third-party engines.
I set Spark to my default email app, but clicking on mailto: links in Safari still shows Send button greyed out because no accounts are configured in Mail.app.
[1]: https://developer.android.com/topic/google-play-instant
It's impossible to develop around a feature that must be specifically enabled by digging through settings menus by individual users. As a product owner, there's little way to justify it. As a user, I've run across them less than 10 times in the wild, but they've been delightful and consistently good experiences.
Try moving — well — anything between home-screen pages that have widgets: there is a good chance that many icons will be shuffled in an indecipherable order. And worse, it’s so easy to get too close to the edge of the screen and accidentally switch pages, which means when you try to move one little icon you might shatter the entire icon layout of two adjacent pages!!
(Also, I really loved being able to edit screens sanely in iTunes and I miss that. It was just easier to set up a few screens of phone icons using a mouse.)
Sent from my iPad
Just tap additional icons with your secondary finger while moving an app, and the additional apps will be added to the main finger’s “stack”.
Also, I think I figured out why Apple is hoping everyone uses “App Library” and edits their phones down to one page: it is buggy as hell if you do it any other way.
Apple vets apps for their use of push notifications and will warn/ban them if they use them excessively or for advertising purposes. Obviously they can't do the same for PWA.
On android these notifications are abused to send shitty content, maybe a change at the OS level to warn the user in a more prominent way? Like these modals that won't allow you click until X secs have passed.
2) Generally I'd rather none of the software I use be webtech, so anything that makes it easier to deliver webtech to my phone/tablet is a step the wrong direction. Yes I'm willing to have less total software in exchange. The point is that I don't want apps that are or will be native, to be webtech instead, which may happen as more features are added to webapps. IMO allowing stuff like React Native and Phonegap is something I'd even rather they didn't do (and I've been paid to develop both native and React Native apps, plus worked on a very early and somewhat successful Phonegap-but-more-native solution that ultimately fizzled out). My ideal situation is that if anyone tells me to try out some app or to use some app to communicate or share something with them or whatever, personal or business, it's a webapp 0% of the time. It's either native or it doesn't exist, so no-one can bug me about it or cajole me into using it.
In short, my UX on iOS is better without them even being possible, so why would I prefer they be allowed?
Apple was completely right to not allow web push notifications on iOS. They're 99% abuse. I don't even like them on desktop either.
The P in PWA comes from the word progressive. So, we don't need to enable every native feature immediately for every website.
People who want PWA notifications would be absolutely fine with not being able to send them until the user added the PWA to their home screen and opted into notifications.
You wouldn't have to get them unless you proactively installed the PWA to your home screen.
> 2) Generally I'd rather none of the software I use be webtech, so anything that makes it easier to deliver webtech to my phone/tablet is a step the wrong direction...so no-one can bug me about it or cajole me into using it.
That's your only reason? Because people ask you to use web apps? Perhaps that's because you want the wrong thing for some reason. You haven't explained what that reason is very well at all.
> In short, my UX on iOS is better without them even being possible...
You have never experienced this, so how could you possibly know? Also, no it wouldn't.
> so why would I prefer they be allowed?
Because you haven't listed any good reasons why you're right, which usually means that you're wrong.
I can't really parse this but from the best sense of it I can get, I reckon the most correct response is, "no, u".
[EDIT] Oh and also:
> You have never experienced this, so how could you possibly know? Also, no it wouldn't.
It's really incredible how often relatively straightforward conversations on HN end up veering, pointlessly, into theory of the mind and epistemology.
Allow me to make it very simple: You didn't give any reasons for your opinion. You just gave your opinion.
> ...I reckon the most correct response is, "no, u".
If you're used to that sort of argumentation, I suppose that is what you'd reckon.
> It's really incredible how often relatively straightforward conversations on HN end up veering, pointlessly, into theory of the mind and epistemology.
Apple has never enabled notifications for PWAs on iOS. Therefore, you couldn't possibly know that your "UX on iOS is better without them even being possible" because you have nothing to compare to.
What about that speaks to "theory of the mind and epistemology" in your opinion?
Perhaps you're confusing web notifications with PWA notifications. Perhaps you're thinking that Apple couldn't possibly do it any differently from Android where every website can prompt you to give notifications.
Gee, I wonder if your whole problem couldn't just be solved by letting you opt into the whole idea of PWA notifications? Then you could never turn on that switch and happily live your life without ever thinking about them again.
Somehow, you'd rather force everybody else to do it your way instead of giving them a choice and I find that to be rather deplorable.
Consider also that it's possible to assert something without perfect knowledge of its truth. Usually context is sufficient to gather the level of certainty being expressed, or the implicit perspective from which it holds true, without hedging and defensively weakening every little statement.
> > Perhaps that's because you want the wrong thing for some reason.
> Allow me to make it very simple: You didn't give any reasons for your opinion. You just gave your opinion.
I'm glad you translated it because I'd never have gotten the second claim from the first. Phew.
> What about that speaks to "theory of the mind and epistemology" in your opinion?
Your entire objection, which seems to carry some unusual assumptions about the power and utility of thought experiments and the extent of the value of comparing similar, but not identical, things. Notably, it appears to reject them as being to any useful degree, even for evaluating a user-facing OS feature valid or enlightening.
> Gee, I wonder if your whole problem couldn't just be solved by letting you opt into the whole idea of PWA notifications?
Making them opt-in and off by default, ideally with no way for the app to tell whether they're enabled, would be an improvement, but allow me to repeat my reason from my post which, you claim, contained no reasons: I do not want features that make webapps more viable on iOS, because I do not like webapps and prefer an environment that makes me less likely to encounter them for any reason. So simply not having the feature would be even better.
[EDIT] nb. I entirely get disagreement with my position on a variety of grounds, but I find such apparent failure to even engage with it, and rejection that it is a position, harder to understand.
Having a choice is always better than not having one with regards personal preferences. That's my standard. What's yours aside from "I don't like web apps"?
> Your entire objection, which seems to carry some unusual assumptions about the power and utility of thought experiments and the extent of the value of comparing similar, but not identical, things. Notably, it appears to reject them as being to any useful degree, even for evaluating a user-facing OS feature valid or enlightening.
For example?
You are needlessly complicating the conversation with all this meta-drivel. It's pretty simple really: You want everybody to have no choice. I want people to have a choice. I stated my position pretty clearly. You're just giving opinions and philosophizing.
> Making them opt-in and off by default, ideally with no way for the app to tell whether they're enabled, would be an improvement...
Good - we've moved from zero choice, to some choice. We're making progress!
> because I do not like webapps and prefer an environment that makes me less likely to encounter them for any reason.
That's not a reason. That's an opinion and a personal preference. You didn't state the reason for your opinion that nobody should be able to get PWA notifications.
> I entirely get disagreement with my position on a variety of grounds, but I find such apparent failure to even engage with it, and rejection that it is a position, harder to understand.
You still haven't stated anything other than your opinion.
That's all either of us have been doing. [EDIT] and an opinion can be a reason! They're not mutually exclusive. Do you need an itemized list of problems I have with webapps, with figures backing them all up (else they'd be opinions again, I guess)? I figured that'd been discussed to death, especially on HN.
> Having a choice is always better than not having one with regards personal preferences. That's my standard. What's yours aside from "I don't like web apps"?
I like being able to choose a platform that makes it hard for developers to get by with a webapp, pushing them toward native apps. See? I like choice too.
If you find yourself getting sucked into a "no, u" dynamic, the only thing that works is to step away. That's hard in the moment (because it feels like ceding the field to the obviously-wrong, obviously-inappropriate other) but then you win. And we all win.
Certainly when an internet thread becomes so generic as to reach "theory of mind and epistemology", it was time to walk away a long time ago. It's hardly likely that any internet forum will ever generate anything new or valuable to say about such things, and certainly not in the middle of a tit-for-tat activation.
Actually we have.
In the early days of iOS, Apple never regulated push notifications. And so I remember many apps using them as a reminder pushing notifications daily and sometimes even multiple times a day. There were also companies selling "notification space" within their apps to third parties for use as an advertising channel.
It was pretty awful and it degraded the overall experience of using the iPhone since notifications appear whilst your using other apps.
Apple was right to regulate them. And I hope Apple continues to look after consumers and not allow PWA to use them.
They said "In short, my UX on iOS is better without them (web notifications) even being possible".
How could they know when Apple never implemented it?
The fact that apps had unregulated push notifications and now they don't pretty much settles the debate in my favor. Apple can regulate push notifications for PWAs in all sorts of ways outside of barring them altogether, just like they did for native apps.
They can't do this with PWA.
You’re acting like there’s zero way for them to throttle what’s going on in Safari.
How do you think Google warns you when you’re going to some malware website? They keep a list somewhere. Apple could do that very easily.
Computers are very good at keeping lists.
Surely Apple could implement a setting to disable all requests for push notifications?
> In short, my UX on iOS is better without them even being possible, so why would I prefer they be allowed?
Because not everyone agrees with you and web apps have many advantages over native.
But I don't care about those advantages (to the extent that they exist for users they're secondary effects of webapps being very cheap to make as cross-platform apps, so more likely to be made in the first place if cross-platform is a requirement) and like being able to choose a platform where it's hard to deploy a webapp instead of a native app, forcing the choice of "native app" or "no app at all" on the part of the developer, because I think it leads to fewer total apps but way more native apps than there'd otherwise be.
So why would I prefer PWAs become more capable on the platform? I see why PWA developers and maybe some users would.
That’s an option in macOS. Ultimately it doesn’t make the UX any better though, as web developers still present JS-based dialogs asking for notification permissions
A friend the other day thought their laptop had a virus because they had inadvertently turned on notifications for some spammy website. Took me a while to work out how to turn it off.
Being able to approve or reject notifications is not enough - we should take the additional step of not allowing sites to show these kinds of prompts unless the user specifically clicked a button and asked for it.
The overwhelming bulk of Xcode's footprint is the simulators. Xcode 12 went from two iOS simulator architectures to three (previously i386 and x86_64, arm64 added), one watchOS architecture to three (previously i386, x86_64 and arm64 added), and one tvOS architecture to two (previously x86_64, arm64 added), which naturally increases the size quite a bit.
Xcode 11: 10.3GB on disk / 17.1GB apparent
Xcode 12: 16.9GB on disk / 30.0GB apparent
Edit: it just appeared 3 min after I posted this. Downloading.
I suspect they are just progressively rolling it out.
If you have a ton of Home Screen pages like I do, you have to tap/drag a long way to the App Library to be able to restore the "hidden" apps.
Translation is still wonky for EN↔JP: "Test" gets translated into Japanese as "Testament", okay...
Also Safari’s ability to translate websites seems to be geolocked to the US.
I'm seeing iOS devs on twitter complain about multiple builds and redundant versions. I'm waiting for Xcode 12.1 the launch seems to be a mess.
Edit: iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 are available now as of 1:08PM.
When will the huddled high-device-usage masses be free of 10 of these a day?
PS. non iOS user here
when fatal bugs, or issues are reported, there is little communication from apple... alot people/companies depend on what apple is doing here
hisotrically, they announce new stuff, then ios is released about 1 week later (conveyed at the annnouncement)
this time, it was one day.
alot of us had apps already in testing and preparation, but depending on what features you might have used, some bugs occur that have either no workaround of nasty workarounds, and we need the GM release to confirm certain things and how to proceed
i cant talk about the issues i have faced in my job, but this 1 day notice has not gone off well
-- as an aside --
personally, my feelings towards apple has soured very much, and anecdotally, many friends who work in industry who have to deal with apple (apps, app store, safari etc) have soured on them too
when people say "apple doesnt care about developers" i can understand thier feelings somewhat...
1. Download, extract, and run the new version of Xcode.
Note: you cannot upload builds for production App Store with pre-GM builds. You _must_ use the GM or production Xcode.
It's a 12 GB download, and extracting takes 20 minutes. Factor in about an hour here. Especially around when it's posted you can expect a very slow download.
2. Build, execute and validate the app at least _launches_.
Maybe another 30 minutes.
3. Create and upload an archived build to Apple.
Maybe another 30 minutes.
4. Wait for the uploaded build to finish processing.
This takes somewhere between 1-3 hours.
5. Submit the finished-processing build.
Manual inspection of metadata, screenshot uploading, etc. Let's call it 20 minutes.
6. Wait for approval from Apple.
Who knows how long.
7. Release.
So this is somewhere around 4-5 hours at _minimum_ of work to get the build uploaded.
When you're told at 11am that users will have it in their hands the next day, even if you are incredibly prepared, there's simply very little time to actually do the above in a safe way. And if you're not on Pacific Time, you're going to miss this window entirely.
Not to mention Apple uploaded a GM build of Xcode around noon, and then silently replaced it with an updated version sometime later without explaining what the difference was. Fun stuff.
Also: the GM build has regressions.
Do certain vendors get pre-release access that smaller vendors do not? Does Twitter/Facebook/etc have to do the same thing you just described? If it was truly as bad as you are making it out to be, how in the world does the eco-system survive? There's no way Apple could expect to be able to handle reviewing every single app in this manner. Surely something is missing?
I also believe that, right now, they're just rubber stamping all app reviews. They cannot handle this volume.
Grumble, grumble.
For earlier releases I would go back to the main release only a few days after trying the beta due to bugs.
My impression is that 14 beta had fewer bugs than the first official 13.
Even if it wasn't simply low-effort and repetitive, I haven't seen a single instance of a person who's used the beta corroborate this pessimism. Quite the opposite: every single one of these comments has replies by users of the beta that haven't noticed significant problems and generally seem to believe it's a solid update.
“Inline replies You can reply directly to a specific message in a group conversation. See all related messages in their own view to easily keep track of a thread.”
It baffles me that I can't search someone by firstname lastname and have our messages thread come up 100% reliably.
Sure it works some of the time, but not for older threads.
Im ok with waiting 10 seconds as long as it returns the results I know are there. I am forced to go to Contacts and find the person, then click the new message button linking into messages.
Contacts app has a similar issue. I have < 1000 contacts, yet I can't search reliably for a contact I know is there by first / last name. I have to scroll through the list of all my contacts to get to it.
Maybe this is a bug, but its been an issue for me for years.
You do understand that the iPhone is designed for the widest of audiences from children to elderly. I don't think making Messages significantly more complex is a good thing.
It can run other apps inside of it, You can @people inside a group message, pin people to the top, etc..
You may not care for the app, but they update it relatively frequently!
I wonder how much of it is competitive advantage to push people to switch to iOS vs. Apple executives literally never texting people with Android phones.
If I want to install an app on my 3rd gen iPad, I try to install it directly in the app store, it tells me it requires an updated version of iOS.
I then have to install the app on my iPhone that's running the latest iOS version, then switch back to the iPad, change the app store account from my partner's to my account, and only then am I allowed to install the previous version of the app.
EOL devices should be opened up for whatever software a user wants to put on it. Jailbreaking seems like a somewhat viable option, though, but even that comes with its own issues.
Separately: is it just me or has Apple lost its innovative edge? Widgets and app drawer, that's the huge new update? Android has had these for, like, 5+ years.
Not that android has had anything super exciting lately, either. Maybe phone OSes have kind of implemented most of the obvious great features, I guess.
(I particularly like the new option to pre-select the photos that you want an app to see, rather than giving complete access to my photo library)
There's no indication Apple is doing anything noteworthy regarding privacy.