I'm not sure why this is presented as some new thing, or a gotcha or whatever this is. We've known about it for months... And IMO, it's a positive change although it does sound a little weird.
slightly tangential, I hate being informed of things when I try to do them. I'm in a hurry, I don't want to read all about something now. I wish the dialogs had an "email this to me, willya?" selection, with an opportunity to decide the long term setting that I want.
The worst time to try to tell me about new features is right when I'm firing up my web meeting client to join a meeting that's about to start.
Make help discoverable, don't ram it down our throats, please.
We added loads of genuinely useful new features to our SaaS app over the past year, such as the ability to mute notifications, quick user-switching with a PIN, and non-exclusive user role membership, and more - despite mentioning this in our monthly user newsletter we still get peppered with support emails and feature-requests for things that already exist! Additionally our feature-usage data showed that users just weren’t using them.
After we added a forced (but only 15 second long) new-feature-tour those support tickets evaporated and user-satisfaction went up.
Gotta use tough-love, it seems.
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Users are weird - we have a bog-standard “user menu” in the top-right corner that’s got the usual visual-affordances and opened by just hovering your name and avatars - with menu items like Logout, Switch User, Dark Mode, etc - but to our surprise the vast majority of our users simply never explore the software.
If you think that's bad, when we overhauled some incompetently written code (from a dodgy contractor before I joined) that stored passwords using reversible-encryption (ARGH!) - which was for a "feature" that allowed tenant-admins to reveal their own users' passwords (WTFBBQ!) - and switched to using correctly hashed+salted passwords we had dozens of support calls from angry/frustrated (and yet unsophisticated...) users who said they were no-longer able to login because they never bothered to remember their password, they'd just ask their tenant-admin to tell them their own password (aiaaiaiiaiaiia) and now they couldn't do it anymore. We asked why they couldn't use the forgot-password page or a magic-link to login and they said it doesn't work because they all used fake e-mail addresses for their users (*dies*) (these tenant accounts were all set-up before things were fixed, and accounts with invalid/unverified e-mail addresses were just grandfathered-in).
We do also support OIDC (we are our own IdP, as well), so to try to make things easier for our users we'll be adding O365/AzAD soon, with sign-in-with-Google (and maybe sign-in with Facebook... excuse me while I take a cold shower) so at least some users can dispense with having a separate user-account they need to remember details for.
...so things were awful, now they're just bad, and they're getting better - but things could always be worse: Our main competitor is an on-prem VB6 app that pushes data to a "cloud" (i.e. Internet-exposed) SQL Server running off a business/residential IP address with a hardcoded SQL login userID and password shared by everyone (all of their tenants!).
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...this is what the LoB software world is like. There is so much room for improvement everywhere - but all the competent uni grads join some glamorous FAANGMA company after school (well, I'm guilty of that myself...) - but I wish they'd consider un-sexy LoB software: it pays much better than FAANGMA provided you're competent and know how to negotiate. I think the LoB area gets a bad rep just because it's generally where (for want of a better phrase) less-talented people end-up which brings down the average total-comp.
I'm rambling at 3am again, ugh...
Also it’s very easy to reopen later which was the OP complaint against popups. Now that I think about it, VSCode is pretty much best in class when it comes to update content notifications.
The modal dialog could be replaced with a toggle on the same screen as the power off slider in place of that text, and maybe one day it will be. But right now, since the feature is novel, it's probably worth it to have the extra bit of text so people know what the options are that they're selecting between. As far as slowing you down, you're shutting down your phone. If you only want to temporarily turn this off, yes, you're slowed down by about 0.5 seconds But if you are really concerned about this feature you've also had opportunities while using the phone to disable it so that it is permanently off in which case you can just use the power off slider and be done with it.
We ran an A/B test on some 3-pane and 8-pane versions of these at my last job and on the long ones with a "dismiss" button IIRC it took our users something like 3.4 panes to hit it on average. The long ones without the dismiss button got people to view panes 7 and 8 a lot more often but there was a noticeable (albeit small) uptick in users who left the site entirely instead of finishing.
No, it was intentionally designed in a way which discourages reading. In the case of this warning, it's possible that it was unintentionally designed in a way which discourages reading, but regardless the fault lies, at least in part, with the design.
Which also benefits the legal community by keeping them in a job, obviously. "Get it checked by legal/my lawyer" rather than just reading what you're signing up to is definitely a thing. I wish the legal system was more focused on clarity and common sense rather than the hard letter of the law.
One would think that a group of people so familiar with Latin would understand the potential consequences of this. That the masses were able to read Protestant literature but unable to read Catholic literature was one of the major factors that allowed the Reformation to occur.
The problem is that this was not done by a conscious decision but by a slow progression of a system. Bad actors getting away because of wording not being airtight etc.
Perhaps what could be done is enforcing the key points of legal agreement to appear at the top in clear language. We're already seeing some of such initiatives like Apple's privacy information section in the app store.
If the average user blows past this message, it has no impact on their life.
In other news I updated my phone to iOS 15 and put it down to charge last night. When I woke up it was hot, and my battery has gone from 100% to 15% since 7:30am. I gotta get off this ecosystem.
"My phone's battery life has suddenly become much worse" sure sounds like a major impact to me.
The turned off pings use an ultra low power mode similar to the airtags which should last months on a "flat" battery.
No. The phone got charged. That’s made clear in the quote. Something is draining it post-charge.
So it works best for everyone. The average person can track their stolen phones now. And people hiding from the government can still turn it off.
I actually thought this was very old, added a year or so ago. I guess it got delayed?
I've had two phones stolen (right out of my hands) that were immediately shut down and sim cards ejected to prevent them from being tracked. While I'm sure this feature wouldn't help me get back a phone, I hope it does deter this.
Edit: I think this was announced back in 2019 WWWDC https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet... ?
The restaurant manager called the police, and over the next 15 minutes we learned that the thief went on to try to rob the wrong person at another restaurant a couple blocks away. The intended victim held the guy down until the police arrived. The restaurant manager led us over to the other restaurant.
The police managed to recover nearly everything that was stolen, by going through the guy's pockets, and also doing a search in a nearby alleyway, where he had dumped my friend's bag and some of the less-concealable items he'd stolen from people. One thing (can't remember what) was still missing from my friend's bag, and the police took down information about it and told her who to contact to follow up in case it was found.
It was easily the best experience I've ever had with police anywhere (I live in the US but travel fairly frequently). I wish all police could be like that. (Granted, this was just a single experience with two specific officers; who knows if the rest in their precinct or even country are on average that good. But it was definitely encouraging.)
I recount this to suggest that in places with police that don't suck, maybe this sort of thing could actually be a decent anti-theft feature. But agreed that police in the US don't care. I was once mugged and had $3000 worth of stuff stolen from me (laptop and two phones), and the police clearly filed my report to /dev/null. Another friend of mine had her iPad stolen once, and she ended up tracking it down on her own (not the safest thing she's done) because the police told here there was "nothing they could do" even though she showed them the tracking information.
Living in the US has probably skewed my impressions of police generally.
I strongly believe "Find My iPhone" has made iPhones significantly less valuable on the resale market and will have reduced thefts
I often see people here referring to their country without mentioning the actual country, i.e. they hide the interesting detail, which I find weird. Why not to write "in Iceland..." instead? Or is it a privacy thing or just some kind of modesty?
Something like this could further deter the portion of thefts that end up funnelling through shady resellers.
But yeah the police are not going to go get your iPhone back for you.
On a side note: I don't like the attitude of laughing at civilians/victims who the police officer is supposed to serve. Its a kind of negative attitude which devalues the victims interest (I don't like the word toxic but others would apply it here), eventually harming trust in police in the process which (long term) benefits criminals. And what I also don't like is when such is generalized on all police, all around the world.
The way you were treated flat out sucks.
... unless your country is the US, in which case, yeah, true.
https://www.wnyc.org/story/nypd-misled-public-about-response...
https://www.texasobserver.org/activist-and-rape-survivor-lav...
It's getting a bit better, but it's still a problem:
https://www.nycsouthpaw.com/p/texas-still-has-thousands-of-u...
Not to mention the fact that there's a reminder of this setting every time you turn your phone off, which can be tapped to disable this behavior.
Your argument here is pathetically transparent.
You seem to be the only one having trouble with it. Think about that.
Who do you think you're even talking to on here?
PS: I like phones whose batteries are removable, currently use a Nokia Android with a removable one. One advantage is that when the phone drops down, it disintegrates, frame from battery, decreasing the overall impact on the phone.
I remember using a low-energy bluetooth scanner and noticing a strange mac that shouldn't have been present. I really wanted to know wtf was broadcasting it. I searched and searched looking in stupid places. Eventually I settled down and began thinking clearly and looked at my speaker. Yeah, it was as off as the power button could make it, though still on. A good toss across the multi-acre yard and the signal faded accordingly.
But if you're one of those few people who does turn the phone off, it says right there, and you can tap on it to shut down to unfindable state this time instead.
Note that it requires a passcode to disable, which is key to this feature. If someone steals your phone it will remain findable unless they open it up and pull the battery.
Sometimes turning it off and on again is the only way to get wi-fi syncing to work.
> If someone steals your phone it will remain findable unless they open it up and pull the battery.
Or drop the phone into a faraday bag?
It does not. iPhones 11 or newer.
“Participating in the Find My network let’s you locate your phone even when it’s offline”
It don’t it says anything about what happens if your phone is off.
The power reserve for this only lasts a few hours, but if you don't want that feature you can turn it off.
then turn it off? most people will want this, and for those who don't it's easy to turn off.
It literally isn't spying on you, it's allow you to find your after you've lost it.
almost no mobile device has a feature that is 'literally spying on you'.
the problem is when the devices have so many features that they can be easily turned into a consummate spy device by any nearby paying agency.
in other words : no mobile device is spying on you, but the people who control them definitely do, and they're often willing to sell the rights to do so to groups that are poorly vetted -- using a device with less capabilities necessarily gives the controlling party less options by which to gather data for whatever reasons they may be compelled to do so.
so.. the phone, lacking sovereignty , does not spy on you; but it's a big leaky gps/imu-enabled microphone camera that sits in your pocket or purse all day, and the list of groups with access to that leaky data-pipe increases every day with little concern and little reform regarding data retention policies and ownership rights.
Either way I don't want it spying on me.
A cell provider can triangulate any phone connected to its network.
The other way to be aware of by which websites do get location though is from GeoIP.
hmmm maybe because a monopolistic firm is repurposing the term 'power off'?
It's a negative change that I didn't know about and yes, it is weird/wrong.
Interesting how different people have different desires.
I went to next screen it doesn’t even say it there.
Then I clicked on “About Find My & Privacy..” it opened a huge T&C kinda thing text screen and I read until 3-4 paragraphs. It doesn’t mention it there either.
So I think it’s a problem and Apple is anything but clear/straightforward about it.