Are our phones becoming too smart to do dumb stuff? | Hacker News Reader

Are our phones becoming too smart to do dumb stuff?

18 pointsirisedhaze31 comments

I have noticed that a lot of simple tasks are becoming more difficult to do with smartphones. For example in Android, it's basically impossible to set a countdown timer if the phone is locked without using a voice assistant. Apple might have implemented this specific feature better by allowing users to access the timer through the Control Center. However, iOS's calculator is just too cumbersome to use due its lack of features and sadly, there aren't a lot of decent alternatives in the App Store. Moreover, you couldn't delete all of your alarms at once without using Siri. What are your thoughts?

Edit: typo & additional examples

View on HN

I don’t remember being able to do ANYTHING with a locked dumbphone, apart from answer calls.

Silencing the alarm clock.

Fair enough. I never managed to work out how to set an alarm on my dumb phones.

Ah, dumbphone; I may have missed that, and been thinking smartphone. Can't really recall if I ever did that on the old 6230i (etc) either.

But anyway, AFAICS answering[1] a phone call and silencing[2] an alarm are about the only functions you should be able to do on a locked phone, be it "dumb" or "smart".

___

[1]: ObPedantry: Or dismissing. And hanging up when you're done talking.

[2]: ---- " ----: Or snoozing.

On IOS I find it a tad more difficult to edit parts of urls (eg remove www and add old for reddit or remove facebooks clid to posts) . We still have the ability to modify the url, Im grateful they haven't taken that away yet but I'm getting that some some things slowly become less usable, for some people at least. Also the main app for photos gets in my way with a lot of things I do not need, all those smart films of the month, face tagging and making albums out of tags is really something I wish I could turn off.

At some point on iOS they deprecated the "magnifying glass" that appeared when you held down on a piece of text, instead making your finger "pick up" the cursor. They've eventually re-introduced a similar (but worse, as it automatically starts a selection at the current word) functionality it but during that time it was very annoying.

Hold spacebar, acts as a primitive horizontal touchpad.

Kudos to you. Why was this not explained in iOS...

I was aware of holding the spacebar and it somewhat works but it is clunky too when having to scroll right on the url. It is not completely broken but it used to be easier, that was my point.

I thought I was the only one who felt frustrated with editing parts of copied urls or editing the url in the taskbar. I like to think it's because so many people just copy URLs or enter new ones instead of editing what is there. I believe the use case is that 99% of the people wouldn't have thought to edit them but instead enter a new one or copy it to share so why make editing them a main mode.

As for the albums thing, my mother in law loves that so much. As an elderly lady she loves creating videos of photos taken based on time periods and the like so for her that's a killer feature. I'd be willing to bet that they have this feature on by default because it would require an index to be built if it was re-enabled and showing a blurb about it needing to build up an index is something they didn't want.

Text editing on mobile is a horrendous experience, slightly worse on iOS than Android.

Why the hell did Android switch to a gesture system though. It's so bad. I've been unable to change the volume on a video when volume controls on a web page are too far to the left because the swipe motion triggers the "back" gesture in the browser. Never once have a had isues with the old Android bottom bar or iOS gestures.

Not really. If my phone is locked, I don't expect it to start something (except phone calls) until I unlock it. Stock apps are generally useful, but I don't use my smartphone for long enough periods to get frustrated.

What are you talking about? You want to access apps without unlocking your phone? What a banal post.

Somewhat off the subject of this post, but I believe we lost something when calling for help stopped being as simple as grabbing at the wall and punching a couple buttons. What are children supposed to do these days to call 911 or 999?

On iOS, just hold the button you would use to turn the phone off, but hold longer, it will loudly count down to 0 and call emergency services. You can also press the side button 5 times and it will call without you having to hold the button pressed. Works on iPhone and Apple Watch.

More info here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208076

Press and hold doesn’t work if you have Siri enabled.

It does, just hold the buttons you would hold to turn the phone off, not the button you would use to trigger Siri.

On FaceID phones that means holding both the Lock and Volume Up buttons.

And as well, if the FaceID doesn't work & the PIN is prompted for, "Emergency" is available in the bottom left.

Funny enough, my current phone is absolute garbage, and I've managed to accidentally call 911 multiple times because the phone will simply fail to render the lock screen at times, but all controls are still active.

No. Designers are becoming too dumb to do simple stuff.

Take the iPhone for example. This handheld Unix computer, after a decade and a half, STILL doesn't audibly notify you of missed calls. It's mind-boggling. This was a routine feature on "dumb phones," not to mention answering machines dating back decades.

I mean... for 30 years or more, microwaves have periodically beeped to remind you that you left food in them. But Apple is too dumb to notify you of missed calls.

But what DID they add? Repeatable audible notification of missed TEXTS, on a screen that's otherwise essentially identical to the phone-options screen.

Idiotic.

Designers aren't dumb (well not for the most part). The problem is that they're optimizing for dumb people, potentially because either their background or current KPIs lead them to optimize for "engagement" as opposed to actual power-user usage.

The problem with optimizing for idiots is that it prevents those idiots from ever learning. Back in the day, idiots might fumble around with power-user features but will eventually become proficient at them if they use them frequently enough - I know many people that I would consider IT "idiots" but they still are very proficient at specific features they use regularly (more than me in fact). If you remove power-user features however, there's no chance for anyone to learn them anymore, so people have no choice but to remain idiots.

The majority of calls today are “missed calls” in that I do not answer them. My iPhone allows me to automatically send anyone not in my contacts list directly to voicemail. I hear a lot fewer offers for car warranties this way.

As soon as I open my phone, I see a count of missed calls and I can check if any were real. I would not want my phone to make noises to try to attract attention until then.

Perhaps that feature is becoming less useful to people?

Then you wouldn't activate the feature, obviously.

If my 80-year-old parents have an emergency, they're going to CALL ME, not text me. Why the fuck don't I want to know about it?

Let's not excuse straight-up stupidity. And remember, this glaring defect has existed FOR 15 YEARS.

Apple does give you access to this through the control center. The timer option just opens the regular clock app to the timer tab. I use this feature all the time.

> in Android, it's basically impossible to set a countdown timer if the phone is locked

Yeah, good. That's what locking it is for.

Honestly, WTF are you talking about???

My Huawei phone allows to start any time-based activities as well as others like Calculator or Recorder by swiping up on the lockscreen, so you just need to look beyond what Samsung and Apple have to offer.

I think you'd enjoy this read: https://zguide.zeromq.org

On my Android phone, I go to Clock -> Timer tab

You can do that while the phone is locked?

Oh, no. I wouldn't think anyone needs to do that specific thing on the lockscreen.

I have a Nokia 105 that I got for £20 on Amazon that I use for an alarm clock!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com