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Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

The worst degradation for my UX with my iPhone has been when they added some Siri smart search stuff to searching. I'm someone who's given up on memorizing the layout of my apps and I always just swipe down and search by the name of the app. This used to be extremely efficient. Usually a single letter is enough to have the app be in the top 3 results

Now they also search a bunch of other apps and I think Siri does something with your searches, possible even looking for web results. All I really want is for the app results to show up first and not have them bogged down by all the other stuff being searched

Edit: Seems I'm not the only one.[0][1] Also what I was talking about was called "Spotlight search" now its in "Siri & Search". Doesn't seem like there's a real solution

[0] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7887520

[1] https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1483913

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Siri & Search in Settings. Can configure what’s shown.

Although it’s true what they say in your [1] link with the speed.

Yeah sorry I should've specified I already tried turning Siri results off and it didn't help. I see you can also turn off "Show Content in Search" for each app... I guess I can spend 10 minutes doing that on my 100+ apps

I do the same and instead just search from the App Library screen that shows only apps.

Like I just swipe to that screen which is my second screen and enter the first letter and it’s done. Same amount of swipes just right instead of down!

Doesn’t help if you have pages of apps and have to swipe five or six times to get to the App Library but I hide them all in two folders, one for Apple apps and one for installed apps so searching is key. (this was before the option to add to App Library only, indeed before App Library existed I’d basically created my own!)

> Doesn’t help if you have pages of apps and have to swipe five or six times to get to the App Library

There’s another hidden feature: swiping on the row of dots near the bottom of the screen lets you scroll through the pages at speed.

Om iOS 16, you have to turn off the search field on the home page, since it replaces the dots. Fortunately, you can still swipe down to reveal the old search field.

You don’t have to turn the search field off at all. Just swipe the search field.

This is a great example of how discovery works. Before replying, I just tried swiping and it worked.

Edit: normal swiping between screens switches the search field to dots. This got me to thinking, how much of this is a discovery problem (which I’m increasingly finding harder to believe) to one of users not paying attention.

Swiping on the search field works (I had already forgotten that), but when you have a lot of pages, as I do, the feedback is much worse, as it does not expand the field to accomodate all the dots. It’s amazing what difference such small details make.

Edit: The feedback is unimportant if all you want is to swipe to one end, if course; which is what prompted this subthread.

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