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Comment by peterlk | Hacker News Reader

I’ll give you a very specific example. When turning on the flashlight, I have to hold the flashlight icon for a specific period of time. If I hold too long, I get the dimmer option. If I don’t hold long enough, it doesn’t turn on. The iphone expects what feels to me like a zen-like stoner’s calm press of the button. This is absolutely infuriating to me. Every time. Just turn the damn light on when I press the button.

Did you know that you can hold the spacebar to move your cursor around on iOS? Without my friend telling me about that feature, I also found text selection in iOS to be deeply frustrating as compared to Android

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My Dad is going through ALS and keeps accidentally turning on his flashlight. And is then unable to turn it off. So many UI choices in iOS just seem poorly thought out.

> I’ll give you a very specific example. When turning on the flashlight, I have to hold the flashlight icon for a specific period of time. If I hold too long, I get the dimmer option. If I don’t hold long enough, it doesn’t turn on. The iphone expects what feels to me like a zen-like stoner’s calm press of the button. This is absolutely infuriating to me. Every time. Just turn the damn light on when I press the button.

I just tested this on my phone (albeit it is an iPhone 8, so a bit older model perhaps without as many features). A short tap is sufficient to turn it on and off. A longer tap brings up the intensity slider. I was unable to tap the icon quickly enough so as not to register the tap and toggle the flashlight.

Upon retesting a couple times, I did notice that on the first tap the icon is illuminated but it did take a split second more for the actual flashlight to turn on. But waiting the split second was sufficient instead of further tapping.

I’m using the menu that is pulled up while the phone is unlocked (by dragging from the bottom of the screen, on my model), for reference.

The iOS UI has to determine intent from touch input, so as more gesture-based controls have been added, the OS needs to figure out what you're trying to do. Tap. Tap and drag. Scroll. Slide. Whatever. If your intent is one action, but your inputs don't match the actual requirement for what you want to do, you get bizarre behavior.

For the flashlight in particular, the button inside the control center can do a few different things—including closing the control center entirely—if you fumble the tap even slightly with an upward push of the thumb. With the Lock Screen, a sliding motion of any kind will just not turn the light on if your slide doesn't begin and end inside of the UI element that you're entirely obscuring the view of with your enormous fingers. You can accidentally open the Lock Screen customizer. It's even possible to get haptic feedback from the lockscreen flashlight button without actually turning it on.

While I don't have any of these problems, I am familiar with them and have observed others struggle. There are accessibility settings that are designed to help (repeated input filters and such) but they all slow the UI down and somehow make it more confusing because the phone is just more likely to do nothing rather than the wrong thing.

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