Thoughts on the New iOS Control Centre
manuelmoreale.com
manuelmoreale.com
> they’re shipping half-baked software just to hit some arbitrary deadlines.
Control Centre aside, Apple is my favorite example in founder-led vs manager-led company comparisons. The same company totally changed in less than 10 years. Profits multiplied. But practically everything that made Apple craftsmanship iconic is gone. Feels like their current domination is the echo of their older investment in software-hardware co-design and recent supply chain dominance, but not real innovation.
Every major macOS and iOS version in the last couple of years has had a feature that is "coming later this year". For this cycle it's Apple Intelligence, last year it was the Journal app, and the year before there also were a bunch of things that were delayed.
Why not just wait until they finish those features and use the extra time to actually test the OS? (Rhetorical question, the answer is probably 'investors').
Press the rotation lock in Control Center and it locks the current state would be a natural thing. But that is not how it works on iOS. Rotation lock rotates the screen back to vertical and locks it there. Is this the same on Android?
Also: The icon is a lock enclosed in a clockwise arrowed ~ 350° circle. That shouts rotation lock to me. If it has to be vertical lock, at least indicate that in the icon.
One can also still rotate their screen by tapping a little rotate icon that appears while rotating while auto-rotation is turned off.
Same thing with the wifi button—it no longer turns off the wifi. Used to! The only thing I used it for. Have to push airplane instead.
Another thing that is messed up with horizontal video in Safari is stereo audio. This should also depend on the orientation of the phone, and in the apps I think it does, but in Safari only sometimes.
I guess I should just use the apps, or maybe in the age of TikTok horizontal video is dying anyway?
I still wish they'd allow disabling the ability to scrub playing music/podcast timeline on the locked lockscreen as well, as I seem to regularly seek to random positions in whatever's playing with my phone in my pockets and when trying to grasp my phone to get it out (in coats with larger pockets), meaning I often miss bits of podcasts or have to repeat them as the position randomly skips.
Especially with Face unlock, I don't really see why you'd want to scrub/seek playing music without unlocking, but maybe someone does, but at least adding an option to control that would be nice...
I know this sounds a bit like “you’re holding it wrong”, but there’s just the simple element of physics involved.
I’m truly curious in what scenarios this is happening.
P.S. I’m also aware that there’s a large population of people whose clothes aren’t manufactured with pockets large enough to hold a phone, and they probably deal with this type of thing more often. But I’m just talking about people who have pockets.
1. Engineers like to unify + encapsulate things where possible for its own sake, and the UX people were looped in too late.
2. There was pressure from above to make things “feel different” to stave off the accusations of “the end of an era of innovation” that get louder every iPhone/iOS release, and this stacking functionality is one of the strategies the team developed early on. No amount of negative metrics can put a hole in an Organizational Priority!
3. Despite their successful efforts to minimize intimidation-layoffs, they did end up laying off ~1000 engineers. It’s possible that the engineers were/are checked out due to a feeling of betrayal, and that the times are changing.
4. Most likely by far: a combination of all the above!
I really think it has to be some organizational mistake. No way that got past a good UX person who had the power of veto.
> I wonder what telemetry tells them about this icon
Do workaround articles count as telemetry? https://allthings.how/how-to-get-wi-fi-cellular-and-bluetoot... & https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1fidfm0/ios_18_psa_you...
Why would they broadcast this? Wouldn't they just be listening for SSIDs?
> The reason for client scanning is to determine a suitable AP to which the client may need to roam now or in the future. A client can use two scanning methods: active and passive. During an active scan, the client radio transmits a probe request and listens for a probe response from an AP. With a passive scan, the client radio listens on each channel for beacons sent periodically by an AP. A passive scan generally takes more time, since the client must listen and wait for a beacon versus actively probing to find an AP. Another limitation with a passive scan is that if the client does not wait long enough on a channel, then the client may miss an AP beacon.
The buttons doesn’t actually turn off Wifi or Bluetooth, they disconnect from the current network/device. This is a huge dark pattern.
Also, no one expects a + icon to mean "organize". Sometimes the + icon is not even tappable due to other random stuff that gets jammed up there, like And the new power button doesn't do anything when you tap it, only when you hold it. No feedback at all.
That said, I do appreciate the ability to move the icons anywhere (to put important ones closer to the bottom). Now, can we add the ability to add some of these to the lock screen without using 3rd party apps?
Left thumb holds down an icon to keep it from moving, right thumb moves an icon just as you are already doing.
My greater point being that generally you are not going to write feature requirements into a consumer product UI to hit bleeding edge use desires for a small group of dexterous users unless there is a really good reason to do it. People tend to configure this control center once and never mess with it again—10 mins and you are done forever. Adding multitouch and drag features here seems pretty unnecessary and would require a metric shit ton of additional QA testing for a completely unnecessary feature to configure this screen.
I updated yesterday and I really hate the new design. I'm not using a term for "dislike" I profoundly HATE this change.
Tiny icons, difficult to move/size items, excessive blank space around them...also the UX for repositioning elements has some bug that makes a widget dissapear for a moment and jump from "nowhere" to the desired position (if you manage to place it at first try, of course)
Maybe it's a strategy to make users of the SE line jump to a bigger screen? :-|
With unnecessary UI fluff, no attention to detail, OpenAI integration, side loading and other stuff I am really not liking where Apple is headed. It starts to feel like design by committee and all users and regulators are in that committee.
Where's vision and backbone?
The reality is that Apple can’t win. On social networks, there’s significant overlap between people who criticized Control Center for its minimal configurability and people now doing the opposite. Apple lives rent-free in their identity.
But the main thing that I personally dislike is the whole customization aspect. The control center always felt to me like a under the hood kinda overlay that you just pulled over your personal phone for a moment. Like it didn’t belong to the OS, but to the device itself. Like the bottom bar that you use for switching apps, or like the volume and sleep buttons, or like the Settings app, or like the menu bar in macOS. It was always there, always the same, no matter what app you were in or whose phone it was. I liked that.
The connection group is also a terrible idea. Why don't apple just let you do grouping yourself and make every button in it to be available.
When I turn those off, I damn well mean it. I don't mean turn them back on behind my back later. But that's what Apple does.
But hey, if they want this half-assed temporary disabling, they still could have made smart decisions for users who want these states to be permanent. Here's the easy solution: If the user has gone into Settings and turned Wi-Fi and Bluetooth OFF, then treat the Control Center incarnations as PERMANENT.
But nope, the UI mavens at Apple couldn't figure that out. So they made the Control Center states a fraud to serve... whom, exactly? Who was upset that they turned stuff off and it stayed off?
before the control center icons were changed to just disconnect, i remember being annoyed that wanting to disconnect from a network meant turning off wi-fi completely and no longer being able to use airdrop (and some other continuity feature that i’m forgetting i think)
On the bright side, being able to remove the 'screen mirroring' button is nice, and I can make the music control widget extra-large by default.
Having long ago switched to iOS as my primary, I am continually infuriated by some of the awful UX decisions made on that platform - the control center, yes, but also the app library drawer, the settings screen, the clock app, the list goes on. I could write a rant like OP for each one.
Android has its own ways of driving me insane, but it's clear that Apple's UX has been slipping for a long time.
Also worth mentioning is Jolla's AppSupport (https://jolla.com/appsupport/), which allows Linux devices to run Android apps - a killer feature of Sailfish phones!
I’ve removed stuff until it’s all on 1 page which makes it quite a bit simpler
Lots of senior people have left in the last 10 years, and Covid/RTO dialed up the exodus to 11. Many of the best Apple designers - the ones who had been there for over a decade or two, with lots of deep, hard to acquire skills/knowledge - are gone, and they made so much money from stocks that there’s nothing Apple could offer to bring them back, seeing as the reason they left is that they missed the scrappy high impact environment of the 2000s/early 2010s and got tired of the trillion dollar company vibes.
It’s a tough problem to prevent, and it’s only going to get worse.
A tangential but related problem is that old school designers came from a very different background than modern day UX designers - since UX wasn’t formalized as a field back then, it was industrial design/print design/architecture/software nerds who found themselves having an interest in designing UIs who got the jobs. Today’s junior UX designers all have the same portfolio of hamburger menu apps and nonsensical personas and are lost the moment they have to design something more complex than an informational website in Figma. There might be 1000x more UX designers today than there was 20 years ago, but finding amazing ones in all the noise is harder than it ever was (the same way you can find tons of junior devs who can copy paste React code from chatGPT, but good luck finding devs that can write clean high performance code).
The company is still streets ahead the competition in many areas tho so I’m not too worried about the stock price for the next 5-10 years. Beyond that, who knows.
The image of SJ in a leather jacket flipping off IBM often comes to my mind. Apple is as old, has as many employees, and is much richer, than IBM was at the time this picture was taken. Time for founders to go take pictures of themselves flipping the bird in front of AP.
People with children at schools whose workflow is still completely paper based.
Not to defend Apple too much, but I think the reason is that the toggles in the control group are interdependent. It would be very confusing if you toggle a button and it causes other toggle buttons to switch state that are either far away on the screen or worse - not visible at all.
Take airplane mode for example. The way it works on iOS[1] is that the act of turning it on toggles the other icons in the group off - once in that moment.
It does not prevent you from switching back on WiFi or Bluetooth. So you can end up with WiFi enabled despite being in airplane mode. To complicate matters, this is not true for mobile data.
A cleaner and more intuitive design in my opinion would have been if the toggles were all independent, with airplane mode overruling all. Of course this would prevent WiFi in airplane mode, which might be a desirable use case, and worse: make people avoid airplane mode when they are mandated to use it.
[1] I am curious how Android solved this. If anyone knows, I'd like to know.
It provides UI feedback that this is happening through the Bluetooth and Internet switches, but thats only because I have those visible. If they're not visible then I wouldn't see whats happening.
Is it buggy? Yeah, I've encountered the same bugs as the OP, and yes I wish setting Wi-Fi was a step less, though I think the upsides to the new design are more than the downsides (which can be sorted out by time).
I liked it.
Left/Right is generation Tinder, Up/Down generation TikTok, very easy.
Instead of night mode I want a generation switch. Oh, wait the phone knows my age, it could do that automatically. Apple, adapt to my needs!
This is, in my view, the single most baffling omission in the new control center. It's fully customizable now, but doesn't have an individual toggle for Wifi???
This also leaves off the other terrible decision: the way icons reorder themselves randomly when you reposition things. Want to swap the positions of the brightness and volume controls? Prepare for literally everything to become shuffled for seemingly no reason].
Workaround via a Shortcut control?
https://lifehacker.com/use-this-one-tap-shortcut-to-actually...
The only way to do that is to make the portrait layout look like shit.
Seems totally arbitrary how they line up the items in landscape mode.
What’s bad looking about either of my pages?
Changes like those mentioned by the author of the article may evoke emotions because people are people and run on emotions. Imagine how your favorite screwdriver or kitchen knife one day receives an automated remote software update and changes its handle shape or blade length, wouldn't that at least surprise you even a little bit? And what if changes were not to your liking and you couldn't get your favorite device back to a state in which you liked it far more?
That aside, I feel like if the author loved updating to never versions of iOS as much as they said without paying attention to the upcoming new features, then they probably shouldn't be that surprised by them.
I can’t imagine getting angry or frustrated at any products I use.
That just seems way too insignificant to become angry over. And also unproductive as becoming angry or frustrated won’t change it or benefit me in any way. That’s my opinion and feeling at least.
I guess this means I don’t “run on emotions”? I feel that I have emotions but I feel I’m generally able to choose when and what emotions I feel. To me that seems normal as it’s always been that way for me.
Some people, like you, in their "default" state can control their behavior to a degree that allows them to choose the "loudness" of their reactions to external stimuli. Perhaps you can still be technically angered by something minuscule, but at least you're able to choose to not react and refocus your attention onto something else. Therefore, it might be said that you have the ability to reflect upon your feelings and behavior in perceived real time and adjust them to some degree. It's like you're an external observer to a state machine of yourself, or you're running a reflective feedback loop always on, or that you can actually give the taxi driver of your brain actual directions that they would follow. Which, I certainly agree, is quite practical and useful, liberating even.
In my earlier comment I tried to imply that for many people what you experience as normal may be borderline impossible, therefore getting angry at a phone is "normal". It is that they may be not able to target their reactions with any precision that you're used to. I think you can find evidence of that pretty much everywhere.
How other people experience it, I just have to do my best to imagine it.
I mean is not like I can’t get mad. It just takes way, way more I guess. Like if someone killed my pet or something I wound certainly be angry. But something like my phone UI just seems so trivial and so minuscule and unimportant in the grand scheme of life that it doesn’t seem to warrant getting angry at.
The apparent irrationality of getting angry at something so small and honestly meaningless compared to life seems to allow me to “ignore” it.
Imagine somebody planted a virus on your desktop, or just sneakily RDP-ed into your session and took control over your mouse and keyboard, like kids were joking on each other in computer classes back in the days. Now your mouse runs amok and keyboard types whatever, and you're sitting powerless and screaming at the screen because nothing is done and your day is ruined.
It's a shallow analogy, but in principle if you don't control your attention strongly enough, it gets hijacked by whatever your brain is trained to prioritize "subconsciously". And then once your attention is hijacked and you can't control it, you can only take the backseat and react, because the "virus" is already in your system. That's why and how clickbait titles or "outrage porn" or "reaction youtube videos" work, ditto for tiktok, instagram et cetera.
Unless you proactively and consciously keep running the firewall/antivirus of "why am I doing this right now and what do I get out of this?", your mind will be infected, that's an axiom.
From my observations I find it very ironic that for people who have stronger firewalls there will always be more sophisticated viruses and attack vectors. Don't get outraged at your phone every day? No problem, your next visit to a high profile restaurant will get to you once they stop making your favorite dish the way you liked, or city council orders demolition of an old building you find beautiful, or your favorite producer of high-end bike gears goes bankrupt just when you were to buy some hardware from them, or you maybe waited for a model update of a car you wanted to buy and this year they totally ruined it. Political or economical systems? State of climate, culture, some industry? Oh, there's so much of it. It can be of any complexity, the axiom remains.
Keeping your cool and your tolerance to insignificant things high enough also eats at your runtime resources, if you live among other humans and not like somewhere alone in the mountains after renouncing all earthly pleasures. So it's inevitable to drop it once in a while. Triviality of what will trigger it next time is, thus, entirely arbitrary.
I never saw the point of getting angry or frustrated at things that are outside my control.
If you were to ask me what the last thing I was angry at, I literally couldn’t tell you. It was that long ago and rare and not really important enough to be memorable anyways.
You are making me think that the way I react to things is odd or really uncommon. If that’s true, I never really realized that.
In what rosy-tinted world was it ever not when viewed with such a high level of expectations? Remember, this is the OS that had stellar copy&paste support from day 1!