iOS 18 is the worst software Apple has ever released | Hacker News Reader

iOS 18 is the worst software Apple has ever released

forums.macrumors.com

A bit meta, but how is this a post worthy of hackernews? Is LionTeeth (OP in the macrumors forum thread) some Apple insider/genius? This entire post smacks of reddit energy. They don't explain why the UI sucks but complain about it. If someone formatted this opinion into a blog post highlighting why the UI is worse while providing counterexamples and stuff, it would have a lot more value.

Well lion brings a few valid complaints. Now if we are to have a meaningful conversation I would avoid getting distracted on who the OP is (LionTeeth) and instead try to understand what are the concerns he brings.

- iOS 18 is glitchy and crashes frequently.

- The Photos app has a confusing design with random button placements.

- Touchscreen responsiveness is poor, often failing to register touches.

- The new Control Center is overly complicated with multiple pages.

- Navigation within the Control Center is cumbersome and unintuitive.

- The overall user experience feels disjointed and lacks cohesion.

- The operating system causes the device to overheat during gaming.

- The posters like the simplicity and design of older iOS versions.

These points and others are reiterated by multiple other users on the forum. Some users even downgraded. I would be cautious about upgrading myself given these issues so yes this deserves HN.

*edit: format bullet list

Basically iOS have become more Android like over the years. This may have helped Apple to gain more users coming from Android. But it is definitely not the old iOS vibe in terms of simplicity.

Since the beginning I have always used an analogy, Android is when Google try to bring a PC into a smaller touch screen. iOS is Apple making a Smartphone appliance with some PC like functionality.

And they are now converging in the middle.

I really like the old iOS design philosophy. All the way back to skeuomorphic style.

I think it's worthwhile. The last several updates of basically anything but particularly ios and os have been remarkably enshittified - there countless surreal anecdotes of bizarre glitch after glitch after glitch inexplicable if basic ux, trouble shooting, debuggging etc was done.

Apple support forums are now an entire sub-genre of enraged or upset people begging Apple for help -"since the x update, I cannot see the cursor or cut and paste, I have an essay to write' etc etc and without any response. AND yes - this is why it's worthwhile, every utterance from Apple is about how they're integrating A.I. etc and how revolutionary extraordinary etc it is. The cognitive dissonance is crazy and I can't think of any company that was that great and had such devoted customers which has turned into an 'it just sucks' brand - not for everyone of course.

Admittedly I speak as someone who foolishly updated to 18.1.1 and have just spent several hours undoing all the compulsory "we're connecting you to blah blah blah" features. OS Sonoma is worse. Sorry if this sounds reddittyy but does anyone with inside intel know why/how they've gotten so bad. Eg; Before - maybe in about 2013: 'get new mac -- excitement' - 'updates - usually cool. new features, maybe a bug or two.' Now the excitement has dwindlied and any update requires at least an hour of debugging undoing all the bloat.

Ad hominems are against the site rules. Please try to discuss the topic, not who raised it.

The photo app redesign looks great on paper, but is terrible in practice.

Watching videos in full screen, with audio on, and without controls overlay (I hope I am not asking too much!) requires multiple taps and several frustrating attempts every-single-time.

Activity on your shared albums has been relegated to a small text-only link, and you only get to see small photos, and it doesn’t smartly tiles photos together anymore (photos are now randomly chopped to fit in the frame).

The photo app gets badges, but then you don’t know where to find the new activity inside the photo app.

There is no way changes like these were created, tested, and validated by a well-functioning team

Also, watching videos full screen and scrubbing around in the video requires backing out to the smaller view. Then you get to fast forward/rewind. Then you have to tap to watch full screen again. Everything about this experience has gotten worse. I can’t even come up with a use case in which this is an improvement.

All of Apple's recent software is the worst it has released, both mobile and desktop. Bugs abound and are never fixed despite thousands of people upvoting bug reports. UX is terrible (someone needs to tell Apple UX people that it's not actually fun to have to randomly stumble upon useful functionality). Their laptops hardware really deserve better software. Their mobile hardware sucks so it doesn't deserve anything.

I wonder if they know it and have been ramping up their marketing budget reactively.

I'm getting blasted with their ads everywhere. Reddit, X, Youtube and Twitch.

It's crazy I've never seen so many ads from Apple before.

Yes I have noticed the increase in Apple ad spending as well. Perhaps it is because of geopolitical changes? It is only a matter of time for Apple to be booted out of China.

The complaints w.r.t. control center are effectively resolved on page two of the thread. The photos complaints are reasonable but "the worst software Apple has ever released" is either extreme hyperbole or high praise for what would be an impeccable record of software design on Apple's part, historically.

I'm running iOS 18, I've not had a single problem with it. I guess I'm an outlier ?

You're probably running 18.1.1 by now

The complaint in the linked post is from October 20, 2024...the victim was probably running 18.1 too.

That's unlikely. iOS 18.1 was released 8 days after their post on October 28.

I don't think 18.1 really changed much w.r.t. the issues discussed in the forum. Happy to be corrected.

It must have, since their complaint about swipe counts on the control center panels is not currently correct.

Same situation here. You're not alone. I think these posters just needed something to be angry about.

Apple needs a new Jobs. Yes yes yes. Old trope, getting boring I know. I don't mean Jobs as in the tyranical leader

But Jobs as in a PRODUCT leader who knows that to be successful your product needs to speak for you, needs to have allure, a certain quality. Mr. Cook is a great COO/CFO. A backend / money leader. I don't see him care about what makes a product shine.

The 90's downfall might happen again, even if it takes a couple of generations to burn all that cash, eventually the iOS market is saturated, and the only thing changing are humans leaving this life and new ones acquiring iDevices, not enough for exponential growth curves.

The Photos change was bad enough for me to decide to never purchase any Apple device again except for MBPs until they realize how bad the design and quality of their software has gotten across the last 5-10 years.

It legitimately kept me up at night thinking what kind of company process is required to greenlight this.

It is especially a night and day difference when compared to consistent UX improvements to watchOS and how much more stable it has gotten. Certainly a team that cares about it a lot and are capable to realize that are working on it.

An easy photo app fix: Photo app > scroll to bottom > Customize & Reorder > deselect everything but Media Types and Utilities.

Thanks! That made it a lot more useable again.

It's been the absolute worst experience since updating.

Thank you!

Still shows ~35 of your most recent photos every time you open the app. It's insecure and an abomination.

Just as a small counterpoint, incorporating RCS into iOS 18 was a meaningful quality of life improvement for my mixed manufacturer household.

Full quality (good enough) videos and pictures, reactions, typing indicators. So much better than the previous state of SMS/MMS only.

users have been begging Apple for many years, they don't give a damn, only do it under EU's iron fist.

Wasn't due to the EU but because of China for that one most likely

No one in the EU uses SMS.

Scammers do ;-)

I sadly have to agree. Even ignoring all the poor design choices (the photos app, control center, etc), ugly new UI changes, and the confusing-at-best and misleading-at-worst integration of "AI", it's just incredibly unstable. I've never had as many performance issues and freezes during normal day-to-day tasks as I do with iOS 18.

Safari constantly lags, and has a nasty habit of tabs becoming either completely unresponsive or completely blank, the latter of which has actually been an issue for a few iOS versions, but has gotten worse. Battery life is absolutely abysmal - my phone suddenly lasts half the time it used to after jumping from iOS 17 to 18. Somehow playing music is a complicated task now, and the music controls on the lock screen, control center, and music app itself all somehow regularly get out of sync and become unresponsive on different songs, all while a completely different song keeps playing in the background, unaffected by any of the controls.

I could go on, but it's frankly embarrassing that Apple put it out in this condition. It seems to me that they really got caught with their pants down about the generative AI trend, and their rush to hop on board is taking precedence over everything else, including basic stability and quality.

I’ve been frequently bitten by the Music bug. It keeps playing but the controls no longer work so you can’t pause or skip and have to force-quit the app. I also had an issue where iOS told my car I was on a phone call instead of playing music, which prompted my car to only play the music through the center speaker, which is extremely quiet. I had to reboot the phone to fix it.

The bugs are annoying and I hope they get fixed soon. But in spite of this, I do like iOS 18 overall and it has some things that are genuinely useful, like RCS.

I was also surprised that the message summarization feature (the only Apple Intelligence feature I’ve used so far) is actually great. If someone sends me a “serious” text, it’s handy to get a gist of what it’s about so I can mentally prepare before I read it.

I’ll add: Siri somehow gets in a state where the pulsing circle appears and responds to voice, and it stays in that state apparently indefinitely and never actually transcribes any words or does anything. It’s possible this happens when music is stuck?

iOS 17 seemed to break Siri pretty badly when the phone thinks it’s in a car, but the damage seems to be spreading in 18.

I never upgraded from 17.5.1 and 17.x is no longer offered. I just checked. I continue to lag one release behind all Apple upgrades for this very reason.

FWIW, I transfer all photos to the desktop, where it's vastly easier to manage and edit them.

I'm still being offered 17.7.2 as an alternative to 18.1.1. In fact, I just tapped to update iOS in case they drop it.

I think 17.7.2 is still offered but you have to scroll down on the Software Update screen.

Reply to the three kind souls who offered the "scroll down" advice.

Turns out, there was no hint of the off-screen item, and I had to scroll past the giant "UPDATE NOW" (to 8.5.1) button WITHOUT TOUCHING IT (sneaky!) and there it was!

Thanks again.

go Settings -> General -> Software Update. Let it load for a sec, then scroll down and you may see "Also Available" showing iOS 17.7.2 available to download/install.

What choice do we have ? I need security, so I update.

Only competition is Android, made by Google, aka you get a spyware that can be used as a phone contrary to Apple phone that can be used as a spyware.

and beside that nothing else.

Google really screwed everyone by making Android « free » for manufacturer, as long as they include Google play services and all the other Google app phoning home. They have no reason to make a new operating system and even then it would require developer to publish app on it.

And seeing Apple stock value, I don’t think they are going to care anytime soon about a few people upset with the new photo app or the increasing amount of bugs.

For a large company, it's not impossible. Android was morphed into the OS for Oculus Go and later.

Google Pixel with GrapheneOS might be a good choice for a security/privacy enthusiast.

Yes but then you lose safety net, so no banking app and let’s agree that grapheneos isn’t exactly beautiful or easy to use. You have no way to pay with the phone outside of Google, most foss app looks ugly and lacks functionalities, even the grapheneos default app icon for some reason are all in a ugly black and white. It’s like privacy require thing to be ugly and janky.

https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...

Seems like some banking apps are working. I haven't personally tried this though.

> I need security, so I update.

Is there a parallel universe where state actors are targetting randos with multi million dollar 0 days?

Call me crazy but I barely noticed on my “old” iPhone 11.

The control center changes I liked, and the photos app is mildly unintuitive, but I figured out after about 30 seconds…

I also thought it ok. I'm on 13 mini. There was a brief wtf with the photos app, especially as a use it for a QR code to get a cafe discount and was fumbling at the counter to figure where they'd moved all the controls to keep us challenged.

On the other hand being able to access the phone from the laptop via mirroring is cool and there's another feature that started working which was bugging me for years which is for iphone-laptop tethering to resume automatically when you reopen the lid. Though not quite sure which os change did that. I also upgraded the laptop os.

The worst thing was with the macos laptop upgrade it mucked up all the python stuff and they've put in some new weird abstractions to deal with.

As somebody that's definitely been burned by bugs and redesigns of questionable utility in iOS updates, I can't say 18 has personally been either much better or worse than the last few.

Some UI aspects of the "Photos" app are a bit confusing, but as I don't use it all that much, for me that largely (or even more than) balances out with other various quality of life improvements across the OS.

I agree with the article. I saw the photos app in the betas and immediately decided it wasn’t for me.

iOS 17 should still get security updates for a few years. We just got 17.2.2 recently.

I use this profile to prevent my 14 from auto-updating: https://betaprofiles.com/install/block-ota/

If your phone is supported with iOS 18, it will stop getting 17.x security updates soon.

It’s sad. Once Steve Jobs died, the software has just slowly been slipping into Microsoft territory. The UI is getting so complicated

wait until 18.2, it'll be more disappointing: image generation is limited, mail has stupid categorization, webkit is buggy, Siri is the only thing does not get worse bc it can't be any.

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