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Comment by corylehey | Hacker News Reader

there are two types of people in this world, those who can tolerate the red badges on their apps and those who cant

My fiance absolutely never updates and also never clears her notifications. She only uses her phone when she wants to... use her phone.

And actually, I think that's the rational approach. Updating is a horrible experience. "Hey, guess what! You can't do anything while these 10 apps are updating. And guess what, the one you need is in the back of the queue. And a large game is in the front. You're not getting anything done for a while!"

Background auto-updating should be the default on all OSes.

> And guess what, the one you need is in the back of the queue. And a large game is in the front.

If you tap an app icon while they are updating it will be given priority and moved in front of the queue.

> Background auto-updating should be the default on all OSes.

And then the foreground app will have slower network speed and performance which given that a mobile device is a bad thing. If I need to quickly check mail I want that to be the only priority of the phone.

The current behaviour is just fine. Many poeple are just waiting until the device is plugged in at home/work before updating all apps.

So then only do it when on wifi and connected to a power source? I don't know, make a sane design decision but don't force your users to babysit stuff that doesn't matter to them.

This is not something users should have to think about, at all. "Update" shouldn't be in the user's vocabulary. Sure, some people are interested in that level of control, and for them there should be options to configure it.

Having not owned an iPhone, I just want to clarify: when you update an app, it does so in the foreground? That seems like an odd design decision. Would there be any reason for that to happen, as opposed to in the background (a la Android)?

Depends on what you mean by background. You can't use an iOS app while it is being updated (or in the queue to be updated), but you can do anything else. I'd call that a background update.

Gotcha. I foreground == can't use the phone while the app is updating. Seems like it uses a similar mechanism to Android app updates then.

By background I mean without notification of any kind. It's not something we should have to worry about.

Another easy way to avoid the red badges - just put all the utility stuff in it's own folder on the non-home screen, and use Spotlight search to navigate to it quickly when needed. That's how I use Find iPhone. Spotlight even works well with Siri as of iOS6, so I just pick up my iPad and say "Open Find iPhone" then tap to see which couch my kid has dropped my phone to.

The behaviour I want is that when I've opened that app with the badge the badge should go away. All apps that don't follow that behaviour are relegated to a screen far to the right.

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