No shit David Brooks has a Bill Maher problem

Also, I’m being generous and taking a case where I’m already in the browser.

But say I got to this link from Facebook, when I open it I’m in Facebook’s browser which means to share on another social network I need to first Open in Safari, then go through the charade described above.

2. Having Useful Widgets & Quick Settings

Oh, the bitcoin price ride. Good times.

Alright, it looks a bit like a battlefield, but this home screen I had (using Nova Launcher) was super customisable.

I was free to make it look this ugly ☺, to put as many apps as I wanted on there, widgets (bitcoin prices + time, date & weather) and if I pulled the notifications bar I had access to quick settings to turn on/off wifi, cellular data, bluetooth, to dismiss all notifications, change music, brightness, and volume.

Now on iOS I’ve got this joke of a widget solution in the form of the Today screen:

The main problem with this solution is that you need to pull down the notification bar & select “Today” to see the widgets.

It’s the same with the Mac OS dashboard — you need to go there.

To me that defies the purpose of these widgets which should be there next to your regular workflow for you to take a quick glance almost subconsciously.

Great song, great lyrics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RghsLFEuuJM

In terms of quick controls there’s this nice feature on the latest iOS, it’s super helpful & easy to access with a swipe upwards from the bottom of the screen. Lacks a toggle for celular data though, so to term it off (e.g when roaming abroad) you have to go to settings, cellular data, disable.

3. Better integration between browsers & apps

On Android, say you have twitter installed and you click on a tweet from your browser, e.g a tweet that has been linked to in an article, it opens it in Twitter.

On iOS it really struggles to figure out that you’re looking at something that should be opened in an app. I’m guessing this ties in to #1, that apps cannot be as closely integrated (with Intents) as on Android.

In any case, it leads to this kind of BS:

NO

No I don’t want to Sign up. I am already a Twitter user.

No I don’t want to “Install” or “Download” (why the two words?) this app, I have it already on this very device.

Yes this page exists, I opened this same link on Desktop and it worked fine.

Nuts.

I’ve had the same sort of thing happen with Facebook, Quora, Asana & the FT, where it won’t open in the native app.

And a few more things..

Now for a few more smaller things that piss me off:

No back button. I understand the decision to only have a home button from a design perspective, and it looks great, but what happens is that different apps have picked different places to put their “back” button in their UIs. Most do it on the top right, but some don’t e.g twitter images where you have to click on the image to dismiss it. Having a common back button for all apps (in hardware) means you dont have to look around to find the back button in various UIs Google Now is better than Siri. Plenty has been written about that. It’s pretty clear. https://www.stonetemple.com/great-knowledge-box-showdown/ App Store search & discovery is a mess. This post makes that case very well http://gedblog.com/2014/12/15/how-broken-is-discovery-on-the-app-store-this-broken/ No way to dismiss all notifications at once. You dismiss once per app. If you have notifications from 6 apps, you click dismiss 6 times. Non-threaded notifications. You get one notification per email, one per whatsapp message, one per mention on twitter. What is this nonsense? Android groups these (e.g 12 new whatsapp messages) and you can swipe down on that notification to get the detail.

Conclusion

OK these reasons are getting increasingly pedantic as this post goes on… ☺

In summary, while I can do everything I want to do on my iPhone, it’s slower for me to use than Androids.

Some of these reasons are purely bad UX implementations (e.g notifications & the “Today” screen), some have deeper ties to the design philosophy at Apple to be a more “closed” ecosystem, which is why 3rd party widgets & keyboards are so new to iOS. As a consequence Apple also lags on integration between its apps, and that’s bad coming from your mobile OS.

Cheers for reading — iOS Fanboys/girls, let’s fight it out on twitter http://twitter.com/ernopp