While this article focused primarily on things being left unmaintained, etc. there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse.
When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps, not creating huge new ones.
There seems to be a prioritization problem at the very least. Which I get, on some level who wants to work on the broken things? But if they threw some money at this they could fix it.
The current UX of notifications is terrible. After months of using it I still don't understand the mental model. A notification comes up, I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it. But then some time later I unlock my machine or something happens and apparantly all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups.
Somehow Apple took a UX flow that was fine and made something that regularly makes me feel stupid because I don't understand what I'm supposed to do to make it behave in a way that makes sense.
Notifications are such a simple thing, but they somehow made them complex.
For me the issue is notifications that appear, then disappear, and I can’t find them again, or what they refer to. If it’s important enough to do a notification, it’s important enough to keep in a notification log that I can go through chronologically, search, group, sort, etc. I will high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and I’ve just missed it.
This happens to me a lot. Somehow I miss the initial notification but catch it as it animates away and I don't know how to find out what it was or what app caused it.
I'm probably missing context (skimmed comments quickly on phone after a long day), but just in case it helps:
on iOS, swipe straight down from the very top to access Notification Center. IME, on iOS, it's a reliable way to access them.
Thanks --- I did know about that. For whatever reason, though, that doesn't appear to reliably bring back all notifications, only some of them. While I definitely could be wrong, I'm just about 100% certain that I've had notifications come and go that aren't to be found in the Notification Center afterward.
In the notifications settings/preferences, on a per-app basis, you can set whether notifications are displayed to allow banners, badges, and sounds. And you can turn on/off whether the notification posts to the lock screen, or stay in the notification center (swipe down on iOS, click the clock in the menu bar on OSX)
I'll have to look into this, but my experience has been that Notification Center: doesn't display everything; loses things on a whim; gives no way of recovering things, or displaying all things.
It definitely does. One reliable way I've noticed for this to happen is if you have the app that caused the notification open on another device. Presumably that app is then saying to the notifications system "don't worry, I've got this", but then that notification disappears on all devices.
The notification history feature does exist, on Android (11 I'm using). It can show you both the recently dismissed notifications and the ones in the last 24 hours, grouping by apps.
> important enough to do a notification, it’s important enough to keep in a notification log that I can go through chronologically, search, group, sort, etc.
In light of a grandchild comment to this one about notification center on iPhone, I'll offer that on Mac you can do a two-finger swipe from the right side of the touch pad to get notification center. It doesn't have search, but they are grouped in stacks chronologically. There is no default hotkey, but you can set one in system settings.
> I don't understand what I'm supposed to do to make it behave in a way that makes sense.
There used to be an actual icon for it to the right of the clock. Why would someone think to click on the clock to access their notifications? This apparently also led to the clock becoming mandatory instead of being able to hide it if you wanted to use different options.
Don't get me started on the new iOS podcast app. I used to know how to use it. Now I need to click five times at random to get anywhere, and still don't understand where I am. All the views look similar, but different. I just want to hear the oldest first and see if episodes are downloaded, that's it. Cue… "you had one job!"
Try Overcast. It’s one of the best pieces of software on my iPhone. Simple, well thought through and reliable. And the speed controls are the best I’ve seen in any program.
It’s the sort of software apple makes when they’re at their best. Much better than the built in podcast app.
The audio controls in Overcast are what made it must-have software for me. I had a few podcasts with audio so bad they were barely listenable that the voice boost function in Overcast was able to make them actually listenable. That and the shorten silence feature combined with the excellent audio processing if you listen at higher speed have allowed me to really optimize my podcast consumption. Highly recommended!
I like Overcast. Though neither it nor anything else really comes close to letting me play podcasts with some degree of reasonable selection when I'm driving. Maybe too difficult a problem and reflecting that voice assistants are pretty limited.
I haven’t used it in a while but when I did, it was pretty bad.
One annoying bug: if you switch to a different podcast sometimes, even when the new podcast starts playing, it continues to show the cover art of the previous podcast for a while. Super annoying.
What’s even more frustrating is how buggy streaming music to a HomePod mini is.
Even though I’m the only person in my household using it, I frequently get errors that I can’t play something because someone else is playing something, which turns out to be something I played a while ago.
Things seemed better before the latest HomePod software upgrade…
If only there were a built-in podcast app that wasn't a mess, like there used to be for the previous ten years. That wasn't broken on purpose, and folks from Stockholm didn't feel a need to defend.
The new generation (some young employees/interns) are awesome about notifications. I arrive on their screen and tell them they have a notification pending. And then they showed me:
They ignore them. Red dot? Ignore. Blinking red dot jumping in the docker? They live with it. They say macOS is terrible because it has red dots, sometimes worse than Windows. One is colorblind which helps, but really, they got used to Windows nagging them, Youtube nagging them, websites where the cookie banner and the consent form. They try to deactivate as many notifications as they can, but they tend to avoid the cross itself, or they avoid clicking on the Slack icon to remove the dot. They just let it jump on the sidebar.
I think it’s worse than that. IIRC I had the second model of Android phone ever released in the UK, and even that phone’s notification system was superior to iOS of 2021.
I’ve always assumed patents are to blame - I mean, surely no one at Apple uses their iOS notifications and thinks “yes, that system is perfect in every way”? There must be other factors at work?
Can you elaborate? I have an iPhone and notifications seem fine. But I’m probably missing something. I haven’t had an android phone in nearly a decade. What do android notifications do differently and better?
From memory (my last use of Android it was a long time ago!) it was a combination of two factors:
1) Android's system relied on icons appearing on the bar at the top of the screen (e.g. a mail icon for mail, or a message icon for a text, etc.) - which was both unintrusive, and very quick and practical to check. To check a message, you'd just pull down the menu from that bar, and you'd see your different notifications in more detail, most recent first, and a tap would take you to the app. It was a lovely holistic concept. In contrast, iOS has some aspects of this, but it's not holistic:
* Red dots on icons indicate waiting content, but don't reflect when the content is from (unless you're obsessed with clearing all of your red dots - which would be a problem in itself)
* The notification center offers a list of notifications, but it's not linked to a visual reminder - you have to remember to check it.
* The notification center is shown on the lock screen, but IME it's buggy, not always responsive, and sometimes disappears confusingly.
* There are also banners which pop up (and there used to be alerts?) but these aren't connected with the other approaches.
TL;DR: Android had a single holistic approach; iOS has a variety of apparently unrelated approaches.
2) When you're using your phone or computer (it happens on MacOS too) many of Apple's notifications distract you and demand your attention or action. This would include banners which hang around obstructing part of your screen and need a swipe to remove them, or alerts which must be interacted with before you can do anything else. I find this a fundamentally user-unfriendly paradigm.
Also, while this isn't so much a macOS as an iOS thing, there are a huge number of apps that take advantage of wanting functional notifications turned on ("your food has arrived") to constantly spam the user with marketing notifications ("sign up for FoodPass, 50% off!").
I hate that! iOS 15 has a way to filter that — you can have a special “focus” that allows notifications for all those abusive companies, which you can enable when expecting a delivery or have made a restaurant reso.
You’ve nailed it. I upgraded from Mojave to Monterey, so I didn’t know when this change kicked in (or if there had been multiple iterations that made the new process more intuitive for users who had upgraded each year).
The only thing I’ve learned about dealing with these new notification types is that you can hover over them and swipe left to right to dismiss them. Unfortunately the notification will reappear sometimes. It seems like this happens for calendar notifications but not Messages notifications.
Anyone else have tips for how to deal with this? In ready to turn off notifications completely, which is unfortunate because I like to have calendar notifications (but only once).
It's even better that in some cases (calendar invites?) you have to mouse over the notification "x" to see the dropdown to "accept" but if you move your mouse off the "x" then the dropdown disappears!
I know it's minor, but managing virtual desktops is infuriating. There after I take the two steps necessary to manage virtual desktops (swipe four fingers up and move the mouse to the top of the screen). There are exactly 4 actions I want to take:
* Select a desktop (even this is questionable as an action)
* Re-arrange a desktop
* Add a desktop
* Remove a desktop
----
Nearly all of the time, I want to remove a desktop because I have too many of them.
I would expect a sane UI where the X button is always shown _and_ deleting a desktop results in a new X in the exact same spot (so I can quickly close multiple desktops).
Instead, I have to hover to reveal the x, click it. Everything then shifts to a magic new location where I have to repeat hover, find X, click it.
Same for me. Notifications on macOS weren’t great before but they are way worse now.
Before they were an annoyance; but now they’re just utterly baffling to me. I have no idea what I’m supposed to click half the time and they seem to come back randomly for me too.
The notifications come back in just about the same way the Algorithm scrambles timelines on the social media apps--its just like they're trying to keep you engaged in using the phone.
Ideally, the notifications should have two very simple views: a linear list by time, a grouped-by-application list and the ability to mark and sweep them away.
Or maybe at the most, an archive all notifications sweep that you can re-open if you remember that you wanted to see an old notification.
I wish there was some way to look at the last N notifications, see what apps generated them, etc.
My biggest pet peeve right now is that my iPhone bongs when charging. Not when the charger is plugged or unplugged (its a different sound). It seems to happen when the charge passes 20% and then again when it passes 80%. But there is never a notification on screen, just a sound. Googling for this is impossible, since you wind up with a million questions about the sound the phone makes when a charger is plugged in.
As far as I'm aware there's nothing in the OS that should do that, at least by default. Perhaps an accessibility option. Or your charger is finnicky and somehow disconnects during charging a few times, but you say the sound is different. If you record it, and post it on reddit, they might be able to identify it.
> I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it.
If you’re manually dismissing every notification, consider going to your System Preferences and changing the notification type for those apps.
> all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups.
Last I checked notifications over a week old are auto-cleared, so ignore the cleanup and only open Notification Centre when you need to check on a previous notification.
> there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse.
I have never been a big fan of Apple's software, but I must say that this is not just an Apple problem, it's a software industry problem.
The amount of software I use daily that has actually improved in the last 5 years as opposed to getting worse is getting frustratingly low as the years go on.
I have just upgraded to the latest version of Android and pretty much every UX change is worse than what it used to be, and I've felt the same way since 3 or 4 versions ago. Same with Windows, Spotify, YouTube, FB, Twitter, even Google search has gone downhill (not being able to get to the source image from an image search; although apparently that was due to a legal compliance reason).
We have come to a point where we have large companies employing thousands of people who need a purpose. Engineers re-writing the app in the most fashionable language/framework, designers deciding the UI isn't "fresh" anymore, PMs on a crusade to "simplify" the experience by removing features. These changes happen so frequently that the software barely has a chance to live up to its prior version before the next change happens.
We have come to a point where we have large companies employing thousands of people who need a purpose.
Fix your bugs. There are plenty. It’s not that they have no purpose. They want to add things to their resume so the next place will give them a pay bump or get that promotion.
If your strategy was to hop around between jobs every 12+ months or climb the ladder, would you bother making things better? You’ll be gone soon and it will be the next persons problem.
The problem is that engineers don’t get promotions based on bug fixes or refactors, and they get rewarded for building features, even if they introduce lots of new bugs.
Also, if getting a promotion was just as easy as a pay bump for transferring jobs, maybe engineers would stay longer. These are all ultimately management problems.
This is something so many big companies do, and I hate it. Every 6 months it seems Spotify has to change their UI and make it harder to find what I want. Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed. It at least takes away from more important issues being taken care of.
Because they aren't building UIs to be useful for pleasant for users anymore. Once these data-driven companies have enough users locked in, they begin optimizing the user interface to manipulate user behavior for profit. They shift from helping you do what you want to manipulating you into doing what they want you to do.
It's actually gotten so bad that open source software with it's notoriously unpolished interfaces is actually starting to be the better, more useful and more aesthetic option, without having improved much at all.
Spotify is an ever-evolving trash fire. It's become very difficult or impossible to get it to display a list of albums created by a given artist, and then play album X. "Oh no" Spotify says. "I think what you really want to do is play <random popular song Y by that artist> and then a whole bunch of random songs by other artists you've never heard of, right? That's what I'm going to do for you."
I realize it's still actually possible to get Spotify to do what I want, but that stuff is increasingly buried beneath dark patterns.
Yeah it’s weird to me - spotify has basically all of the world’s music. Why does it insist on playing the same 12 songs on repeat when I listen to anything? I enjoyed those songs the first hundred times they were played. How do I get out of this recommendation engine jail and get some variety? Here’s a feature I’d love in spotify: no repeat workday. Once activated, unless I explicitly play a song again, spotify is banned from repeating any song within a 24 hour - 2 week period. You know what has this feature? The radio.
Is Apple Music any better?
YouTube has the same problem. It seems to insist on recommending the same 3 rabbit holes every time I visit the site. I know there’s more stuff out there I’d love that I’m not seeing, that I don’t think to search for. But I have no idea how to get YouTube to show me any of it.
Spotify pays a discounted royalty rate when they can kick you over to random plays. Business over user experience, for sure, although they might say you wouldn't pay them a higher monthly subscription to compensate if they didn't do this.
Can't say why or how they arrive at such a tight list of random options; perhaps it's an attempt to give you something predictable while fulfilling royalty obligations. Maybe it's just broken.
My guess is that attempting to diversify what they play for you leads to much worse results, at least for the modal user. I don't think that music recommendation services actually work that well except by identifying very popular stuff.
"Jeannie Becomes a Mom" by Caroline Rose plays first every single time Spotify tries to generate radio for my Indie Mix playlist. This has been happening for months. You can click "Don't play this again", but since the contents of the *Mix playlists change every day, the don't play list is wiped every day.
I wish I could universally blacklist a song (at least for a couple of months), but that only works for entire artists. I've seen the exact same complaint for the exact same song on reddit, which makes me wonder if it has something to do with their program that lets artists jump ahead in the algorithm (https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-11-02/amplifying-artist-in...).
My wife has been complaining about the random feature playing the same songs over and over again. It's been about ten years now. I stopped using the trash fire because of it.
Surely if some company focussed on making software that puts the user at the centre they'd be able to carve out a pretty decent niche for them.
Sadly if they we're a public company their investors would probably be unhappy because they'd be sacrificing the all important "growth", but a private company might be able to get away with it.
> Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over.
It gets people (in your example, designers, but the same organizational disease affects engineers and product managers too) promoted. Perhaps somebody got promoted this cycle for "making a decent UI", but you're not gonna get promoted next cycle for "sticking to it".
And managers get promoted by "growing" teams to build stuff.
When performance and promotion criteria incentivize "having impact", which is understood to mean "launching stuff", this is what results. It's a analog of "teaching to the test" [0], or a special case of "gaming the metrics" [1] or "you are what you measure" [2]. I don't know if there's a term for the general phenomenon.
I agree it sucks, but while I'm invoking cliches, I should remind myself: don't hate the player(s), hate the game.
> My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed.
I'd say more that they keep people relevant, particularly architects and CTOs. You can't go in front of the board and say "Everything is great and we're keeping it just the same!" You can't say that in front of the CEO, you can't say that in front of the investors. You have to keep selling the idea that Big Changes Are Coming and Our Userbase Will Increase.
So you add bloat that nobody wanted and credit anything good that happens to it.
I work for a company based in a foreign land and while there are downsides, one of my biggest reliefs was to find that there is very little interest in 'change for the sake of change'.
When I did use twitter the only way that was even remotely tolerable was with a third party client (tweetbot was my client of choice; twitteriffic is quite good too).
The biggest benefit is you get a literal timeline that's unmanipulated by promoted tweets. I have no idea how anyone does anything remotely useful with the native twitter UI.
I can understand Safari tabs. I assume that it all came about because they decided to change the location bar on iOS Safari, moving it to the bottom of the screen.
This is a good change -- it makes Safari much easier to use on iPhones with current screen sizes. But then they said "okay, we're making one big change to Safari... let's see if there's any other changes we can roll in, since we're making people learn new UI anyway". So they made all those other changes to how tabs behave in iOS Safari. And then kept on going and updated iPadOS Safari and MacOS Safari -- gets them a whole "we're improving Safari this year" slide in the keynote, etc etc etc.
...and then, to their credit, they listened to beta feedback and rolled back most of the poorly considered UI changes.
This seems the problem of every big company. Eventually they become slow and their priority becomes puzzling to people outside of the companies. Complexity aside, my theory is that as a company grows, the headcount always grows faster than the quantity of work, and more people become obsessed with visibility and promotion, which leads to promotion-oriented and visibility-oriented project planning. Consequently, product quality deteriorates over time, first slowly and then suddenly.
As soon as the company starts collecting metrics and sets up A/B testing infrastructure people can just implement whatever they want, as long as they keep improving these metrics. Very often there's no one who can take a look at the resulting mess and decide enough is enough. It's all just self-congratulatory meetings with extremely optimistic charts and an occassional employee complaining about the product being utterly broken and unusable.
I worked with a developer at <household ecommerce company> whose main claim to fame was that she'd deleted more features than she'd added. We need more people like her.
I don't use my iphone for email because I get 200-300 emails per day, and there's no way to mass delete the inbox. I have to select-delete for every email.
You can drag down with two fingers held apart to select the messages. I use that fairly often, especially with search results. It's still not as fast as having a select-all button but does give you a chance to notice that not all of the messages are the same.
Neat! I was in the other sub-thread suggesting the slow one-finger version. Hopefully a few other apps use the same paradigm.
Walter Bright, is it possible you run an older version of iOS or that you use a different app than Mail? I completely believe what you’re experiencing; just trying to think why it’s happening to you…
It might be the tap-then-drag delay — I've been using this process for a few years so I know it works but I haven't seen it documented anywhere by Apple so I'm probably using different terminology.
What works for me is to not attempt to time it at all. Simply place two fingers directly on a message. Leave them there. Wait a second, then start sliding down. The message list should immediately shift to the right, exposing selection "circles" at the left edge of each message. As you continue sliding downward, each circle you "pass" will become selected. You can continue holding as you reach the bottom of the screen to keep the selection going. If you overshoot the end of the area you want to delete, you can slide back up to unselect a few rows before releasing. This works in both Mail and Messages.
Ha - on the iPad there is an edit button that exposes the selection circles; never occurred to me there would be a way to do the same thing on the iPhone. Nice!
I put two fingers on a message. The message shades slightly. I slide down. The shading goes away, and the screen slides down. It does not slide right, it does not collect $200.
When I put two fingers at the same time on a message, the checkboxes immediately appear. If I'm even slightly off, the checkboxes never appear and instead I get to see the contents of the message when I let go.
In the Mail app, tap Edit, then select the empty checkbox to the left of the top email, then drag from the second email down to the bottom of the view (it'll autoscroll.) Then you can move or trash the emails all at once.
Are you tapping and swiping down on the unchecked circles on the left? It scrolls the screen down if you swipe on the preview of the emails, but not the circles you see after you tap Edit int he upper right.
Why would you delete emails? I still do not get people's email habits. I used to maintain my inbox back in the days before all the normies came online. Now I just scan, read the things that interest me, and move on. Same for every email...work, school, and personal.
Why would you use a phone for email. Plenty of desktop web clients work excellent and support the click1, shift-click2 or click1, shift-downArrow selection flows that are way faster than what the phone UIs can pull off.
> Which I get, on some level who wants to work on the broken things?
I love working on broken things just as much as working on new things. Sometimes the reason something is broken is because it was a difficult problem. I love those difficult problems.
When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps, not creating huge new ones.
There seems to be a prioritization problem at the very least. Which I get, on some level who wants to work on the broken things? But if they threw some money at this they could fix it.