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iPhones are so frustrating they're almost zen. so, here is a rant i spent twenty minutes typing

Submitted by twovests in just_post

So my opinion of iPhones is that they are slow. You are prohibited from flying through the advice, and the lag behind every action is covered by a smoothly-animated veneer, such that the delayed reactions to your clicks instead look like an an instantaneous initiation of that sweet sigmoidal transition.

The lack of basic multitasking makes a simple context switch (to reply to a message, for example, opening an app rather than typing in a notification) a very heavy action. The heavy animations make navigating to different apps slow and unyieldy. This actively encourages me to use my phone less.

The less-information-rich, scattered, and delayed notification system makes it so that I go from answering and reading emails throughout the day, to answering and reading them only when I'm sending an email of my own volition, or when I open up my old Android.

When people call me for urgent things, it is usually only after having had sent me a message for context. When someone is calling you on an iPhone, your whole screen is taken and you can 1. answer, or 2. reject. You cannot navigate to other apps to, say, see why someone messaged you. In this manner, I've been ignoring calls (it is rude to simply Reject) so that I can read the context, and then deciding to call them later whenever I remember that they had called. My coworkers are quite upset with me.

Finally, iPhones are gesture-heavy. Pinch in, pinch out, two finger rotate, swipe horizontally, swipe vertically, etc., with surprisingly little tolerance for swipes that stray from a perfect horizontal or vertical swipe. I'm faced with a decision: Use my phone less and ignore notifications as they build, or precisely swipe each of these horrible little rectangles so I can uncover the "Clear" button. I simply use my phone less, and ignore notifications more. There is much more jittering bullshit on this awful glass rectangle, but I am made less able to comab it, and that frustrating futility makes me care about the jittering bullshit less.

I lament the things my iPhone can't do to my friends, I lament that I have this extremely powerful device that can barely do anything, and my friends are surprised that I view my phone as something other than an entertainment+communication+phone rectangle. They've never seen what I've seen. Now that I have an iPhone, I am no longer a power user of mobile devices.

I have to ask, who is this for? I could easily type this diatribe on an Android, but I would never do so on this iPhone. (Or, if I did, I'd have to disable autocorrect and use no punctuation other than Space and Return.) I went into iOS with an open mind, I tried so hard to love it as so many others do, but in doing so I found myself hating the phone and everyone who sincerely prefers its user interface.

I'm still waiting for tech blogs to go "Just kidding! The iPhone was just a prank! Nobody actually prefers this garbage user interface!* Sure, this phone can get worse, and I understand things are better than they were in the past. (NFC locked?! Volume indicator takes up the whole screen?!? No folders or app rearranging?!?) I don't want to take this phone for granted -- it's behind Android, but both are surely far ahead of what is possible in the spectrum of user experience. And I must concede, there's a lot that I picked up on while using this phone, and... Wait.

Actually, I'm going to stop typing and read up on how the iPhone X and on deal with the lack of a home button. BRB.

I'm back HAHA HOLY WOW okay

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neku wrote (edited )

gestures are annoying for me because i dont clutch my phone in two hands like an infant so if i want to do something other than flicking up/down i have to double fist it for a sec. that said idk what the alternative would be. fuck design

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devtesla wrote

The apple solution to the notifications problem is to give you filtering tools to receive less notifications which honestly works for me