Thoughts on the New iOS Control Centre

https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts-on-the-new-ios-control-centre

by surprisetalk • 2 years ago

99 90 2 years ago

Let me add a simple icon to toggle control wifi (...) There’s a single toggle for mobile data, a single toggle for Bluetooth, a single toggle for airplane mode, and a single toggle for personal hotspot. No wifi. Why? Why Apple? You added a fucking single toggle for Print Centre.

This is, in my view, the single most baffling omission in the new control center. It's fully customizable now, but doesn't have an individual toggle for Wifi???

This also leaves off the other terrible decision: the way icons reorder themselves randomly when you reposition things. Want to swap the positions of the brightness and volume controls? Prepare for literally everything to become shuffled for seemingly no reason].

walterbell4• 2 years ago

doesn't have an individual toggle for Wifi???

Workaround via a Shortcut control?

https://lifehacker.com/use-this-one-tap-shortcut-to-actually...

lencastre• 2 years ago

I have two separate shortcuts to toggle between mobile and wlan data, because it’s insane to have to click in 7 different menus, scroll kilometers of of options, and finally click-hold-lick-drag until Wi-Fi is permanently banished to the nether realm.

weiliddat• 2 years ago

I’ve been trying, for the past two days, to make it so that the layout in landscape mode doesn’t look like shit.

The only way to do that is to make the portrait layout look like shit.

Seems totally arbitrary how they line up the items in landscape mode.

strongpigeon2• 2 years ago

You’re not kidding. I can’t seem to figure out the logic for why the landscape version of mine looks like it does.

SirMaster5• 2 years ago

Really? Seems to look fine to me immediately.

What’s bad looking about either of my pages?

https://imgur.com/a/Q97tohU

happyopossum• 2 years ago

If you expand the connectivity panel out to cover a full screen it has an individual WiFi block, which even has a dropdown to select a WiFi network

drewcon• 2 years ago

I literally went through this exact thought process with new control center today. Absolute nightmare.

pazimzadeh4• 2 years ago

The icons sizes all shrank significantly with no option to increase the size. Combined with a ton of space on either side of the icons, now they are icons are tiny, especially on an iPhone mini.

Also, no one expects a + icon to mean "organize". Sometimes the + icon is not even tappable due to other random stuff that gets jammed up there, like And the new power button doesn't do anything when you tap it, only when you hold it. No feedback at all.

That said, I do appreciate the ability to move the icons anywhere (to put important ones closer to the bottom). Now, can we add the ability to add some of these to the lock screen without using 3rd party apps?

treetalker• 2 years ago

You actually can change which ones appear on the Lock Screen! Start editing your wallpaper directly from the Lock Screen and you’ll be able to edit them. I changed the flashlight to the calculator.

pazimzadeh4• 2 years ago

Only a small number that can be added to the lock screen. I meant to the widget area anyway, not to the bottom corners. Would be nice if more than one row of widgets were allowed too

pazimzadeh4• 2 years ago

Oh and why can't we use multi-touch to drag multiple icons at the same time using different fingers? Or to hold one down so it doesn't go flying while dragging another one around.

kcplate2• 2 years ago

I chalk this up to “no one except that ‘one’ guy is going to do it”. Literally you would need to be a classical guitarist with amazing finger dexterity, coordination, and accuracy to do this without screwing up your goal.

strongpigeon2• 2 years ago

I get that they changed the “1x1” controls to be circles so that they’re the same as on the Lock Screen. But still, the control center does look kind of bad because of it…

pixelesque• 2 years ago

It's pretty bad, but at least you can now remove that annoying torch/light icon on the lockscreen, which I (and quite a few other people I notice) always seem to be triggering, and then pulling my phone out of my pocket with the light on...

I still wish they'd allow disabling the ability to scrub playing music/podcast timeline on the locked lockscreen as well, as I seem to regularly seek to random positions in whatever's playing with my phone in my pockets and when trying to grasp my phone to get it out (in coats with larger pockets), meaning I often miss bits of podcasts or have to repeat them as the position randomly skips.

Especially with Face unlock, I don't really see why you'd want to scrub/seek playing music without unlocking, but maybe someone does, but at least adding an option to control that would be nice...

snug• 2 years ago

I change the setting for the torch to only turn on with a long press, never turn it on by accident anymore

orev• 2 years ago

As an iPhone user since the 3G, I’ve never had these kinds of issues, and I find it hard to understand how people are triggering this. The only thing I can think of is you have the screen facing out when in your pocket? And then resting your hands on your lap on top of the phone? The simple fix is to have the screen facing your leg when in your pocket. That triggers the proximity sensor and the screen doesn’t react to anything.

I know this sounds a bit like “you’re holding it wrong”, but there’s just the simple element of physics involved.

I’m truly curious in what scenarios this is happening.

P.S. I’m also aware that there’s a large population of people whose clothes aren’t manufactured with pockets large enough to hold a phone, and they probably deal with this type of thing more often. But I’m just talking about people who have pockets.

eviks• 2 years ago

thought you were a true friend and true friends don’t let iOS turn to shit.

In what rosy-tinted world was it ever not when viewed with such a high level of expectations? Remember, this is the OS that had stellar copy&paste support from day 1!

can16358p• 2 years ago

While I agree with the points, I think the new Control Center is a step in the right direction: opening way to more customization "in the Apple way": opening things little by little by keeping general UX consistent.

Is it buggy? Yeah, I've encountered the same bugs as the OP, and yes I wish setting Wi-Fi was a step less, though I think the upsides to the new design are more than the downsides (which can be sorted out by time).

I liked it.

alphabettsy• 2 years ago

I like it. Needs further improvement, but it’s better than what existed.

AmVess• 2 years ago

We are at the point in time when you could fire every UI designer on the planet and would be doing humanity a favor. They all have the approach that change for the sake of change is a good thing. It isn't.

xixixao• 2 years ago

Hilariously I have a totally empty circle in my control center. Maybe it was accessibility / contrast dimming before? It’s just broken now :)

matricaria• 2 years ago

I honestly think the person that is to blame here is you. Yes, there might be some weird decisions here, but if you get so mad about those minor changes, you should make at least some research before updating.

bbor2• 2 years ago

Meh — I see where you’re coming from, but this post is about Apple violating design principles, not a pity post about this particular person. We’re all to blame for everything in our lives on some very basic level, but it’s no excuse for the negligence of others.

dclowd99012• 2 years ago

Would it be a viable alternative to never update? Asking genuinely.

wongogue• 2 years ago

Updating is not a choice. The most you can hold off is 1 year. If your phone is eligible for the next iOS, you don’t get security updates. Many apps I use already require 17.0 as of today.

wendythehacker• 2 years ago

Interestingly, I had the exact same reaction when trying to figure out how to enable/disable WiFi. Why Apple, why? I wonder what telemetry tells them about this icon - wouldn't it be one of the most used ones? Or is there maybe an incentive for Apple to make sure users have WiFi on that I don't understand.

bbor2• 2 years ago

Oo this is fun: guessing what the meeting was like where this decision was made. Off the top of my head, there are a few possibilities:

1. Engineers like to unify + encapsulate things where possible for its own sake, and the UX people were looped in too late.

2. There was pressure from above to make things “feel different” to stave off the accusations of “the end of an era of innovation” that get louder every iPhone/iOS release, and this stacking functionality is one of the strategies the team developed early on. No amount of negative metrics can put a hole in an Organizational Priority!

3. Despite their successful efforts to minimize intimidation-layoffs, they did end up laying off ~1000 engineers. It’s possible that the engineers were/are checked out due to a feeling of betrayal, and that the times are changing.

4. Most likely by far: a combination of all the above!

I really think it has to be some organizational mistake. No way that got past a good UX person who had the power of veto.

walterbell4• 2 years ago

When WiFi is enabled, iPhones usually broadcast a list of previously connected SSIDs, which can be used in fingerprinting. Fortunately, shortcuts can disable (not just disconnect) WiFi.

I wonder what telemetry tells them about this icon

Do workaround articles count as telemetry? https://allthings.how/how-to-get-wi-fi-cellular-and-bluetoot... & https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1fidfm0/ios_18_psa_you...

aembleton2• 2 years ago

iPhones usually broadcast a list of previously connected SSIDs

Why would they broadcast this? Wouldn't they just be listening for SSIDs?

sumuyuda• 2 years ago

I think the reason is Apple wants to make it hard to turn off Wifi, so your device is part of their Find My network and will support other Wifi based data collection they do.

The buttons doesn’t actually turn off Wifi or Bluetooth, they disconnect from the current network/device. This is a huge dark pattern.

yunohn• 2 years ago

Sure, but they could still provide a solo toggle for Wifi, which continues to do the disconnect instead of disable behavior.

amluto• 2 years ago

The new connectivity group is indeed awful. When expanded, some of the options are buttons that toggle state. Some open a whole new page of options. And Personal Hotspot is represented by a blank icon, and actually clicking it just dismisses the settings entirely.

ototot• 2 years ago

Is this a post posted by me? I have basically the same thought on the new control center. The new UI and edit flow truly disappoint me a lot.

The connection group is also a terrible idea. Why don't apple just let you do grouping yourself and make every button in it to be available.

ashvardanian2• 2 years ago

The gist:

they’re shipping half-baked software just to hit some arbitrary deadlines.

Control Centre aside, Apple is my favorite example in founder-led vs manager-led company comparisons. The same company totally changed in less than 10 years. Profits multiplied. But practically everything that made Apple craftsmanship iconic is gone. Feels like their current domination is the echo of their older investment in software-hardware co-design and recent supply chain dominance, but not real innovation.

dclowd99012• 2 years ago

Aren’t they dominating cpu architectures as well? Is there a better mobile cpu being made today?

DidYaWipe5• 2 years ago

How about some examples?

lelandbatey• 2 years ago

We are literally in a thread discussing the latest example in the form of control panel. Do you require an enumerated list before you shall permit us to continue?

ashvardanian2• 2 years ago

Easy. Here is an article I wrote in 2016: https://ashvardanian.com/posts/whats-wrong-with-wwdc-2016/

danirod2• 2 years ago

Funny thing is that the arbitrary deadline maybe was real 5 years ago, but nowadays is a lie.

Every major macOS and iOS version in the last couple of years has had a feature that is "coming later this year". For this cycle it's Apple Intelligence, last year it was the Journal app, and the year before there also were a bunch of things that were delayed.

Why not just wait until they finish those features and use the extra time to actually test the OS? (Rhetorical question, the answer is probably 'investors').

interludead2• 2 years ago

Apple’s profits might be up, but does the soul of their product design feel diluted?

appendix-rock• 2 years ago

That…is what the comment is saying, yes.

weinzierl6• 2 years ago

"By swiping Up/Down. Since its inception, you swipe left/right to navigate across screens on an iPhone."

Left/Right is generation Tinder, Up/Down generation TikTok, very easy.

Instead of night mode I want a generation switch. Oh, wait the phone knows my age, it could do that automatically. Apple, adapt to my needs!

luismedel• 2 years ago

Didn't read the full article but I feel I don't need to.

I updated yesterday and I really hate the new design. I'm not using a term for "dislike" I profoundly HATE this change.

Tiny icons, difficult to move/size items, excessive blank space around them...also the UX for repositioning elements has some bug that makes a widget dissapear for a moment and jump from "nowhere" to the desired position (if you manage to place it at first try, of course)

Maybe it's a strategy to make users of the SE line jump to a bigger screen? :-|

weinzierl6• 2 years ago

While we are at it: Can someone explain to me, why I can lock my screen in the vertical position but not horizontally.

Press the rotation lock in Control Center and it locks the current state would be a natural thing. But that is not how it works on iOS. Rotation lock rotates the screen back to vertical and locks it there. Is this the same on Android?

Also: The icon is a lock enclosed in a clockwise arrowed ~ 350° circle. That shouts rotation lock to me. If it has to be vertical lock, at least indicate that in the icon.

kkylin• 2 years ago

Not only that, but the rotation lock on iPads do the right thing!

larouxn• 2 years ago

It is not the same on Android, at least not on Pixel devices. If you turn off auto-rotation, your screen will stay locked in whatever orientation (vertical or horizontal) you did so in.

One can also still rotate their screen by tapping a little rotate icon that appears while rotating while auto-rotation is turned off.

mixmastamyk• 2 years ago

Used to work that way. But then someone got a bright idea. They could “simplify” it by only allowing the majority use case. If you sometimes liked it locked in horizontal position, well fuck you.

Same thing with the wifi button—it no longer turns off the wifi. Used to! The only thing I used it for. Have to push airplane instead.

weinzierl6• 2 years ago

I think watching horizontal video should be a pretty major use case, but then again; it is only an issue in the browser, because apps like Netflix seem to handle the horizontal lock themselves.

Another thing that is messed up with horizontal video in Safari is stereo audio. This should also depend on the orientation of the phone, and in the apps I think it does, but in Safari only sometimes.

I guess I should just use the apps, or maybe in the age of TikTok horizontal video is dying anyway?

Lammy• 2 years ago

I always wished the “Ring/Silent” switch was a “Lock/Unlock Orientation” switch instead.

Tronno• 2 years ago

I wish more people had the ability to daily-drive an iOS device and an Android, to more clearly see the positives and negatives of both.

Having long ago switched to iOS as my primary, I am continually infuriated by some of the awful UX decisions made on that platform - the control center, yes, but also the app library drawer, the settings screen, the clock app, the list goes on. I could write a rant like OP for each one.

Android has its own ways of driving me insane, but it's clear that Apple's UX has been slipping for a long time.

fractallyte• 2 years ago

Sailfish has the simplest, most consistent UI of all. It's a joy to use, but sadly comes in a distant third in the mobile OS ecosystem. (https://sailfishos.org/)

Also worth mentioning is Jolla's AppSupport (https://jolla.com/appsupport/), which allows Linux devices to run Android apps - a killer feature of Sailfish phones!

jonwinstanley• 2 years ago

I like so much of iOS 18 but yes, control centre has a load of issues when you analyse it.

I’ve removed stuff until it’s all on 1 page which makes it quite a bit simpler

jer0me• 2 years ago

Another example of the janky configuration UI: https://twitter.com/jeromepaulos/status/1835915486757884413

throwaway2902• 2 years ago

The value of iphones used to be that they are more constrained but more polished than the droids.

With unnecessary UI fluff, no attention to detail, OpenAI integration, side loading and other stuff I am really not liking where Apple is headed. It starts to feel like design by committee and all users and regulators are in that committee.

Where's vision and backbone?

exsomet• 2 years ago

Have we already forgotten the courage it took for them to remove the headphone jack?

theden• 2 years ago

I actually liked it, a bit fiddly, but being able to reorder and resize as well as have multiple screens is better IMO. Not perfect, but I think my control centre is better than before

CharlesW• 2 years ago

Yes, it’s a huge improvement. That’s not the same as saying that there isn’t always room to make it better.

The reality is that Apple can’t win. On social networks, there’s significant overlap between people who criticized Control Center for its minimal configurability and people now doing the opposite. Apple lives rent-free in their identity.

zombiwoof• 2 years ago

Apple engineers now build features in order to get promoted, not to build great software

weinzierl6• 2 years ago

"Who needs quick access to the print centre on an iPhone"

People with children at schools whose workflow is still completely paper based.

ytywrtbrbertb• 2 years ago

I had the exact same experience on my ipad. I wish I had bought an android tablet instead, using apple's software is dreadful. I won't fall for it again.

gherkinnn• 2 years ago

Overall it is an improvement over the old and the quirks are adapted to in a few minutes.

Toutouxc• 2 years ago

The new Control Center reminds me of the one my Xiaomi had in 2019, which was a weird cheap copy of the latest iOS design at the time.

But the main thing that I personally dislike is the whole customization aspect. The control center always felt to me like a under the hood kinda overlay that you just pulled over your personal phone for a moment. Like it didn’t belong to the OS, but to the device itself. Like the bottom bar that you use for switching apps, or like the volume and sleep buttons, or like the Settings app, or like the menu bar in macOS. It was always there, always the same, no matter what app you were in or whose phone it was. I liked that.

orimirs• 2 years ago

Another fun thing I've noticed is that the volume and brightness bars now have a lot of input latency

weinzierl6• 2 years ago

"The only way to control wifi is to include your stupid connectivity group [..]"

Not to defend Apple too much, but I think the reason is that the toggles in the control group are interdependent. It would be very confusing if you toggle a button and it causes other toggle buttons to switch state that are either far away on the screen or worse - not visible at all.

Take airplane mode for example. The way it works on iOS[1] is that the act of turning it on toggles the other icons in the group off - once in that moment.

It does not prevent you from switching back on WiFi or Bluetooth. So you can end up with WiFi enabled despite being in airplane mode. To complicate matters, this is not true for mobile data.

A cleaner and more intuitive design in my opinion would have been if the toggles were all independent, with airplane mode overruling all. Of course this would prevent WiFi in airplane mode, which might be a desirable use case, and worse: make people avoid airplane mode when they are mandated to use it.

[1] I am curious how Android solved this. If anyone knows, I'd like to know.

dmonitor• 2 years ago

bluetooth is in that group but also has its own button

weinzierl6• 2 years ago

Good catch! I think it didn't in iOS 17. Even more confusion.

aembleton2• 2 years ago

On Android, or at least on my Pixel - toggling on Airplane mode switches off Bluetooth and Wifi, but if you then switch on Bluetooth and/or Wifi whilst Airplane mode is on then next time you go into Airplane mode those will also stay on.

It provides UI feedback that this is happening through the Bluetooth and Internet switches, but thats only because I have those visible. If they're not visible then I wouldn't see whats happening.

DidYaWipe5• 2 years ago

Not to mention that I'm sure Apple didn't address the insulting behavior of the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth controls.

When I turn those off, I damn well mean it. I don't mean turn them back on behind my back later. But that's what Apple does.

But hey, if they want this half-assed temporary disabling, they still could have made smart decisions for users who want these states to be permanent. Here's the easy solution: If the user has gone into Settings and turned Wi-Fi and Bluetooth OFF, then treat the Control Center incarnations as PERMANENT.

But nope, the UI mavens at Apple couldn't figure that out. So they made the Control Center states a fraud to serve... whom, exactly? Who was upset that they turned stuff off and it stayed off?

catgirlinspace• 2 years ago

Who was upset that they turned stuff off and it stayed off?

before the control center icons were changed to just disconnect, i remember being annoyed that wanting to disconnect from a network meant turning off wi-fi completely and no longer being able to use airdrop (and some other continuity feature that i’m forgetting i think)

DidYaWipe5• 2 years ago

You could just "forget" the network. Granted, that's buried a few menus deep; so that's what Apple should have put in the Control Center.

danirod2• 2 years ago

Similar thoughts after upgrading to iOS 18. The new control center is a mess, the way to discover which widgets are available to add is painful, and I don't understand why there is no button for Wi-Fi.

On the bright side, being able to remove the 'screen mirroring' button is nice, and I can make the music control widget extra-large by default.

anArbitraryOne• 2 years ago

If you want control of something, why would you use an apple product?

gyomu• 2 years ago

Apple recorded almost 100 billion in profit in 2023. They can afford to hire every single UX and UI designer on the face of the planet with that money

Lots of senior people have left in the last 10 years, and Covid/RTO dialed up the exodus to 11. Many of the best Apple designers - the ones who had been there for over a decade or two, with lots of deep, hard to acquire skills/knowledge - are gone, and they made so much money from stocks that there’s nothing Apple could offer to bring them back, seeing as the reason they left is that they missed the scrappy high impact environment of the 2000s/early 2010s and got tired of the trillion dollar company vibes.

It’s a tough problem to prevent, and it’s only going to get worse.

A tangential but related problem is that old school designers came from a very different background than modern day UX designers - since UX wasn’t formalized as a field back then, it was industrial design/print design/architecture/software nerds who found themselves having an interest in designing UIs who got the jobs. Today’s junior UX designers all have the same portfolio of hamburger menu apps and nonsensical personas and are lost the moment they have to design something more complex than an informational website in Figma. There might be 1000x more UX designers today than there was 20 years ago, but finding amazing ones in all the noise is harder than it ever was (the same way you can find tons of junior devs who can copy paste React code from chatGPT, but good luck finding devs that can write clean high performance code).

The company is still streets ahead the competition in many areas tho so I’m not too worried about the stock price for the next 5-10 years. Beyond that, who knows.

The image of SJ in a leather jacket flipping off IBM often comes to my mind. Apple is as old, has as many employees, and is much richer, than IBM was at the time this picture was taken. Time for founders to go take pictures of themselves flipping the bird in front of AP.

SirMaster5• 2 years ago

It’s hard for me to believe that people actually get that angry at their phone and how it operates.

j_crick3• 2 years ago

A phone is a very personal item that people interact with multiple times a day, and it's only natural to have strong opinions on how it should operate, or being angry about how it one day stops operating the way you got used to in previous years.

Changes like those mentioned by the author of the article may evoke emotions because people are people and run on emotions. Imagine how your favorite screwdriver or kitchen knife one day receives an automated remote software update and changes its handle shape or blade length, wouldn't that at least surprise you even a little bit? And what if changes were not to your liking and you couldn't get your favorite device back to a state in which you liked it far more?

That aside, I feel like if the author loved updating to never versions of iOS as much as they said without paying attention to the upcoming new features, then they probably shouldn't be that surprised by them.

SirMaster5• 2 years ago

You can explain it, but it’s just not something I resonate with at all.

I can’t imagine getting angry or frustrated at any products I use.

That just seems way too insignificant to become angry over. And also unproductive as becoming angry or frustrated won’t change it or benefit me in any way. That’s my opinion and feeling at least.

I guess this means I don’t “run on emotions”? I feel that I have emotions but I feel I’m generally able to choose when and what emotions I feel. To me that seems normal as it’s always been that way for me.

interludead2• 2 years ago

Apple usually nails user-friendly experiences. Maybe it's a matter of time, and we all will eventually get used to it

devinprater• 2 years ago

You know, it's amazing how different people view iOS 18. I, and many other blind people, love iOS 18 because the system for typing in Braille, and now controlling the phone in Braille, just using the touch screen, has been majorly improved. Although, we don't have an LLM based image description feature, like Android now has in TalkBack 15. I'd love Android, but it's screen reader is so sluggish, especially when scrolling the screen where it feels like it takes half a second, that a one year old Pixel 8 is much less responsive than a 4 year old iPhone SE 2. It's a shame, but Google hasn't changed much in the last five years, and I don't see them changing much before the Pixel 8 is deprecated.

Thoughts on the New iOS Control Centre

Related Stories