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Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11

ericasadun.com

11–20 of 62 posts

Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11

#11

I wonder if this is a reaction to the belief that you need to keep on killing apps as soon as your phone is perceived to be running slowly? iOS will background kill apps under memory pressure but leaves an screenshot of the interface up in the task list. As people rarely need to manually kill apps and presumably rarely use the task switcher to jump back in the history more than a few places, having easy access to kil…

Probably, but in using it on my iPad it is my biggest annoyance. If they don’t keep the swipe up to close they should at least have a drag to rearrange. The reason I want to be able to remove it is because I usually have a few things going on when using my iPad now. Mail, slack, Twitter, notes, messages. Then I open some random app and want to get it out of my “working space” but the new system makes that quite slow.

Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11

#12
post #4

The Control Center's little control panel (reminiscent of the one in macOS 1, by the by) is an accelerator —a bunch of non-canonical secondary ways to reach items that have canonical locations in Preferences. Accelerators are about recall, not recognition. They're intended for touch-typing, not discoverability. The app close buttons are indeed too small, though. Maybe they only tested them on the iPad Pro with the Pe…

They should at least make the close button touch target bigger, even if they don't change its visual size.

Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11

#13
post #8

The stacked-card app switcher in iOS is the worst thing ever. It scrolls to the side instead of flinging an app "up" and closing it. You can see maybe a fraction of the most recent app, and barely any of another two, and then you have to scroll through a list of apps that have been open since I last rebooted my phone. How anyone can think the iOS app switcher is the pinnacle of design baffles me.

Yeah I find it extremely inefficient. When I want to switch between apps, I'd almost rather just have a short list of the apps that are open or even just the icons (like Command + Tab on OSX)

Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11

#14

I wonder if this is a reaction to the belief that you need to keep on killing apps as soon as your phone is perceived to be running slowly? iOS will background kill apps under memory pressure but leaves an screenshot of the interface up in the task list. As people rarely need to manually kill apps and presumably rarely use the task switcher to jump back in the history more than a few places, having easy access to kil…

I need to kill apps quite often because the app has a bug and killing it, whether it actually kills it or not, ends up making the app redisplay or resync etc...

Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11

#15
I think people are making the incorrect assumption that the ios 11 beta’s UI is the final UI. If anyone else did the iOS 7 beta when Ive made huge changes, it looked/operated alot like is right now, devoid of proper functions… But hints at what they wanted to finish with.

Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11

#16
As someone who've used iPhone since the first version of it, usablitlity has been on decline since iOS 9. They removed very simple two step gestures like swipe-delete in music player. In the iOS10 search bar, if you search an app and start that app, the 'search button' remains active on the top left, press on which leads you back to search. (Why would I want to go back to search after I've found my app?" In iOS9, they removed the feature to create a new playlist by adding songs from another playlist. But this got fixed in iOS10. As someone who listens to music wherever I go, I liked the music control access on lock screen. But in iOS 10, they put AirDrop and Airplay controls on the first tab of control centre and music control is on second tab, requiring a second swipe(I'm walking on road and I'd like least amount of distraction). Few more iOS iterations, and I think I'll switch to Android.

Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11

#17
post #3

>> In my opinion, this new design doesn’t work for the young, the old, the millenial, the seasoned pro, the able, the dis, the hawkeyed, or the near blind. My absolute favorite change with iOS 11 was the removal of unnecessary labels. As a young millennial who has been using iOS for almost half of my life those tiny little blips of text scattered everywhere are completely redundant and simply add noise to an otherwis…

> You could replace every icon with a blank oval and I could navigate my phone just from the locations of the buttons.

This may well turn out to be the new "touch typing". "Who looks at their phones to drive them? It's all in finger memory." (It's only old people like me who need to watch where their fingers are going...)

Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11

#18
post #4

The Control Center's little control panel (reminiscent of the one in macOS 1, by the by) is an accelerator —a bunch of non-canonical secondary ways to reach items that have canonical locations in Preferences. Accelerators are about recall, not recognition. They're intended for touch-typing, not discoverability. The app close buttons are indeed too small, though. Maybe they only tested them on the iPad Pro with the Pe…

they might be an accelerator, but they are also most people's primary means of accessing the tools. i've never seen anyone go to the settings menu to access the torch. people probably discover many of those settings from the control centre because they're just right there

Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11

#19
post #4

The Control Center's little control panel (reminiscent of the one in macOS 1, by the by) is an accelerator —a bunch of non-canonical secondary ways to reach items that have canonical locations in Preferences. Accelerators are about recall, not recognition. They're intended for touch-typing, not discoverability. The app close buttons are indeed too small, though. Maybe they only tested them on the iPad Pro with the Pe…

Why not just have the same "swipe up to close" as iOS 10? It'd be instant. I guess regular people must "close" apps all of the time and Apple wants to hide that.

Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11

#20
I've long held, without any real concrete evidence, that Apple puts its best and most powerful iOS UI behind modern hardware/device capabilities as a ploy to coerce sales of newer devices. So much stuff is hiding behind Force Touch, which is a relatively recent hardware upgrade to their device fleet.
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