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My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

technicallychallenged.substack.com

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Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#21
post #10

Every family member whose midrange phone I have to update due to EOL software or additional carrier bands somehow loses every feature they actually value and they rightfully complain it's a downgrade.

I feel like this even without replacing my hardware, the software alone updates itself and changes all the time. I feel like whenever I open the youtube app it looks slightly different. See that button? Now it's gone! A week later, it's there again! Few days later, it's gone again, turns out the previous week was just A/B testing.

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#22
post #8

Kinda unfortunate that phones have made basic workflow gestures like this so obscure. Let's not even get into how "undo" is accessed by shaking the whole device

This is the true problem. A lot of this is not discoverable

And for real, I'm suspecting Android is better at this than iPhone

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#23
I wonder if reliability was a factor in ending this feature.

3D touch malfunctions badly with a slightly swelling battery pressing against the lcd backplate inside the phone. Or a bend in the phone chassis. The 6s case was bent for every person who carried it in their back pocket. I saw malfunctioning 3d touch several times every week back when I was in phone repair. Especially with carrier insurance refurbs, where the replacement parts were of especially poor quality. Carrier refurbs often had the cheapest batteries, screen assemblies and sometimes non original chassis.

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#25
post #9

One of the issues with the 3D Touch replacement (“long press”) is that if I accidentally hold a finger on the screen for too long (e.g. I’m touching lightly to scroll, but pausing for a moment to finish reading), then I’m unintentionally long pressing something. This wouldn’t happen with 3D Touch. Another one is that the illusion of pressing a tactile button is gone. 3D Touch would give tactile feedback only if the s…

> I’m touching lightly to scroll, but pausing for a moment to finish reading

Just checked on my own behavior in this regard, and I seem to have grown a habit of just scrolling slightly enough to not make it appear to be a long press before actually resting my finger on the screen.

This might be a more common habit and would explain the consensus of long presses not being seen as too problematic.

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#27

Was it earphones. I used to love my iPhone for music. I've a really nice set of noise cancelling headphones. Now I have a dongle (that always goes missing). I almost never listen to music with my iPhone anymore.

Tape your dongle to your headphone cable?

What if you use multiple devices, e.g. a laptop too?

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#28
3D Touch was a big UX problem, there was never a way to show the user that you could do it and where you could.

Apple has a problem with discoverability in quite a lot of features. There's many small little things in iOS that users don't know about and likely will never find out about, perhaps because they want to keep the UI clean.

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#30
> But the ease of use and selection capability has been greatly reduced. You can still select text but it takes two hands (or fingers?) and I can’t seem to figure out how it delineates its boundaries so I end up never using it.

Only now thanks to the OP I understand how to achieve this without 3D touch. Poor discoverability on this feature never ends.

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