I really feel like iOS 11 was released 6 months too soon. Apple really messed up with this one. I run into strange bugs daily. Sometimes apps just freeze for 10 or so seconds and then come back. Or apps won’t launch at all. Sometimes the problems go away or I have to reboot. I really hope they can put out some patches quickly to fix this mess.
iOS 11 was enough to get me to move off Apple products altogether. It turned my iPhone 7 into one of the slowest, most buggy devices I've had. Everything is slow, audio constantly cuts out and stutters (even when predownloaded), there's lag switching between apps, apps reload constantly, it disconnects from Bluetooth devices at the drop of a hat, my keyboard disappears or fails to appear, and battery life is garbage - I'm charging twice a day minimum. And it looks like they removed the download button from Podcasts or moved it where I can't find it. It's not in the menu.
Granted 11.1 fixes some of these issues, but I don't appreciate having my thousand dollar phone gimped for two months, and it's still worse than it was before.
I'm getting a different phone, watch, and TV device. But hey, the industry still has me by the balls as long as I'm buying something every year, right?
It's maddening to read that iOS upgrades are still causing this kind of problem. I had a couple of iOS devices rendered near-useless due to OS upgrades around 2014 and decided to give each device a max of one major OS version upgrade in the future. I use Android more now, really like it overall, and am considering getting an Android tablet instead of my next iPad. Sorry about the trouble with your phone.
I use iOS 6.1.3 on an iPhone 4S, jailbroken and running offline apps, syncing with iTunes 10.6.3 over USB, no iCloud.
It worked great 6 years ago, and it still works now. I'm not persuaded by the "updates" Apple keep trying to tell me to run; I think I'll lose more features and stability and battery life and USB sync, and not gain anything of any practical purpose to me.
If Android had USB sync, I'd consider converting. But swapping one cloud ecosystem for another just doesn't work for me, I want to keep my data offline.
> If Android had USB sync, I'd consider converting. But swapping one cloud ecosystem for another just doesn't work for me, I want to keep my data offline.
Uuuh,it does last time I checked. You can even create backups with debug enabled. Nobody uses it though because plugging the phone to the PC is annoying.
You are also not required to use the Google drive services for file syncing. Setting up an owncloud server gives you pretty much the same benefits and interactions that gdrive provides
Andorid phones (the modern ones anyway) do support the MTP protocol... but it's horrid if you're trying to do something like transfer large files for storage of any type; it's like it was written with the old 4GB file limits in mind.
If you really need to transfer files to-from your phone just install an ftp server or something on it and remote into it. I do it all the time and it's great.
It has, but last time I tried it (on Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.x), it was completely unusable. Transfers freezed and crashed all the time. I was unable to upload a single music album even after few tries.
I have an up to date 4s, but that means iOS 9.3.5. It works great, only problem is web browsing. Most sites load too much junk and can crash the phone. Brave is the only browser I can use, and it works pretty good for most sites.
On another practical point: isn't your battery completely shot by now?
I've never seen a phone where it isn't obviously somewhat impaired after 2 years, so what is it like on something that's 3 to 6 years old? Or do you get it replaced often?
I tried to buy a replacement battery, but that expanded dangerously until I noticed marks coming from behind the screen, so I popped open the case to have a look and promptly removed it.
I use a Third Rail case, so I can recharge easily. I don't use 3G, and all my apps work offline.
One of the reasons I still like my phone is because of that case. I wish there was something similar for another phone. The external batteries also have microUSB in and out, so I can charge friends' phones too.
I had a Nexus 4 from 2013-2016 (so three years) and now have a OnePlus One (for 1.5 years now), and I didn't observe any loss of battery capacity on either.
Apple completely ruined Podcasts. It wasn’t great in iOS 10, but its terrible in 11. For example, they removed play the next episode automatically. Now it just stops. WTF. Why wouldn’t i want to continue playing the next episode???
in the same boat here, iOS 11 update for my older ipad has made it slow/buggy and significantly worse for my use case (browsing the web and watching netflix)
For example in IOS 10 to enable night mode was -> "Swipe up, tap" done. In iOS 11 it now requires 2 swipes, a long press then a tap. Also minimizes the app in focus requiring another tap to get back to it. Why?
Take two steps left, one step right, incant the cthonic rite, twist dial 11-b to optimal firing position, and that’s it, you’ve followed the simple and obvious steps to save an episode.
Fine for you and me, maybe, but a decade ago I acquired iPads for my mother and grandfather, as the constant windows support calls were maddening.
Over the last six weeks it’s felt like 2008 again - “no, I don’t know why they did that. Yes, it’s different. No, no reason”.
I’m not averse to change, but they’ve shifted bits of UI that habitual users relied upon, and done things are really inobvious to a neophyte - try getting your non-tech relative to save a pdf from safari on iOS - and as a corollary - power touch has given rise to a slew of blind mystery interaction. It’s just not as thoughtful as it was.
I don't begrudge occasional UI tidy ups, since cruft accumulates (eg Office 2000 menus!) but this seems like a perfect opportunity for adding help to Siri or Google Assistant (plus they've got a head start given their contextual knowledge).
Then it's a matter of encouraging grannies and other tech illiterates to ask the obvious questions to the tool in front of them:
"Where did the button to save episodes go?"
You cite Office 2000 as an example of bad UI but honestly it's far easier to find stuff in menus if you're not sure where it is the having to hunt through the Ribbon bar for an icon that looks vaguely right to what you want. And sometimes the Ribbon bar just hides stuff completely if the Window isn't wide enough.
The thing with menu driven interfaces is while they're ugly, they do make functions discoverable. You don't need to remember what icon you want nor where it is, you just need to remember it is in the menu.
From a personal perspective, I still find myself hunting for common functions in Office even after years of using the Ribbon bar. I've found that to be the single handed biggest productivity killer to Office
Apple's claim to fame was always that "grannies and other tech illiterates" could use their stuff without having to go to any help resource. Apple has lost its advantage there. Good luck getting many of them to talk to their phones.
For example, my wife, my daughter, and my sister are all really smart but not tech savvy. They love Apple, but the "upgrade" to iOS 11 is bothering them quite a bit. (Too bad Android isn't any better.)
My mom is still on Windows. She hates Windows 10 and really misses XP, but she can get by OK without too much help. She's 84. I'm thankful she never went to Apple, frankly. She would never talk to a computer. That is in the ridiculous range for her.
I had to do an internet search to find out that the Airplay selection on my phone was now the two squiggles on the upper right of the music icon on the control panel. Not too obvious when you’re trying to redirect YouTube.
If it helps you, I’ve felt similarly bitten by the Podcasts UI changes and have found solace in Overcast as a great replacement; free with a paid option.
Overcast is a great app. Smart Speed is awesome, syncing between devices works perfectly - something Apple hasn't gotten right in 6 years -, playlists are logical, and it works better with the Bluetooth controls in my car.
I when with Pocketcasts. For one thing, they haven’t explicitly said they don’t want my money, like Marco Arment has said. For another thing, i like the interface better.
I've somehow managed to avoid most of those issues on a iPhone 7 and iPad Mini 4. However, I am having issues with audio playback and with Bluetooth, as well as WiFi "forgetting" passwords (I get "password incorrect" prompt, re-enter password, it is rejected, Settings -> General -> Reset -> Network Reset, reboot, and it's back to normal for a few days).
With audio, it will occasionally hiccup or skip. With video (especially Netflix), it will skip or become choppy for a few seconds. With Bluetooth, my car stereo will switch from another source to Bluetooth Input whenever I receive a text, then it will not revert to the original source input (CD, terrestrial radio, etc). All of this only started happening after the iOS 11 update, and all of the above issues persist across both devices, so it's not a hardware thing.
iOS 11 works with no noticeable degradation on my 6S Plus, which is a surprise to me given my crappy iOS 7 and up experience with my 4S. Maybe you had one of the cruft accumulation/wipe-mandating situations.
iOS 11 on my iPhone6 has completely slowed it down. Apps take forever to open. The camera too. When this phone came out, it was lightning fast. The way they keep bloating the incremental iOS updates is infuriating.
First, make sure you’ve got at least 1GB free space on the device. iOS starts thrashing when free space is low.
Second, tap Settings > Battery to see if any apps are excessively burning the battery (and by extension, the CPU)
Third: Settings > Privacy > Location Services and make sure every app is set to Never, unless giving that app location services has some benefit to you.
Fourth: Settings > Background Refresh. Turn off everything except apps you want to refresh. For example, apps that sync data via iCloud.
Last suggestion: back up via iTunes, restore to factory settings, restore from backup. In my experience, this is iOS’ dirty little secret, sometimes it gets into a state that can only be resolved with a wipe.
Oddly enough, iOS (even 11) has worked better for me than any Android version back when I was on Android. My Nexus 5 used to have a Google process spin out of control and kill the battery. An OS update rendered my Nexus 7 and Nexus 5 basically unusable because of performance (which I hear was eventually fixed). When the iPhone 6 came out, I said enough and went back Apple. I'm sure Android has improved since then, but so has iOS.
My point is that in the mobile landscape iOS and associated hardware, at least for me, work better than anything else out there.
I think the answer is to delay upgrading till you have to. I'm on iOS 10.3 on the phone, Mavericks on the Macbook, both gadgets >3 yrs old and have almost no issues. I may have to upgrade Mavericks in a bit as things are starting to become incompatible but will prob go to 10.11 or 10.12, not 10.13.
(edit - I'm on iPhone 5 which doesn't get iOS 11 which may have saved me)
- Mavericks is old enough that it hasn’t received any security updates in over a year
- You’re falling way behind on emoji support (but maybe you haven’t noticed if you spend all your time on Hacker News, since apparently emojis get stripped out of posts here)
The fact that we have come to a time where anyone would consider it a "colossally bad idea" not to upgrade an OS because of substandard emoji support makes me weep for the future.
MacOS 10.13 is even worse. When I tried to install update, installer crashed in the middle of installation (seems that it's common problem[1]). After I managed to install it, I found out that it's extremelly slow. Time machine causes complete freeze for few seconds when starting each backup. It's literally Vista. Most issues were fixed in 10.13.1 (which installed only from second try too, each taking 2-3 hours), but, for example, Finder still has random line height that clips file icons and randomly chooses display mode for each directory.
And it's supposed to "just work" so there's no way to diagnose problems.
It completely locked my drive on a Macbook Pro mid-2014. With no warning or user information, it simply wouldn't accept my password and could not log-in. I had to drop into recovery mode and use the terminal with some obscure commands from a forum post somewhere to unlock it ... talk about user friendly. Apple is really slipping in terms of QA here.
I had disk utility telling me that my unlock password both did and did not work, and I didn't want to move forward like that. Disk utility's password prompt would do the 'ya done fucked up' wiggle at the same time the main window below it loaded partition information.
I waited for 13.1 to upgrade and login was such a mess I just didn't trust it to not be terrible elsewhere. I had to spend a whole day downgrading back to Sierra and waiting for backups to transfer. Good news, even though Apple pretends old installers don't exist after the new one is out, you can get to them from a direct app store link.
Cold boot login took over a minute on a 2013 MBP that runs Sierra just fine. Something was clearly hanging 60-75% through login and crashing the display server. Function keys wouldn't work until after first login. Can't change screen brightness, keyboard backlight always off, etc.
Only posts on Apple support forums were useless. Yes, I've run a disk check. No, a reboot didn't magically fix it. I've always done a disk check post-upgrade because the updater always seems to misplace >1k blocks in the filesystem after upgrading. The >console user login didn't work at all. Safe Boot looked like a broken powerpoint, is that supposed to happen?
I have no idea what I'm going to do with this update. I'm lucky Time Machine didn't garble my backup sparsebundle, which happens about every six months.
I had constant problems with the entire laptop freezing after waking. Sometimes the freeze would result in black screen that never recovered. Sometimes it would happen a minute after the display woke up. Touchbar and touchpad would be unresponsive.
Also many problems with apps using the Java.Framework, such as JetBrains IDEs having no menus.
Newly installed AudioUnits plugins would not load until after a reboot (which is minor compared to the above).
10.13.2 beta seems to have resolved all these issues. I've not had a single freeze since installing this beta.
If anyone from Apple is listening, please please please raise this up the flagpole on your teams. I love Apple, and think they’re doing fantastic work overall. I get that there are unique problems with having such massive scale, but iOS 11 has been a mess from the beginning.
Edit: It’s apparently “springboarding”, not restarting. Very similar experience either way.
And also a relatively small product line, which should make quality control easier. Although the product line has grown a bit lately.
I find it interesting to note how the quality of some Apple and Google software products is declining lately. Google Hangouts is a total buggy mess. And Gmail is worse than it was some years ago. It seems that big organizations inevitably get more disordered as they grow and age.
On a related note with the watch, try making a call using the watch as a speakerphone.
I know a lot of people hate this feature, but i use it all the time while driving. It will literally, every time, connect the call then go to "call failed" after 5~ seconds. This is completely reproducible on my parents and roommates S0's even after a pair/unpair(which is to my understanding the closest you can get to a "restore")
I've also gotten this to completely lock up the watch at the 'call failed' screen a few times, too
That was actually an issue with iOS 10 as well but only in the quick view, not the full app. There you’d see messages out of order and sometimes duplicated.
In the full app opening and closing the keyboard fixes it. I can’t believe they haven’t fixed it, and actually actively made it worse.
> Timer alert is delayed ~10-20 seconds if you look at the screen as it hits 0
I wonder if that's something to do with timer coalescing. The visual timer ticks down in some "cheap" way, but to actually change the view and make a noise, it has an event set in the OS scheduler—and that event only goes off at some large granularity, to prevent the scheduler from burning energy.
weirdly, i regularly had or witnessed the messages issue in iOS 9 and 10, but haven't seen it once on 11(on a 5S, 6, and 6S+ both sides). That's been fixed for me since 11.0
I wonder why some of these are so ridiculously inconsistent
So many bugs... Some that irritate me most: lots of text boxes won’t let me copy/paste. Often a delay when changing from portrait to landscape in Safari with jumbled formatting after. What appears to be intentional programmatic latency in several apps (ie calculator but also the share function in Safari)
I’m not so married to my iPhone that I won’t investigate switching to something else.
Are you German? I only ask because I've never heard an English native speaker saying "flatten" when they mean to reformat, but I've often heard Germans say "platt machen" when referring to reinstallation.
If you're not German, it's very interesting to me as it highlights my lack of exposure.
Make a full backup. (If you use WhatsApp or some other app that has its own backup system, use the app to create the app-specific backup. For WhatsApp it is to back up to iCloud, I think). Reset your phone but don’t restore it from backup. Test it if it still shows the same problems. If not, great, you at least have a working phone again. Then reset and restore from backup, test again. Maybe you get lucky and it shows no problems with the restored data. If it shows problems, you can decide between a working phone without your data and a non-working phone with your data. Not the best choice but it is worth a try to narrow down the problem. Sucks that you have to do it in the first place.
We do, but configuration doesn’t correlate to issues.
It seems to be very random. Maybe there are radio or baseband variants? It’s very frustrating to our guys who do this stuff as there are really no useful tools to troubleshoot.
While doing a CrossFit workout, we were using the native iOS timer (because our favorite timer app from the app store doesn't work on iOS 11) and saw the time skip ahead by 8 seconds. It was confirmed by my Casio watch that was running in sync with the iPhone's timer.
Really missing the old company motto that Steve Jobs used to bring: "It Just Works." That was how he got away with charging so much money.
No, I don't want to hard-type my letter "I" to be a letter "i." This is why I'm no longer on windows, and why I switched from blackberry to iOS so many years ago.
I want to pay extra money to save time configuring all the BS, so I can get on with my life, and achieve my goals faster.
This is one of the reasons why I turn off all auto-* features in software that I use. From a UX perspective I want the program to do exactly as I command instead of trying to "help" me out.
I've had problems like chrome autofilling to an old address so a package gets delivered to the wrong location, or having to constantly edit text messages back to what I originally wrote because the program decided I was wrong.
When designing anything, if you think that you are doing someone a favor by doing work ahead of time please stop.
I completely disable autofill in the first place. As an added bonus, sites can't have hidden fields that get autofilled with my information either.
Second, I'd strongly argue it's your fault for not looking at what Chrome filled into the fields.
> if you think that you are doing someone a favor by doing work ahead of time please stop.
To be fair, they probably are doing some people a favor. I just think that things should be opt-in instead of opt-out though.
If things don't get opted into, then perhaps you should look to see why. Maybe people just don't know about it. Time to create some quick tutorials then.
It is often the case that I type faster than the UI can respond. So if I am tabbing through form fields and the last one changes everything above the viewport without me noticing it's an easy mistake to make. I usually won't double check shipping addresses because I typed the correct thing in the first time. At the end of the day it is on me to catch these kinds of things but I am sure you can understand my frustration.
The only UI that is too slow to respond on modern hardware is a UI which is so laden with shitware. There's absolutely no other reason for a UI to be too slow to respond to typing; whether it's a terminal application, a native application, or a browser GUI.
A GUI that changes what you've typed into some field (especially when you're not looking) is a prime example of UI dark patterns and shitware.
I type on glass without autocorrect. I use that bar of predictions above the keyboard, which occasionally suggests words that slightly differ from what I typed, and if I made a typo, I'll gladly accept the correction. But I'd never use a "feature" that changes what I typed after I already moved on to the next word. I wouldn't call it painful, but maybe I'm unusually good at hitting the intended key most of the time.
Google's keyboard recently added the ability to auto-correct a word back, which I find really useful when I'm using swipe typing -- usually I'll fix as I go anyway, but I'm not infallible and if I expected a swipe to give me the right word, I might not otherwise notice until I go back to proof-read before hitting send.
Yes. The computer should never do something that I haven't explicitly told it to do. You can design the same exact feature but I need to trigger it, the machine should not be making decisions for me.
Because the OS can guess correctly more often than a typical user can type correctly. You can always proof read its work at the end.
Also, in addition to auto correcting words, your phone also auto corrects individual key presses based on the word you are typing. The same physical impact on your screen will register a different letter based on the letters that come before it.
So part of your “typing on glass accuracy” is dependent on a designer designing that feature that “does work ahead of time”.
> Because the OS can guess correctly more often than a typical user can type correctly. You can always proof read its work at the end.
No. Certainly not on a desktop, where I type much faster than any suggestion can appear (esp. infuriating on IDEs); usually not on a phone either, where "corrections", while sometimes faster than me, are always wrong.
I use SwiftKey (without cloud predictions) and if you press spacebar that's the equivalent of "explicitly telling it". The thing is that usually, the auto correct is correct so when you see it is not you click on the word you (according to the computer) "made up", et voila.
Why people use autocorrect is beyond me. Chats with my friends are littered with addenda where they correct what autocorrect corrected, it's insane. Just type what you mean to type -- a spelling mistake isn't the end of the world.
But changing a word for another makes a sentence unintelligible and blocks or at least seriously slows down communication.
I touchtype at around 90WPM on a keyboard and swipe/glide typing (which obviously relies heavily on autocorrect) is the only thing that makes inputting text on a smartphone somewhat almost bearable for me. Otherwise I feel like I'm trying to type with mittens while drunk.
It's reasonably fast, I don't have to aim for tiny boxes with my fat fingers and it takes care of accents when I type in french. The correction algorithm is also getting better (albeit still far from perfect); sometimes it'll correct the previous word based on what I enter next. If you want me to disable this you'll have to give me a full size keyboard as a replacement.
> you'll have to give me a full size keyboard as a replacement
It seems to me, speed is only an issue for long texts, and why would people type long texts (or lots of small ones) on a phone? Can't that wait until they're in front of a proper computer?
> If you want me to disable this
I don't want you, or anyone, to do anything ;-)
I simply find it strange that people rely on autocorrect, and then send a second message immediately afterwards, to say correctly what autocorrect got wrong. It seems it would be faster, and better, to get it right the first time than the current sequence of "type, send, proofread, retype, resend".
Even writing a ~100 char text manually on a phone is extremely frustrating for me. And well, sometimes you try to be fast and you hit "send" before you take the time to proofread correctly.
An incorrectly autocorrected word is far worse in terms of negative user experience than a misspelled word not autocorrected. I say underline the word in red and leave it to the user to tap the underlined words to trigger autocorrect.
I don't think that it what he is saying. I agree with him and the point is that a misspelled word is not going to inhibit the communication between two friends. Changing a joke/inside/slang word to something the phone thinks is "correct" does inhibit communication. They are arguing that auto correct is worse in this context. (Although, it makes more sense in an email or document editing setting)
This is ignoring the fact that autocorrect can fix massively incorrect words. If you’re off by half a centimeter for a while word it could be complete gibberish if not for autocorrect.
I can't speak for Apple keyboard but the only Android app I ever bought is SwiftKey (before it became free). Recent versions of Gboard are also pretty good it seems.
Auto-correct mishaps happen (especially when using multiple languages at the same time) but are fairly rare. It's a trade-off, it makes the majority of my typing much quicker and accurate, but I have to be careful about a few things.
Edit: as a non-native speaker, I don't really make spelling mistakes in English, either I know a word or I don't, so that's not a reason for me to use auto-correct.
I have learned to type much faster with autocorrect by working with it and understanding the limitations. I'm not a very good speller, but as long as I get enough letters correct, the phone will do the rest. And for long words I often skip a few letters, because I just need to be close enough.
I use autocorrect because it lets me type sloppily enough that I would make a lot of spelling mistakes without it, frequently making words unintelligible. Of course, I could type reasonably accurately if I slowed down, but in theory, with autocorrect I can type faster and still end up with the right text most of the time. Yes, miscorrections happen, more often than I'd like, but not enough that avoiding them would be worth even a small speed penalty; virtual keyboards are slow enough as they are.
…On the other hand, my teenage younger sister has always used her phone with autocorrect disabled (just because she doesn't like the capitalization), and she types pretty quickly. Maybe it's just a matter of training yourself with autocorrect off, and eventually you can type accurately while keeping the same speed. But I'm not sure. There's no doubt that training would help, but can it make up the full difference, compared to a user well-trained with autocorrect on? (…And for that matter, if I care about speed so much, shouldn't I switch to a swipe-style keyboard? But that's a separate discussion.)
Anyway, the fundamental problem is that without the tactile feedback of a physical keyboard, it's much easier for your fingers to get misaligned, so the relative positions of the taps might be reasonably correct but the absolute positions are totally messed up. Even though you can see when you make a typo, humans have pretty high latency in responding to visual feedback, and you only get the feedback after the fact (whereas on a physical keyboard you can feel if you're in the wrong place before you've actually pressed down on the key). It seems more efficient to just type the whole word at once, and even if you were misaligned, most of the time autocorrect will figure out what you meant. (Especially if you keep going with the sentence, which can change previous words after they were seemingly finalized. I used to go one word at a time, stopping to correct any word that turned out wrong, but after I learned to trust autocorrect a bit more I realized that some of those corrections were unnecessary. This applies especially to the word "its", which autocorrect likes to change to "it's" but will often change back when appropriate.)
Actually, I make typos on physical keyboards too - which I'd like to think is just a side effect of being a fast typist, though I'm probably less accurate than most - but my impression is that those are more often timing rather than positioning related, and I can often tell they've happened by feel alone, letting me hit option-delete to redo the word immediately without waiting for visual feedback to go through my head...
I find it infuriating that autocorrect constantly subs out correctly spelled words with other words it thinks I meant to type. It would be understandable if their suggestion made more sense contextually than what I typed, but that is frequently not the case. When I start typing "I had" it likes to change it to "I has" as if I'm some kind of a cat meme. Where is that even coming from? I can guarantee it's not coming from analyzing my past typing.
When you dictate to the phone, this happens inevitable. For example I can't get the phone to type "culled", only "called" or "cold". And so on. But these are minor compared to some other issues.
Would be nice to be able to have an escape word and spell the previous word by letters. Or get out into some control sequence :)
I have used the same keyboard, SwiftKey, for the past couple of years. Whenever I write a new word that is unfamiliar to the keyboard it is saved to a personal dictionary. By now, it knows very well what words I use and the autocorrection rarely fails. It is instead quite handy as it corrects my mistypings when writing quickly.
> When designing anything, if you think that you are doing someone a favor by doing work ahead of time please stop.
Can see validity in your other points, but I don't think this is always true. For example, I find it useful when looking up classical musicians on youtube to see what works they are most famous for playing
Offering to do something is usually fine, as long as you do it carefully and stop of the user closes your offer in frustration ("stop bugging me, I have work to do").
On the other hand, assuming know what the user "really" wants to do and doing that work ahead of time without asking first is arrogant and frustrating. If this also breaks existing behavior, it's also teaching people to treat your software as unreliable, possibly hostile, unpredictable toy they they should avoid when possible.
Tools need to be reliable, and that includes reliably following the user's orders.
They’re not even asking for their love to be returned though. They’re just disappointed that Apple is releasing poorly tested products. And that’s troublesome because bad quality directly affects Apple's sales and reputation, so it should be in their best interest to fix it.
This thread is literally Apple's history the last 20 years or so. People love Apple and, but for a few hardcore types, they will put up with a lot of crap and keep Apple. Apple has done a great job marketing itself. Its products have always been slick looking. And that's the point: people will put up with a lot to associate themselves with the brand.
I haven’t put up with much of anything... I like Apple because it’s more usable than android. That’s all. The truth is hat everyone here has a grudge against Apple and so any time they get something wrong or there’s a bug (even something as irrelevant as the OP) they lose their mind like “haha what now Apple users.” It’s sick really. Apple is still good.
It’s a really hard bug to run into - you have to get the bad Unicode I-that-isn’t-an-I in your autocorrect dictionary somehow (for example by having someone else text it to you multiple times), then this character shows up as an autocorrect suggestion. If you’re in messages, it still shows the fake I as an emoji, so you dont see the problem sometimes.
I think overall this release might lead some to believe that Apple is spending less time on QA. For instance, bugs that are much easier to run into, like the calculator bug[0] still somehow made it into production
They're easy to demonstrate. I'm not sure I'd qualify them as easy to run into. Generally when using the calculator (if I do use it all!) I'm not focusing on typing very fast.
> for example by having someone else text it to you multiple times
This one is super widespread. I don't believe I had anybody text it to me before it showed up for me. Over-the-air model update perhaps? Could have been a virus-spreading situation but it seems like something else.
11 is so trash. Slowed me down immediately. Typing in iMessage is awful and lags like none other. I started to uninstall apps to see what I thought was an increase in speed, but I don't actually believe it. It's the very definition of planned obsolescence.
I thought that too at first, but slowness isn’t even half the problem:
1+2+3=24 if typed quickly into the calculator, even on the fastest hardware
They got rid of autoplay next episodes in podcasts, and make it take three taps to play next episode. That moron swerving during your commute Monday? That’d be one of millions of people trying to advance to the next episode.
They also eliminated “mark as [un]played” in podcasts.
Alerts show on the lock screen, but are missing from the alert list.
The keyboard in messaging is completely different than the keyboard in third party apps (and it doesn’t have feature parity with itself across third party apps either.
If I enable speech in maps, using my car bluetooth, it pauses audio and plays silence during the voice prompts. After bluetooth drops when I leave the car, it happily speaks directions into my pocket instead of realizing I arrived.
The battery meter and lifetime were FUBARed for a week after I upgraded.
Calendars randomly opens to a useless year overview screen, even though I only ever use the “today” screen.
(and so on...)
All of these issues are regressions introduced between 10 and 11, and I’m sure I’ll notice more issues over time.
(Also, performance is terrible on my old phone. Web pages and apps swap out constantly, which I never noticed before. It takes Siri so long to turn on the microphone that it’s better to open the app I want, and type the query. Maps take 15 seconds to open. Time to first picture is unacceptable, and I swear the quality of the pictures is lower too).
> They got rid of autoplay next episodes in podcasts, and make it take three taps to play next episode. That moron swerving during your commute Monday? That’d be one of millions of people trying to advance to the next episode.
Seriously, why did they think this was a good idea??
> They also eliminated “mark as [un]played” in podcasts.
It seems most of the issues you are running into is not a bad OS, but bad applications. Granted they are baked in, but appart from Camera, Calculator and Safari I think there’s little to no downside moving to a third party app.
Why bother with the stock apps at this point ? They have had 2 to 3 times better alternatives for years and years now, some even free with basically no barrier to switch.
I feel like beating on Apple apps is a bit like crying about Microsoft making IE shittier or Google making another chat app. Why not move on ?
Not parent, but thats half the reason I buy Apple products. Because the product works well out of the box - the apps are well designed, they can sometimes do things 3rd party apps can't, and they all integrate with each other & apple ecosystem.
There may be workarounds for every single issue, and as a techie I could do them, but I pay specifically not to have to spend time & energy on any of that.
I could swap out the keyboard, podcasts, calendar, maps, camera, etc, etc, but that’s 90% of what I use my phone for, and I do have know of viable alternatives for any of them in the app store.
There’s not really anywhere to “move on” to, since Android is still [edit: also] a tire fire, and I don’t trust google (or anything ad supported) with my data.
The small players like Win Phone have thrown in the towel, or have unproven track records (to put it politely).
edit: Also, if I move to third party everything (even Siri is useless now), then it will break the cross-integration that I’ve gotten used to, like finding calendar invites in emails, or having the lock screen tell me the right route home and eta during rush hour.
Not ideal, but after listening to an episode of Back to Work, I tried the Reset All Settings trick and for the past 4 days since it's been wonderful.
Fast with good battery life and minimal things to re-install / setup. Mainly just TouchID, Wifi networks, and Apple Pay.
This isn't Windows Phone that regular users are okay with being abused and know how to install the beta[0]. It's also kinda ridiculous that anyone is suggesting running something that Apple clearly doesn't think is ready for prime time to fix bugs.
I'm not suggesting that you install the beta. I'm just letting you know that this has been fixed by Apple and will be pushed out sometime in the near future.
I use an Android phone and a MacBook. I assumed it was just OS X that they were fucking up, to concentrate on iOS. Interesting to know it's across the board.
Maybe so, I haven't tried that one yet. My problem is that the UI has gotten increasingly fucked up with each of the previous "tick" releases while adding absolutely nothing I'm interested in.
Snow Leopard was a superior OS in every way, from my perspective. The only reason I upgraded was the increasing number of apps that required newer versions for no good reason.
Oh, good to know - I guess these were mostly developed in parallel then. The 11.1 release notes specifically mentioned the 10 so I assume they were paired like each previous year’s hw+sw release.
It was released when the schedule said it was to be released, rather than when it was ready to be released, and things got crammed in half-baked to make the deadline. (Android has the same problem.)
Well, and they ran off their remaining expert tear inducer, Scott Forstall. Nothing since has improved iCloud as much as Steve publicly humiliating and firing the .Mac Team.
The thing that surprises me about many of these comments is the yearning for the "good ol' days" when Apple released major software or hardware revisions that didn't have issues. As someone with affection for Apple but also a reasonably good memory of its history, I don't believe those days existed.
Antennagate. iBook solder fails. Bendgate. Apple Maps (for which Forstall famously apologized). Touch disease. Various Crackgate(s). MobileMe. Slowgate(s). Batterygate. Wi-Fi Assist eating excessive mobile data. Locationgate. Staingate. iTunes. The Mac Pro debacle. Keyboardgate.
When it comes to Apple, waiting for the .1 or .2 update (or the "refresh" release of a major hardware revision) has never been a bad idea.
You're referencing a lot of stuff that I consider to be new problems. Apple didn't have so many problems before they introduced iOS, and especially before OS X.
Seriously? Even before the macbook pro GPU issues, the very first gen models had like... 10 hardware revisions because of how many issues they had. I know some people who went through 4 machines before they got one that lasted.
This also leaves out the second gen white macbook issues with the bottoms falling off and failed motherboards, and so many other things. Although i could definitely dredge up more G3-G4 era stuff that wasn't mentioned(tons of tibook issues, other ibook g3/g4 issues not mentioned, failing imac g3 power supplies/displays in huge batches, imac GPU failures in the first few c2d generations, core duo imac display failures, etc)
I remember there being huge online discussions about these issues. A number of them generated tons of pissed off people online, and apple was resistant to fixing a lot of them at first or would only do it on a case by case basis until it became overwhelming.
As an iPhone user since the iPhone 3G, I have say iOS 11 is the buggiest iOS release ever and very disappointing. Most of my family aren’t technical and the reason I recommend iOS is it just works. This is really embarrassing.
Also, typing out this comment on my iPhone and autocorrect is exhibiting the exact behavior in the link... :-/
iOS 11 before 11.1 was worse than iOS 4 on the iphone 3G
Seriously. Even though that was super laggy, it had less issues and i never had to hard reboot my phone. At least you could press the home button and bail on things.
That's not what OP was talking about, but for what it's worth you can get a decent dev environment going on Android. Termux offers a command line with a great selection of packages you'd find on most Linux distros (a C compiler, python, git, tmux, etc) and if you plug in a USB OTG cable you can use a full sized USB keyboard too. Adjust the DPI to the most comfortable setting and you can get a passable dev environment going.
Thank God! I was going crazy trying to convince the Apple support people that this was a real thing.
It appears that somehow a rogue Unicode character gets in the dictionary, and it looks just like a capital I. It even shows up as an emoji in the recently used section!
I have owned multiple iPhones since the original but what really bugs me is that there aren't any official ways for downgrading your iPhone without saving blobs and being quite careful[1]. I understand having an official downgrading technique brings up security issues but either way the bugs are getting pretty crazy.
Reminds me of a longstanding similar issue. I regularly type Korean on my iPhone, and autocorrect has been historically terrible on iOS. It will replace entire correct and valid words with completely unrelated words.
No Korean I know keeps Autocorrect turned on because of this, so I think iOS never learns which words are used frequently when, and never improves.
I have had autocorrect off on iOS for years because I cannot disable autocorrect by language/keyboard.
I don't use an iPhone, but Google is really messing up with the default Android 7 keyboard. It frequently replaces correctly spelled words, and will not correct words with one letter incorrect and no ambiguity as to what word it should be. I've tried clearing my history to no avail. It seems like it's trying to be "smart" and using context rather than just a dictionary. It's similar to how they made their search "smarter", returning results that don't match your query exactly.
Someone at Google should really be embarrassed that this got out into the public's hands.
DWIM ("Do What I Mean") is another example of how somme people fundamentally se computers as "magic". Trying to guess your intention from a few typed words was a terrible way to handle typos and spelling errors when Warren Teitelman tried it at Xerox PARC[1] over 50 years ago, and it's still a terrible idea for the same reasons.
From[2]:
> In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the command interpreter used at Xerox PARC. One day another hacker there typed
delete *$
> to free up some disk space. (The editor there named backup files by appending $ to the original file name, so he was trying to delete any backup files left over from old editing sessions.) It happened that there weren't any editor backup files, so DWIM helpfully reported
*$ not found, assuming you meant 'delete *'
> [...] The disgruntled victim later said he had been sorely tempted to go to Warren's office, tie Warren down in his chair in front of his workstation, and then type 'delete *$' twice.
The use of “electric” in Emacs is based upon alternative uses of the English word that have evolved over time, at least in the U.S. These are derived from personal experiences with using electricity. For example, a U.S. English dictionary lists both “electrifying” and “thrilling” as definitions for “electric”. Typical usage might be: “The lion act at the circus was electric. I sat on the edge of my seat the entire time!” So, when someone describes a mode or a function in Emacs as “electric”, they are claiming you will be thrilled or electrified by some of its features.
Electric modes tend to do some things “automagically” and/or very cleverly for the user. The electric features are typically continuously active while the MajorMode is active, taking control of things, monitoring and reacting to every input the user makes. Often, electric modes and functions require fewer keystrokes from the user to navigate and to enter data. Sometimes the behavior is “cool”, “clever”, “seems like magic”, and/or is “just really convenient”. You may or may not like what an electric mode or an electric function does while it is active but, whatever it does, it shouldn’t be routine. It should deliver some sort of “Gee Wiz!” behavior.
Examples include certain printing characters in CcMode which after being inserted also indent the current line and/or insert a newline, the ElectricBufferList, and ElectricPair.
In C mode and related modes, certain printing characters are electric—in addition to inserting themselves, they also reindent the current line, and optionally also insert newlines. The electric characters are {, }, :, #, ;, ,, <, >, /, *, (, and ).
Yup this is generally handled very well by Emacs modes and quite useful. But the electricity in C++ mode can be super frustrating when using C++17 which it seemingly hasn’t been updated to handle yet. For example, it keeps double-indenting things inside “if constexpr(...)” environments.
I'm on Android 8.0.0 and find it infuriating that auto-correct always assumes "its" should be spelt "it's", even in sentences where context should make it clear what is meant.
But don't you just keep typing and it changes the previous word once the context is established? It checks context for 2-3 words. Just keep typing, bro. They've got your back.
The recent innovation to iOS keyboard is a feature called "Smart Punctuation". When you type the single quote, it will automatically turn into a unicode apostrophe. I am sure many programmers occasionally writing code on iOS are thrilled about this feature.
I'm sure there are a lot of programmers who don't know this is happening, or if they have noticed, they don't know it's "smart punctuation" so don't know what setting to click.
Computers need a sort of general 'debugger', you should be able to click on something and ask the computer why it did that, or what is this (a bit like web pages have 'inspect') ... so you could click on the unicode quote and ask "What is this? Why is it here? How do I change it?"
> a lot of programmers who don't know this is happening
Not so sure - anyone who’s ever copied and pasted from an arbitrary WordPress blog that adds smart quotes to code snippets, for example, will have encountered this.
This, a thousand fold. I would point out that it's often an inherent problem in many GUIs though. TUIs are (usually) a bit more explicit about what you tell it to do (even if it's still sometimes rather dumb in doing it.
The real problem, of course, is with the programming languages that don’t support proper quotation marks. ;)
In all seriousness—they look better, can be nested without escaping, and provide redundancy that makes for better error messages in the event of a runaway string literal. What’s not to love?
There’s a number of good code editing app on the platform (which won’t be affected by this), and otherwise I think it happens to most of us to just open a text editor and type a snippet we send to someone or run in JS or on a terminal.
Gods - I have a bot that I submit commands to, and it breaks up parameters using quotations marks. Or, at least, it used to. Not with 'smart' punctuation.
I get those kind of errors on my Samsung phone too.
The problem is for my locale (danish) "i" (in) and "I"(plural you) are two different words and autocorrect should have some idea about when to capitalize and not.
The reason iOS 11 sucks in my opinion, is that Apple has a finite number of iOS developers, and this year, they needed to invest tons of work in iPhone X UI + Gesture work + Hardware support + Face ID + New GPU (while in the previous years, things were kinda stable / iterative on most fronts).
Since they work on one iOS for all devices, they had much less attention for bug fixes and stabilization, and they have a 1 year limit because of the new device cycle.
This update model sucks, because when there are big hardware changes, the software is less mature even for older devices, and they don't back port security issues, so you have no choice but to update...
Honestly i really wish they could decouple iOS from device launches the way they have with MacOS. Do a point release, sure, but it should just be baked on a completely different schedule.
The ridiculous thing is they do this with the ipad, and they've even done it with the phones in the past for certain versions
(Critics of Interlisp, particularly those who were proponents of MacLisp, often commented,
rightly or wrongly, that DWIM seemed to be tuned to the particular typing mistakes to which
Teitelman was prone, and no others. These critics were given to lampooning DWIM with such
expansions as “Do What Teitelman Means” or “Do What Interlisp Means.” “Let the system
automatically ‘correct’ programs? I take a very DWIM view of that, sir!” MacLisp proponents
would remark that MacLisp used DDWIDM: “Don’t Do What I Didn’t Mean.”)
Okay, so he was fired for refusing to sign the Apple Maps Apology in 2012. Then he was transferred to a paid board seat (aka "benched").
How much control did he have personally compared to all the others?
the more i look at apple, the more i think there's now room for competition in the mobile market. I believe someone releasing the equivalent of iOS 6 on a iPhone 6s hardware around the 300$ mark would encounter a huge success if branded correctly ,as well as the right amount of "repairable" and "open source" components.
I bought a Nexus 5X (for 160€) and installed Copperhead OS on it. It's super nice. The battery life is excellent, I feel I can trust the OS and the apps, and they won't invade my privacy. The downside: There will be no more updates after fall of 2018. Guess I have to get a Pixel or a Pixel 2 then (with Copperhead OS) or hope that Google provides updates (and Copperhead keeps supporting the phone) beyond the guaranteed time period.
I'll pile on iOS 11 just to get it off of my chest.
Using maps with verbal directions, Siri cannot pronounce 'onto' correctly. It comes out 'ont'. As "Continue on I-280 ont I-680". What would cause 'oo' in 'onto' to cut out, every time? I know what she means of course, but every time it happens, I just think 'wtf'.
Ha ha that's nothing. In Google Maps on my Android S3 exits like "4A" go like this: "Take exit four amperes." At first I thought it was a local issue but I was recently traveling for a wedding and it was doing it there too. Maybe Google needs to teach its speech synthesizer about context. :-)
This is why I didn't upgrade to iOS 11. I knew it would have dumb issues. My current 10.3.3 is still buggy with lock screen and Siri stuff.... they should have an option to only use security updates but keep everything else the same. No new tricks and UI.
Messages & WhatsApp notifications don't appear at all.
Notifications that do show I can't dismiss.
WiFi I can't turn off from Control Center.
Photos app settings don't persist - I have to keep disabling Live Photos and re-enabling HDR.
Work around. Go to settings.. general... key board.. text replacement. Hit the plus sign at the top. Put I in the phrase and lower case I in the short cut. It will stop it from making it the A and symbol
I thought it was just me, but auto-correct (even with the G Board app) oftentimes changes correct words into incorrect ones. It's incredibly frustrating.
