
Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11 - lonelycoder2
http://ericasadun.com/2017/06/23/holy-war-why-i-utterly-loathe-the-new-app-switcher-in-ios-11/
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djrogers
I have a couple of problems with this article, the first and most glaring of
which is the fact that the author is conflating the new _iPad_ UI with the
iPhone UI. The second problem is that the author went out of her way to turn
on every possible option for the control center, then complains that can’t
tell what things are - using specific examples that aren’t even on by default.

I personally like the new iPad UI - it makes it a lot easier to task switch to
an app that may be several apps back in my history, and enables great drag-
and-drop capabilities.

~~~
nadagast
I agree, it's better than iOS 10. Though quitting apps does feel worse, but
maybe that's intentional?

~~~
coldtea
Users aren't meant to manually manage apps. Perhaps it should not even be
offered as an option in the first place, except as something like "force quit"
of last resort.

Apps are shown by recent-use, so that takes care of "which I'm using for this
task now".

~~~
hungerstrike
Users have to do what users have to do though. Apple may not mean for them to
"manually manage apps" (i.e. killing apps; not some monumental task), but
there are plenty of reasons for users to need to do it which are listed here
and in the article comments.

So why are we making it harder for them to do things that they definitely need
to do? I think the only opinion we've heard so far has been "because that's
what Apple wants users to do".

This is typical Apple - they are totally ignoring what users actually need to
do and acting like it's a superior design. Next thing you know, they'll
provide no means to resize a window by any corner or edge on Macs. Then Apple
evangelists will defend that decision for years and years as if it were
somehow better (or "just different"...but definitely not worse than anything
else!)

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derefr
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 Pencil? (Or they're trying to discourage people
from closing apps, so as to put the pressure back on developers to make sure
their apps aren't bringing the system to a crawl even when in the background.)

~~~
bluthru
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.

~~~
djrogers
Drag and drop. The new iPad UI (this doesn’t exist on the iPhone BTW) enables
all kinds of drag and drop features, including dragging an app onto another
for split screen use. Swiping to kill an app could lead to a bad experience if
you were expecting to open an app beside another and killed it by accident.

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robin_reala
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 killing them is likely an antipattern.

~~~
greggman
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...

~~~
robin_reala
Sure, absolutely not saying it doesn’t happen. But one extra long press to
kill the current app isn’t problematic given that ideally you shouldn’t have
to do it at all, and no-one needs to kill every recently used app (or rather,
if you’re finding problems in multiple apps you really need to reboot your
phone instead).

~~~
exodust
Often I want to properly exit the app because I don't want it starting next
time where I left off, but instead from its default opening state, starting
screen, initial menu, a clean slate. A one tap exit button in the app is
perfect for that, but sadly missing from many apps.

Swiping up from app list was next best thing and its sad to hear this has been
removed.

The idea that exit buttons are redundant is completely missing the point.
Reset, restart, save, quit - it's fundamental to software design but somehow
these concepts have been demoted.

~~~
coldtea
> _Often I want to properly exit the app because I don 't want it starting
> next time where I left off, but instead from its default opening state,
> starting screen, initial menu, a clean slate._

That might be legit as a wish, but it's not an encouraged (or expected) use
case in iOS though. The default is "return where one had left", so this is in
some way an abuse of the system to do something it can manage, but wasn't
designed to offer.

In which case it's expected that it might clash with other UI choices.

~~~
exodust
A "session" ought to have a beginning and end rather than be stuck as CPU-
managed neverending story. I'm only asking for the option to control things,
not one or the other.

Open a few browser tabs for example, you're shopping for new shoes. Find
shoes. Close browser. Makes no sense that tomorrow you open the browser and
your 15 shoe tabs from yesterday's session are still there when all you want
is your home page.

Ever tried closing 15 tabs in iOS Safari? That's 15 taps.

Likewise, the "don't need to save" idea is flawed too, with plenty of examples
why a good old save button actually makes more sense that having the OS save
every single change you make, even the mistakes.

I'm also with the OP on icon confusion. The one that always gets me is the
bookmarks icon in iOS Safari. I always press the little book icon when I want
to save a bookmark. No... that's not right. Must press the '+' button to add a
bookmark. The actual bookmark icon is for retrieving bookmarks, not saving
them. I'm only human though, so I reach for the book when I want to perform a
bookmark action. I guess I'm wrong every single time.

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zymhan
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.

~~~
draw_down
(Not a defense, just an FYI) If you turn on Settings > General > Accessibility
> Reduce Motion, it makes the app switcher a bit easier to use.

~~~
ChristianGeek
Which one?

~~~
draw_down
iOS 10

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

~~~
toufka
If you have a jailbroken device you can actually remove all app labels
completely - it's gorgeous. I picked up a friend's iphone and felt completely
overwhelmed by all the useless text everywhere.

~~~
valine
iOS 10 is pretty tricky to jailbreak, but I got lucky and was on the 10.1.2
when qwertyoruiop finished Yalu. I went a step further and took all the
letters off the keyboard - it’s perfection.

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philamonster
FWIW, haven't beta tested since iOS 7...Control Center swipe-up on lock screen
or in-app is awfully inaccurate in general, coupled with being left-handed and
equally non-dexterous on mobile with either hand as a touch screen isn't a
mouse which I have used right-handed for over a decade.

I welcome the double home-tap to bring all that crap to foreground. Swiping
left or right from there (even on iPhone SE) I welcome wholeheartedly but
honestly I rarely "kill" an app from there anyway unless network changes.

Flipping back and forth from this writing, every grievance can be supplemented
with "if you're natively right-handed" I guess. And that last sentence, much
like my comment; why even fucking write this...

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coldtea
> _In iOS 11, Apple redesigned. It decided to combine this recently used apps
> list with the control center, so that you could put as much information on-
> screen at once as possible. This produced an interface with teeny tiny
> images, and lots of user confusion overload._

The provided screenshot doesn't show that. Rather it shows large window icons
and big enough targets for everything.

The rest of the post goes downhill fast.

Not to mention that it fails to account for all the ways in which the new app
switcher (and assorted options mentioned, control center, etc) make iOS 11 a
much more powerful machine.

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jamesmcintyre
Apple wants to keep positioning iOS on iPad as the de-facto post-pc "get work
done" platform and to do so the UI needs to feel less constrained, more
capable and appeal slightly more to "post-pc power users". Choosing to add UI
like this to the iPad form-factor while omitting it from the iPhone screen
size is likely proof that Apple believes the iPhone still needs a more
constrained, more friendly and extremely low cognitive overhead UX while the
iPad will start dabbling into more "multi-task enabling" UX.

One other thought: I think the author is a bit harsh on this particular UX on
iPad primarily because the author is omitting (or forgetting) the fact that
when a user enters the app switcher he or she will likely already be
anticipating the primary area of focus on the screen that appears and will
tunnel-vision his/her focus to only that region of the screen. In other words,
after using the new app switcher a dozen or so times the user will
unconsciously focus on only the region of that screen they know contains the
actions he/she is looking for and they will do this in a anticipatory fashion
since we are, after all, relentless pattern recognition machines. So I argue
that what the designers have done here is to maximize instantaneously
available information density while simultaneously utilizing classic visual
design cues (such as "items in closer proximity to each other have similar
purpose") to create 3 primary regions in which, per any given usage of the app
switcher, a user is likely only focusing on one region. Here's a quick
visualization I've done, a sort of heatmap of how user's would likely process
this UI:

[http://imgur.com/a/FC1k5](http://imgur.com/a/FC1k5)

The light areas are the areas which users are most likely to focus on and
they'll only be focusing on one of three regions most the time. The darker
areas are there as increased available information density but the overall UI
design is done well enough so that these darker areas should not negatively
impact the "80% of the time" lighter areas but instead only serve to help the
user during the "20% of the time" scenarios.

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cakedoggie
Why compare the iPad interface to the iPhone interface?

~~~
jumbopapa
A bit of a senseless comparison. I think the app switcher works better for
iPad than previous generations as it uses more of the available screen real
estate and makes the iPad seem less of a jumbo iPhone. This is a first
iteration and I think we will see it refined in the years to come.

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ios7hell
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.

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hoodoof
There's a big problem in design which is that _everything needs to change over
time, just because change is good_.

So even when a design is perfect, it just has to be changed eventually because
everything has to be reviewed and modified.

~~~
coldtea
> _So even when a design is perfect, it just has to be changed eventually
> because everything has to be reviewed and modified._

a) which design is perfect?

b) which elements do users not complain of it being "stale" when it hasn't
been changed in a while?

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teilo
Sure, it's a minor annoyance to have to hold down a pane to be able to close
apps, but in the end, closing an app is only necessary when an app is
malfunctioning, which doesn't happen that often. (Yes, it's happening more
right now, - but it's an early beta. What do you expect?)

I still find _way_ too many people who are convinced that every app shown in
the app switcher is using up their battery or actively running. I suspect this
is the audience that will be most annoyed by the change.

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beager
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.

~~~
theWatcher37
I can't stand force touch, and hate the apple compromised on the design to
implement it.

2 years later and it's completely frigging useless, nobody's been able to
demonstrate a useful feature for it and outside of techy Internet forums I've
yet to meet anyone who uses it on their phone. Every time I ask ~50% of people
have it turned off because the incredibly laggy, counter-intuitive, and
downright annoying "actions" were bothering them so they turned it off in
settings.

Force touch belongs in the dust bin of history with wood grain UI and
horizontal sliders on horizontal swipe interfaces.

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joejohnson
Disagree. Have been using this for a week on my iPad and like it a lot better.

There's so much more information on screen, you can configure what buttons
appear in control center, and it's much harder to accidentally kill an app (I
did this on accident with an upward swipe on iOS 10).

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helloindia
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.

~~~
CharlesW
Things change. For example...

> _But in iOS 10, they put AirDrop and Airplay controls on the first tab of
> control centre and music control is on second tab..._

...in iOS 11, it's not. But those (generally) aren't usability declines as
much as necessary rethinks about how apps and OS functionality should work.
It's unfortunate that they sometimes break muscle memory, but I'd be much more
worried if the iPhone still worked like the first version of it.

> _Few more iOS iterations, and I think I 'll switch to Android._

That will probably solve everything. /s

~~~
majewsky
> > Few more iOS iterations, and I think I'll switch to Android.

> That will probably solve everything. /s

It actually could. On Android, he can make his own LineageOS-based build and
implement a completely custom UI.

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supercoder
I love it. Erica is a dev as far as I know, not sure if she has much idea
about design.

~~~
dcw303
Why can't a dev have much idea about design?

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

~~~
supercoder
Because then she'd be a designer.

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aaronbrager
It’s pretty bad on iPad. Still fine on iPhone though.

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kur84
Boo fucking hoo.. look at me

