It was a feature with 1% of users who knew about it and who were its passionate defenders. This is exactly the sort of feature you should RUTHLESSLY kill off. If you do not, the end state of your software is that it is a collection of features, all of them known to 1% of your users, all passionately defended.
Most of the improvements that I can think of for the iPhone (and iOS apps in general) would involve removing features. An example, there is a gesture that will open the camera app, I don't know what it is, but it triggers in my pocket all the time, draining the battery. I get why it's there, but most of the time it just makes things worse.
I haven't used Android enough to know if it's the same issue, but the main problem is discoverability. iOS, and many apps, have a ton of features, but there isn't enough screen space to do hint to how to use them. There also isn't enough space to add more buttons. So we end up with these weird swiping motions, long press, 3D Touch or hard to hit icons.
Maybe it's just me being old, but I'd recommend stripping a ton of features from phones and their apps. If you need to do anything more complicated, push people to use a device that's designed for higher levels of interaction.
Only 1% of computer users do programming. Command lines, compilers, and any method of editing code should be ruthlessly killed off otherwise we risk having a collection of features.
Just give me a phone with a bunch of pictures and mandatory like buttons. That’s 90% of computing’s use case and all we need.
You're being satirical, but doing just this has helped make the smartphone a huge success. You still have your computer to write code, nobody is taking it away from you. There are even numerous coding apps for smartphones, to cater to the 1%.
Long press is in many ways an inferior (slower, less precise, easier to fire accidentally), its benefit is better discoverability. Why not work on making 3D Touch more discoverable?
Sometimes the 1% of power users are right and not listening to them leads to bland and less useful products.
I tend to agree. Then again you could argue that iOS is a mature platform to allow for 1% functionalities, which are discovered step-by-step. I still discover awesome settings options through those Tik Tok movies.
Kudos to Apple.