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Apple vs the Law

(formularsumo.co.uk)
378 points tempodox | 11 comments | 11 Jul 25 06:49 UTC | HN request time: 2.044s | source | bottom
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neuroelectron ◴[11 Jul 25 09:11 UTC] No.44529962[source]▶
I basically stopped buying "apps" almost a decade ago when Apple unceremoniously removed an app i paid for with no refund because the in app browser defaulted to a certain website. Btw I have always hated their "app" branding. But the benefit of it, at least for me, is it's a strong reminder that it's a childish analog to an application.

The only exception to this is I bought the game, Vampire Survivors, no wait. It was free. (because of clones in the app store) Anyway.

The funny thing is I do actually have like 100 (free) apps installed. I just never use any of them except for Brave. I basically immediately forget about them the second I install them because just using them is so awkward. They know they have a usability problem but they can't really square it with their massive app ecosystem except in the most slowest, methodical way possible. In the meantime, more UI annoyances are popping up twice as fast.

iPhone used to compete well a decade ago in usability for things like copying text from a webpage into an email. Despite the phone being much larger, I find it much more difficult to do today, perhaps because selecting text is just so unpredictable with the way web standards have become a pile of cruft. Despite whose fault it is, ultimately it's much worse now. I would only bother trying that on a desktop today unless absolutely necessary.

Sometimes text just becomes impossible to edit in certain circumstances. There's like three different things that can happen on a tap and hold and none of them are consistent. It feels absolutely random which one it does. I used to be able to select text from images, now I have to go through two to three cycles of "hold tap menu" -> "select text from image" until it works. It actually still works fine on my old iPad. How is the regression this bad?

replies(1): >>44530252 #
1. mathstuf ◴[11 Jul 25 09:45 UTC] No.44530252[source]▶
I also find editing on an iPhone to be an exercise in futility. Is it no longer possible to place a cursor in the middle of a word? I end up having to go to a word boundary and erase from there and retype everything.

The keyboard touch areas also seem offset from Android and I end up one row off too much of the time.

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2. neuroelectron ◴[11 Jul 25 09:53 UTC] No.44530294[source]▶
Yes, the UI is so overloaded you can never tell what it's going to do. It might do two or three totally different things. Obviously you want to have the magnifying glass with a cursor. But then the cursor might just decide to jump to the end of the word. Sometimes it's impossible to get the cursor in front of the first letter if the UI is cramped. Maybe it will copy the text into a floating clipboard if your finger drifts a few pixels south. Maybe it will bring up a context menu? If you're using Safari, maybe it won't even let you select any text at all. Then you can take a screenshot and select text from an image to work around that.
3. sorrythanks ◴[11 Jul 25 10:34 UTC] No.44530571[source]▶
if you hold down the space bar you can use that to slide the cursor around :)
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4. neuroelectron ◴[11 Jul 25 13:41 UTC] No.44532041[source]▶
Yes but sometimes it doesn't work, weirdly. The cursor just doesn't go where you put it, jumping to the end of the line or next line entirely, where it gets lost in limbo because it's a single line text box. It's ridiculously broken sometimes.

Now that's not a big deal until it happens 3 times in a row randomly and now something that would take less than half a second on a keyboard is taking over 20 seconds. Not only that the random behavior is extremely frustrating which just makes you avoid it in the future.

5. mathstuf ◴[11 Jul 25 13:56 UTC] No.44532199[source]▶
I use that on Android all the time. But I feel I've only gotten it to work once or twice on iPhone. And even then the word boundaries were very "sticky" (IIRC) and precision placement still very difficult.
6. woah ◴[11 Jul 25 16:12 UTC] No.44533888[source]▶
I do more writing on my iPhone (it's the one with the largest screen) than I do on a computer. I can do about 40wpm. To move the cursor you just hold down on the space bar. These complaints kind of sound like someone from the 90's saying that the close window button is on the wrong side
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7. eviks ◴[11 Jul 25 17:42 UTC] No.44535018[source]▶
> just hold down on the space bar

It's not "just", because you have to switch from the more natural "tap where you want to edit" to a separate gesture, which also takes longer and is less precise. You might also use a different keyboard with better layout/symbol visibility that doesn't support this gesture

8. neuroelectron ◴[11 Jul 25 22:17 UTC] No.44537316[source]▶
40wpm is 33% less than what a bad typist can do. Repeating "just hold down the space bar" doesn't make it behave any less erratically. We had Palm Pilots in the 90s and they ran on AAA batteries and editing text on them was certainly more consistent than the current state of iOS.
9. gausswho ◴[11 Jul 25 23:32 UTC] No.44537879[source]▶
Thank you, I had no idea. When did this feature land?
10. djaychela ◴[12 Jul 25 05:54 UTC] No.44539667[source]▶
Coming from android I have to agree, it's terrible. The only help I can offer is that if you press and hold the space bar you can drag to go through to where you need to be, but it's still painful. I can only bear ios because I am using SwiftKey - the default keyboard genuinely stopped me from switching to an iPhone, I found it that bad. And some apps force you to use the default ios one which is even worse!
11. mathstuf ◴[12 Jul 25 12:49 UTC] No.44541700[source]▶
Just yesterday I had to edit something on an iPhone. I finally managed to put the cursor at the front to add a word before what was there already. But when I started typing, auto correct (or whatever) put the cursor back at the end of the word. I ended up just removing everything and typing from scratch because figuring out Apple logic behind such a behavior just wasn't on the agenda.