←back to thread

Apple vs the Law

(formularsumo.co.uk)
377 points tempodox | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.215s | source
Show context
neuroelectron ◴[] 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 #
mathstuf ◴[] 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.

replies(4): >>44530294 #>>44530571 #>>44533888 #>>44539667 #
sorrythanks ◴[] No.44530571[source]
if you hold down the space bar you can use that to slide the cursor around :)
replies(3): >>44532041 #>>44532199 #>>44537879 #
1. mathstuf ◴[] 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.