It funny, while rare bugs are part of the problem, fundamental design is a problem that confronts me much more. The epidemic spread of animations that reduce functionality and responsiveness are pretty unforgivable. This is something that affects all users that try to interact with their phones, and I'm getting pretty sick of modal switches between "accepts touch input" and "doesn't accept input" when there are no visual indicators of the modality of the current moment. Oh how I long for the old iPhone 4 and it's greater responsiveness and more fluid UX.
Animations are one of the reasons I use Android. iOS is just littered with gratuitous animations that needlessly slow down the interface. My two least favorite are the home screen zoom-in effect you get every time you unlock the device and the animated text on typing autocomplete suggestions. And you can't disable either of these without disabling system animations entirety.
This stuff is symptomatic of Apple's love of form over function, also manifested in dumb and costly UI gimmicks like 3D touch.
Properly designed animations are function: they give a sense of place and help in creating a navigation hierarchy instead of having things pop into and out of existence.
> iOS is just littered with gratuitous animations that needlessly slow down the interface
Their gratuitousness is evaluated by you by the "slowdown" they bring. The only slowdown they bring me is when they're not interruptible/concurrent, but that's a bug, like the calculator app's one.
> My two least favorite are the home screen zoom-in effect you get every time you unlock the device
Unless I'm literally trying to race the beam, by the time I move my finger from the home button to a position over the screen the animation has completed. The animation is interruptible and you can tap or swipe right through it.
> and the animated text on typing autocomplete suggestions
How is that slowing you down? You just type <space> which triggers the animation yet merrily continue as the animation proceeds while you are already inputting the next words.
> costly UI gimmicks like 3D touch
To each his own: I use it everyday to peek at things and multitask, it's a real timesaver.
My issue with 3D Touch is that there doesn't appear to be any language for when you can use it or what it will do if you can.
90% of the time, I forget it's there.
A specific case of where it was a problem for me is that tapping the lockscreen icon for the flashlight does nothing. I thought it was broken for a week till I accidentally discovered that you had to force push it.
Unless I'm literally trying to race the beam, by the time I move my finger from the home button to a position over the screen the animation has completed.
My brain can't identify the icon I want to tap while the animation is in progress. I have to wait for it to finish then parse the screen for my target.
You just type <space> which triggers the animation yet merrily continue as the animation proceeds while you are already inputting the next words.
Again I can't identify the word I want to tap while it's moving around. I have to wait for the animation to complete, then figure out if I want to tap any of the suggestions or keep typing.
I agree animation can be functional, but both of these animations are purely there for aesthetic reasons, get old very quickly, and actively slow down my use of the device. If I have to use an iPhone for any extended period of time I turn off animations at the system level and use GBoard for typing.
As for 3D touch. I always forget it even exists because it has zero affordance. It increases the manufacturing cost of the device for very little user benefit for the typical user. I think it also forced Apple's hand on FaceID and drove the cost of their flagship device out of the range of a lot of people that would otherwise buy one.
> My brain can't identify the icon I want to tap while the animation is in progress. I have to wait for it to finish then parse the screen for my target.
Interesting. I sure don't parse each icon precisely as it moves but the colors and layout allow me to intuitively have my bearings and know which page I'm on and then it's muscle memory. I can see it being an issue though.
> I have to wait for the animation to complete, then figure out if I want to tap any of the suggestions or keep typing.
Oh my bad, I thought you were talking about the autocorrection bubble that has the word come down on <space> but this is really about the predictive words above the keyboard. I turned them off entirely because I basically never used them and it seems to make the keyboard itself terribly slow after some time as it computes suggestions.
> As for 3D touch I always forget it even exists because it has zero affordance.
So are keyboard shortcuts, 3D Touch is not a requirement for using the phone but it allows one to be more efficient without cluttering the interface. Also, you typically don't forget that you can scroll or pinch to zoom on an image or map or whatever, it's kind of the same deal.
Oh one more I just can't live without now: force pressing on the keyboard turns it into a touchpad for the caret, and re-forcing it starts a selection.
> It increases the manufacturing cost of the device for very little user benefit for the typical user.
When I saw it demo'd I thought "what a gimmick", yet now it gives me so much value that any device without it feels gimped to me.
Regarding keyboard shortcuts, at least, on a desktop there are standard affordances for showing what keys will trigger an action.
When browsing a menu bar or looking at a dialogue, labels will usually have an underlined letter (sometimes revealed by pressing Alt) that indicates you can press Alt+<letter> to trigger that action. Items from the menu bar will typically list their corresponding hotkeys directly.
This is true across pretty much every desktop UI toolkit, even, surprisingly, in the Electron based Slack client I have open right now.
Android has a lot of gratuitous animations as well. To give an example, the Clock app on my Pixel animates the tab icons, which I find dumb and annoying.
At least macOS gives you the option to disable gratuitous animations with their accessibility settings. I'm hoping eventually Android will wise up and follows their lead.
> developer mode which comes with its own set of drawbacks
Not really, you turn on "developer options". There is no developer mode as such, just many separate options, all with defaults that don't change things from non-developer behavior.
I have animations set to 2x regular speed, it's nice.
