“They don’t scale. They don’t collate. They’re not granular. They’re not flexible,” Rene Ritchie writes for iMore. “The list of complaints about iPhone and iPad notifications is long. So, how can Apple fix them?”
Here’s a snippet from iMore’s “Vector” podcast:
Dieter: “The New York Times” once a year makes all of their reporters use the website on their phones and use their app. It does not allow them to go to newyorktimes.com on their computers.
I would love for a week for a bunch of Apple engineers and designers to have their home screens disabled. They can only use their phones the way that I use my phone, which is notifications first, and then only after you triage that stuff do you go and open up an app. Usually by the time you’re done triaging, you want to move onto something else anyway.
It is possible to use an Android phone and almost never tap an icon on the home screen to deal with something because everything that you want is so carefully curated and set up in your notifications panel. I’d love to see an iOS engineer try and live that way because I bet that we would see some fixes pretty quickly. [laughs]
Rene: That’s super-interesting to me because the -1 home screen, which is the — I forget what they call it now — Siri Today view thing plus widgets plus all of that is supposed to be a step towards a more modern home screen, but it’s two things…
Dieter: It’s the most underrated part of iOS, also, by the way. I love that screen.
Christina: I do, too. I wish that I could make it my main screen.
Rene: I think it’s sort of a soft test for that, because they reiterate it so often. It’s like every version of iOS, it gets a little bit better, a little bit smarter, and it does a little bit more, but it’s still separate from notifications.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: On iPhone X, the first thing we do after swiping up os swipe left to right.
News flash: not everyone lives and dies by the notifications screen. It’s arrogant to assume everyone else should want what the journalists want on their iPhones.
Perhaps we should be given the choice as to what home screen each of us would prefer.
One of the many, many “features” in iOS I don’t use is Notifications. After a short trial with them on, so much BS gets pushed through, Notifications is not a value adding proposition for me, on the iOs or MacOS
OYTG, good idea.
I have worked full time for 52 years, with two large corporations and two of my own businesses, one current.
There has to be a balance between the marketing sides. Marketing tends to not worry about whether a product is really ready, more inclined to just fling it out there, and then run the other way so they don’t get something flung back at them.
Never can be too many “features” for them.
Engineering side, if you gave them their way, nothing would go out until its perfect, so nothing would go out.
I like Notifications but I never count on them working, like a lot of iOS “features”. On the Mac side, not much happening on either side.
Steve Jobs had the balance mostly right although when he got obsessed with music, and obviously his health, Apple started to lose the balance.
Tim Cook, supposedly a supply chain guy, at least now is far more oriented toward the marketing side. Have been on the supply chain side, you think everything is ok because if there is something, anything is flowing through the pipeline, well it could be worse.
Time to change the balance, move it toward giving the engineers
time to get it right as opposed to just pumping it out.
It will help sales in the end, although the sales guys will NEVER believe that. Slap them down for a bit. It’s good for them.
Develop fewer better features, then you can get them right, and then sell more of what you have.
hint; more Macs than now, they are the base.
And all of these other things like Beats the list is too long to even remember of things that are out there that don’t work well.
It WILL get embarrassing, Apple TV things like that.
Apple Tv is an embarrassment, hardware and UI wise.
And Beats acquisition … perplexing at best.