Thoughts on the New iOS Control Centre

The gist:

> they’re shipping half-baked software just to hit some arbitrary deadlines.

Control Centre aside, Apple is my favorite example in founder-led vs manager-led company comparisons. The same company totally changed in less than 10 years. Profits multiplied. But practically everything that made Apple craftsmanship iconic is gone. Feels like their current domination is the echo of their older investment in software-hardware co-design and recent supply chain dominance, but not real innovation.

You know, it's amazing how different people view iOS 18. I, and many other blind people, love iOS 18 because the system for typing in Braille, and now controlling the phone in Braille, just using the touch screen, has been majorly improved. Although, we don't have an LLM based image description feature, like Android now has in TalkBack 15. I'd love Android, but it's screen reader is so sluggish, especially when scrolling the screen where it feels like it takes half a second, that a one year old Pixel 8 is much less responsive than a 4 year old iPhone SE 2. It's a shame, but Google hasn't changed much in the last five years, and I don't see them changing much before the Pixel 8 is deprecated.

It's pretty bad, but at least you can now remove that annoying torch/light icon on the lockscreen, which I (and quite a few other people I notice) always seem to be triggering, and then pulling my phone out of my pocket with the light on...

I still wish they'd allow disabling the ability to scrub playing music/podcast timeline on the locked lockscreen as well, as I seem to regularly seek to random positions in whatever's playing with my phone in my pockets and when trying to grasp my phone to get it out (in coats with larger pockets), meaning I often miss bits of podcasts or have to repeat them as the position randomly skips.

Especially with Face unlock, I don't really see why you'd want to scrub/seek playing music without unlocking, but maybe someone does, but at least adding an option to control that would be nice...

Didn't read the full article but I feel I don't need to.

I updated yesterday and I really hate the new design. I'm not using a term for "dislike" I profoundly HATE this change.

Tiny icons, difficult to move/size items, excessive blank space around them...also the UX for repositioning elements has some bug that makes a widget dissapear for a moment and jump from "nowhere" to the desired position (if you manage to place it at first try, of course)

Maybe it's a strategy to make users of the SE line jump to a bigger screen? :-|

While we are at it: Can someone explain to me, why I can lock my screen in the vertical position but not horizontally.

Press the rotation lock in Control Center and it locks the current state would be a natural thing. But that is not how it works on iOS. Rotation lock rotates the screen back to vertical and locks it there. Is this the same on Android?

Also: The icon is a lock enclosed in a clockwise arrowed ~ 350° circle. That shouts rotation lock to me. If it has to be vertical lock, at least indicate that in the icon.

Interestingly, I had the exact same reaction when trying to figure out how to enable/disable WiFi. Why Apple, why? I wonder what telemetry tells them about this icon - wouldn't it be one of the most used ones? Or is there maybe an incentive for Apple to make sure users have WiFi on that I don't understand.

The icons sizes all shrank significantly with no option to increase the size. Combined with a ton of space on either side of the icons, now they are icons are tiny, especially on an iPhone mini.

Also, no one expects a + icon to mean "organize". Sometimes the + icon is not even tappable due to other random stuff that gets jammed up there, like And the new power button doesn't do anything when you tap it, only when you hold it. No feedback at all.

That said, I do appreciate the ability to move the icons anywhere (to put important ones closer to the bottom). Now, can we add the ability to add some of these to the lock screen without using 3rd party apps?

The new Control Center reminds me of the one my Xiaomi had in 2019, which was a weird cheap copy of the latest iOS design at the time.

But the main thing that I personally dislike is the whole customization aspect. The control center always felt to me like a under the hood kinda overlay that you just pulled over your personal phone for a moment. Like it didn’t belong to the OS, but to the device itself. Like the bottom bar that you use for switching apps, or like the volume and sleep buttons, or like the Settings app, or like the menu bar in macOS. It was always there, always the same, no matter what app you were in or whose phone it was. I liked that.

Another example of the janky configuration UI: https://twitter.com/jeromepaulos/status/1835915486757884413

I actually liked it, a bit fiddly, but being able to reorder and resize as well as have multiple screens is better IMO. Not perfect, but I think my control centre is better than before

I like it. Needs further improvement, but it’s better than what existed.

Is this a post posted by me? I have basically the same thought on the new control center. The new UI and edit flow truly disappoint me a lot.

The connection group is also a terrible idea. Why don't apple just let you do grouping yourself and make every button in it to be available.

I literally went through this exact thought process with new control center today. Absolute nightmare.

Similar thoughts after upgrading to iOS 18. The new control center is a mess, the way to discover which widgets are available to add is painful, and I don't understand why there is no button for Wi-Fi.

On the bright side, being able to remove the 'screen mirroring' button is nice, and I can make the music control widget extra-large by default.

I get that they changed the “1x1” controls to be circles so that they’re the same as on the Lock Screen. But still, the control center does look kind of bad because of it…

Not to mention that I'm sure Apple didn't address the insulting behavior of the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth controls.

When I turn those off, I damn well mean it. I don't mean turn them back on behind my back later. But that's what Apple does.

But hey, if they want this half-assed temporary disabling, they still could have made smart decisions for users who want these states to be permanent. Here's the easy solution: If the user has gone into Settings and turned Wi-Fi and Bluetooth OFF, then treat the Control Center incarnations as PERMANENT.

But nope, the UI mavens at Apple couldn't figure that out. So they made the Control Center states a fraud to serve... whom, exactly? Who was upset that they turned stuff off and it stayed off?

Hilariously I have a totally empty circle in my control center. Maybe it was accessibility / contrast dimming before? It’s just broken now :)

Overall it is an improvement over the old and the quirks are adapted to in a few minutes.

> Apple recorded almost 100 billion in profit in 2023. They can afford to hire every single UX and UI designer on the face of the planet with that money

Lots of senior people have left in the last 10 years, and Covid/RTO dialed up the exodus to 11. Many of the best Apple designers - the ones who had been there for over a decade or two, with lots of deep, hard to acquire skills/knowledge - are gone, and they made so much money from stocks that there’s nothing Apple could offer to bring them back, seeing as the reason they left is that they missed the scrappy high impact environment of the 2000s/early 2010s and got tired of the trillion dollar company vibes.

It’s a tough problem to prevent, and it’s only going to get worse.

A tangential but related problem is that old school designers came from a very different background than modern day UX designers - since UX wasn’t formalized as a field back then, it was industrial design/print design/architecture/software nerds who found themselves having an interest in designing UIs who got the jobs. Today’s junior UX designers all have the same portfolio of hamburger menu apps and nonsensical personas and are lost the moment they have to design something more complex than an informational website in Figma. There might be 1000x more UX designers today than there was 20 years ago, but finding amazing ones in all the noise is harder than it ever was (the same way you can find tons of junior devs who can copy paste React code from chatGPT, but good luck finding devs that can write clean high performance code).

The company is still streets ahead the competition in many areas tho so I’m not too worried about the stock price for the next 5-10 years. Beyond that, who knows.

The image of SJ in a leather jacket flipping off IBM often comes to my mind. Apple is as old, has as many employees, and is much richer, than IBM was at the time this picture was taken. Time for founders to go take pictures of themselves flipping the bird in front of AP.

I like so much of iOS 18 but yes, control centre has a load of issues when you analyse it.

I’ve removed stuff until it’s all on 1 page which makes it quite a bit simpler

"Who needs quick access to the print centre on an iPhone"

People with children at schools whose workflow is still completely paper based.

Another fun thing I've noticed is that the volume and brightness bars now have a lot of input latency

Apple engineers now build features in order to get promoted, not to build great software

I wish more people had the ability to daily-drive an iOS device and an Android, to more clearly see the positives and negatives of both.

Having long ago switched to iOS as my primary, I am continually infuriated by some of the awful UX decisions made on that platform - the control center, yes, but also the app library drawer, the settings screen, the clock app, the list goes on. I could write a rant like OP for each one.

Android has its own ways of driving me insane, but it's clear that Apple's UX has been slipping for a long time.

"The only way to control wifi is to include your stupid connectivity group [..]"

Not to defend Apple too much, but I think the reason is that the toggles in the control group are interdependent. It would be very confusing if you toggle a button and it causes other toggle buttons to switch state that are either far away on the screen or worse - not visible at all.

Take airplane mode for example. The way it works on iOS[1] is that the act of turning it on toggles the other icons in the group off - once in that moment.

It does not prevent you from switching back on WiFi or Bluetooth. So you can end up with WiFi enabled despite being in airplane mode. To complicate matters, this is not true for mobile data.

A cleaner and more intuitive design in my opinion would have been if the toggles were all independent, with airplane mode overruling all. Of course this would prevent WiFi in airplane mode, which might be a desirable use case, and worse: make people avoid airplane mode when they are mandated to use it.

[1] I am curious how Android solved this. If anyone knows, I'd like to know.

"By swiping Up/Down. Since its inception, you swipe left/right to navigate across screens on an iPhone."

Left/Right is generation Tinder, Up/Down generation TikTok, very easy.

Instead of night mode I want a generation switch. Oh, wait the phone knows my age, it could do that automatically. Apple, adapt to my needs!

Apple usually nails user-friendly experiences. Maybe it's a matter of time, and we all will eventually get used to it

I had the exact same experience on my ipad. I wish I had bought an android tablet instead, using apple's software is dreadful. I won't fall for it again.

While I agree with the points, I think the new Control Center is a step in the right direction: opening way to more customization "in the Apple way": opening things little by little by keeping general UX consistent.

Is it buggy? Yeah, I've encountered the same bugs as the OP, and yes I wish setting Wi-Fi was a step less, though I think the upsides to the new design are more than the downsides (which can be sorted out by time).

I liked it.

> Let me add a simple icon to toggle control wifi (...) There’s a single toggle for mobile data, a single toggle for Bluetooth, a single toggle for airplane mode, and a single toggle for personal hotspot. No wifi. Why? Why Apple? You added a fucking single toggle for Print Centre.

This is, in my view, the single most baffling omission in the new control center. It's fully customizable now, but doesn't have an individual toggle for Wifi???

This also leaves off the other terrible decision: the way icons reorder themselves randomly when you reposition things. Want to swap the positions of the brightness and volume controls? Prepare for literally everything to become shuffled for seemingly no reason].

We are at the point in time when you could fire every UI designer on the planet and would be doing humanity a favor. They all have the approach that change for the sake of change is a good thing. It isn't.

If you want control of something, why would you use an apple product?

I honestly think the person that is to blame here is you. Yes, there might be some weird decisions here, but if you get so mad about those minor changes, you should make at least some research before updating.

It’s hard for me to believe that people actually get that angry at their phone and how it operates.

> thought you were a true friend and true friends don’t let iOS turn to shit.

In what rosy-tinted world was it ever not when viewed with such a high level of expectations? Remember, this is the OS that had stellar copy&paste support from day 1!