• she/her

Principal engineer at Mercury. I've authored the Dhall configuration language, the Haskell for all blog, and countless packages and keynote presentations.

I'm a midwife to the hidden beauty in everything.

đź’– @wiredaemon


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Gabriella439
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fullmoon
@fullmoon

My wife's trying to bully me into getting an iPhone for my next phone, but my impression from having used both is that Android has a much nicer UX than iOS


fullmoon
@fullmoon

Like, my impression of Apple is that they make great hardware (e.g. M1 MacBook, trackpads) but on the software side (e.g. Safari, OS X) they are not as great.

This particularly matters to me for my phone because I live and die by my phone to keep myself organized so the software is really important to me and the hardware doesn't matter as much.


As a concrete example, the iOS alarm UX is much worse than the Android alarm UX the last time I checked (although things could have changed since the last time I used iOS). Android's alarm system has some killer features for me like:

  • Dismiss an upcoming alarm

    Sometimes I complete a task before the alarm goes off, but I don't want to be chained to my phone just to make sure that I can dismiss the alarm when it does eventually go off. I also don't want to turn off the alarm because then I'll forget to turn it back on if it's a regularly scheduled alarm. Also, knowing that the alarm will go off soon is extremely distracting to me (very similar to the distraction level of an upcoming meeting).

  • Tells me how soon the alarm will go off when I set it

    One of my big anxieties around alarms is that I accidentally set it for the wrong time (e.g. the day after I intended or AM vs. PM) to the point where before Android I would set multiple alarms across several devices for redundancy if something was important. On Android it tells me the the alarm will go off in X hours, which reassures me that I set it correctly.


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in reply to @fullmoon's post:

personal preference really. i find android UX intolerable, and iOS adequate. it's not a universal feeling.

i used to have a much higher esteem of iOS actually, but i cant consider any touch interface to be "good" in current year, since i discovered they were one of the primary drivers of my RSI

in reply to @fullmoon's post:

I’m a former Android user, but I have a bunch of things I really like on iOS:

  • The built-in apps suite is really nice. I use the Notes and Reminders apps multiple times daily; they’re relatively lean, easy to use and have a clear scope. All other utility apps I’ve used (eg for note-taking) have either become bloatware monsters or hiked their prices so much I’ve had to stop using them. Notes, OTOH, has been a great daily driver for more than four years now
  • It’s very cozy inside the Apple walled garden. iCloud sync Just Works, which means I get updated notes, photos, documents etc across all my Apple devices (iCloud can even do conflict resolution for documents). Sharing with family members is also effortless. Airdrop and Handoff are quite magical, both in the sense that they are fantastic but won’t work unless the planets are aligned correctly
  • Responsiveness—IME the iPhone is still more responsive than current-gen Android devices. Scrolling, gestures, etc pretty much never lag. The UI feels consistently snappy and reliable

The one thing I really miss is the Back button

The Alarms UX has always been pretty bad. With recent iOS versions, you can set a "Sleep Schedule" from the Health app. This puts your next alarm, as well as the ability to dismiss the next alram, on the lock screen. Why did two different teams at Apple write the same exact feature? We'll never know. (I don't mean to convince anybody to switch from one platform to another---hopefully this "Sleep Schedule" tip will be helpful to some other iOS user, like it was for me when I found out.)