I'm honestly confused... Do you really believe that most users have distinct concepts in their mental model for "wifi off" and "disconnected from a network"? They look at the button, it's not blue anymore, it's off. Then later they think... "Wait how did this randomly turn on again?" I believe this will be the experience even of the majority of tech savvy users, let alone typical ones.
The new control center behaves in the way that most people actually use the buttons. More importantly it solves a major problem in that it no longer requires the user to know what radios need to be on for various features they use to work. Apple probably has all the support call stats they need to decide this was a better behavior.
It always matters if you're trying to minimize user frustration and confusion. The mental model determines what the user expects their actions to do.
> because the user shouldn't be responsible for managing the radios in their phone. > The new control center behaves in the way that most people actually use the buttons. More importantly it solves a major problem in that it no longer requires the user to know what radios need to be on for various features they use to work.
I don't think anyone (certainly not me) is arguing that this isn't a useful feature for the phone to have and is what many people want, at least some of the time. The argument is that the feature's behavior should be clear rather than misleading.
> Apple probably has all the support call stats they need to decide this was a better behavior.
Again, fine, but don't suggest one thing and silently do the "better" thing. Either allow the user to confirm the behavior, or create a UI that clarifies the behavior so people aren't misled into believing that "off until 5am" or "off until you move" means "off."
If Apple wants to change this paradigm, they have to be very very careful about it. And they obviously haven't been.
Nobody cares about this other than technical people, who really only care because they perceive it to be Apple Arrogance. Nearly 40% of the installed base is on iOS 11, if there were complaints about this we'd have heard about it by now (just like we hear about everything else).
Tech blogs and the EFF might write about it, but aside from the HN threads about it, no one in the real world will ever care because the change is an improvement over what it used to do.
Deliberately changing how a well known function works is stupid, especially the part about it not being immediately obvious that it now works differently from literally every other phone out there.
This is a statement that must have links confirming that most people actually do use it that way.
Meanwhile the new shitty toggle leads to my phone randomly dropping perfectly stable 4G connection in an attempt to connect to random Wi-Fi hotspots on the train
So if most iPhone users are using these buttons to disconnect from their current network, or to disconnect the current bluetooth device, then I understand why they'd change them to have that meaning.
Disconnecting from the current wifi network or disconnecting the current bluetooth device probably comes up somewhat frequently as a task the user wants to accomplish, whereas actually disabling the radios likely does not come up much at all outside of airplane mode. So I get what Apple is doing. I wonder why they chose to maintain the button UI though. Perhaps it's because people are expecting it, and are used to it?
The UI (mis)informs the user that wifi has been turned off by greying it out, at the very least it's inconsistent with other toggle buttons. Or are there other things apple decides that you don't really want turned off?
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208086