Hey Apple Fix your phones
Loads of complaints out there about the same two issues:
1- Making an unwanted call from the lock screen
to a missed incoming call
2- Making an unwanted call when the person you were
talking to ends the call before you
These are both examples of truly bad UI/UX and Apple does not seem to either comprehend this or want to fix it. Most of the complaints and requests for solutions go back many years.
The first issue happens when you receive a call and do not answer it. You grab your phone, accidentally touch the missed call notice and it instantaneously makes a call.
This is horrible under lots of circumstances, not the least of which are:
– You did not want to call that person at that time
– It is an unknown number and likely a malicious actor
– Known caller in a different timezone that you should not be calling at that time
– Etc.
I deal with people all over the world. I don’t want to accidentally call someone in Singapore at 2:00 AM just because my stupid phone does not have a sensible “Place call?” (or whatever) intermediate step. This is really bad form in any business setting and, given how this issue has been ignored, Apple does not seem to understand this at all.
You can’t quite disable this unless, at a minimum, you disable home screen calling and unlocking the phone using facial recognition. The latter breaking what some consider a UX improvement. And a lot of it seems to be about millisecond timing issues. In other words, if you just happen to touch the notice at the same time as your face is recognized, it makes a call instantly.
Users should have absolute control over when and how a call is placed. At a minimum, if the number IS NOT IN YOUR ADDRESS BOOK, the phone should NEVER call it without confirmation. If you call a spammer you give them “proof of life” and your number is now added to various databases, making things worse.
The second problem happens when you’ve placed a call from your address book and the call is ended. You and the person you were talking to reach for the end-of-call button at the same time. The other person beats you by a fraction of a second. This happens just before your finger contacts the screen. What happens next is that the call ends before you touch the screen and the UI is replaced with the address book. When your finger makes contact with the screen, you instantly call someone else.
Once again, this is terrible UI/UX. I have accidentally called business contacts and family on the other side of the planet at truly embarrassing and inconvenient times because of this unnecessary and stupid UX problem.
I mean, there are so many ways to fix this it is ridiculous that it has not been done after years of complaints. For example:
– Disable calling for 0.25 seconds after call termination
– After call termination and within 0.25 seconds,
any new call from the address book requires a confirmation dialog
– Even if a call is terminated from the other side, hold the
phone UI for 0.25 seconds and allow both sides to click the red button
– Etc.
It is my general feeling that Apple has added so much complexity and overloading to iOS that the user experience in lots of cases had degraded over the years. What’s next? Tap the screen twice while spinning and rubbing the top of your head with the phone?
The overloading (I am using the term in the sense of operator overloading/polymorphism; a case where one thing does many things depending on how you, in this case, touch it) has also caused an explosion of often competing and incomprehensible settings. When I say this I think in terms of average users rather than technologists who might be accustomed to complexity at this scale or greater.
I just want to be able to tell my phone: Do not, ever, call a number from my lock screen or a missed call notice. Do not, ever, call a number immediately after a call was terminated. These are simple problems. Why are they not fixed?
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42110142
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