Being a 70's child, in computing since the mid 80s you made me almost spill my Monday coffee.
What a laugh, do you want the examples on Apple's side?
Being a 70's child, in computing since the mid 80s you made me almost spill my Monday coffee.
What a laugh, do you want the examples on Apple's side?
I mean Cocoa and SwiftUI are more consistent in the sense that a lot of stuff automatically adapts when Apple changes styling. And they certainly have less churn and more focus compared to Microsoft.
Basically it's been Objective-C and Cocoa since around 2000, later on Swift and then also SwiftUI. That's not too bad for 25 years.
And in contrast to MS, you didn't get abandoned when you were sticking to the official frameworks. Quite contrary, you basically got the switches from PowerPC to x86 to ARM almost for free for example.
Apple is not perfect by any means, but in this regard I truly think they are ahead of Microsoft.
Sure, if we ignore the stuff and bugs they still have, the missing features in SwiftUI and performance regressions, or the iPhonisms brought to macOS with Catalyst.
The reboot of frameworks based in OpenGL with the Metal rewrite.
And many other things I am not bothering with since all those OS System N releases, A/UX UI framework, Teligent based documents,....
Come on, you think SwiftUI has more bugs than the ten different Microsoft frameworks?
There are just more people encountering them because the developers are concentrated on using one thing.
It’s not perfect, but a compared to Microsoft, calling Apple out for having bugs is a little rich isn't it?
I pose to you, if the Microsoft offerings are so compelling, why are the serious players using 3rd party wrappers like QT and Avalonia?
It’s because the first party offerings are not compelling. They’re a disaster dumpster fire. And buggy.
If Apple products are so compelling why are so many devs using Electron, React Native and Flutter on macOS, to the point it deserved being mentioned at WWDC 2025 State of the Nation Keynote?
My point was don't throw stones when having a big glass roof as well.
Apple isn't the perfection you make out to be, also has a rich history of failures, and only did not went bankrupt due to sheer luck of doing the right decision when there were not many remaining to take.
That's a different issue. Things like Electron are popular not because native development is buggy, but because most developers these days are web developers. They know Javascript. They've never written anything in C/C++ or even the slightly friendlier Swift, Rust, or Go. Electron lets people who only know the Web make desktop apps.
Nope, it is the same issue now being worded around to sell the Apple is shiny story above.
> If Apple products are so compelling why are so many devs using Electron, React Native and Flutter on macOS
That is not how the decision making for cross-platform works. You choose those alternatives knowing that they are crap in many respects, yet accept the trade offs because you want to save money on dev hours.
The whole point was the greatness of Apple platform.
That’s not the point being argued either, nor it being perfect. It’s just about Apple’s UI frameworks being more coherent and consistent across all their own platforms, unlike Microsoft. Even Android developers who’ve done a bit of work on iOS easily agree that Apple’s SDKs are far better designed and behave more predictably than Google’s.
They use React Native and Flutter because they want to target more than just MacOS/iOS
Meaning they don't worship Apple UIs as the ultimate design?
It's about the tradeoff.
Option 1: spend double the effort, embrace Apple's UI
Option 2: do it once, ship faster, make more money.
Nobody in this thread is claiming Apple is perfect, just ahead of MS in UI consistency and _less_ buggy
"Ahead" with yes but attitude.
None of the UI frameworks is perfect. Neither the ones from Microsoft, nor the ones from Apple, nor Qt, nor GTK (lol...), nor the web-based ones.
I'm just saying that in my personal opinion and experience, the ones from Apple have the best yay-to-wtf ratio. Your mileage may vary.
The evergreen question of "how do you go back and/or close an app on IOS?"
This one caught me completely off guard when opening YouTube the first time on an iPad: Accidentally clicked on a wrong button and got stuck in a "please subscribe to premium" modal. No amount of swiping or tapping outside the popup would help, only thing left was killing the entire app.
This experience put a major dent in my perception of the "Apple has the most intuitive UI" narrative.
The YouTube app has non-standard and nonsensical UX on every platform. It's Google's fault, nothing to do with Apple.
Case in point: The YouTube app for Apple TV. Everything (pausing, playing, changing subtitles) has been done opposite to the standard player found in every other app. You cannot use the main button to pause and resume, for example. Recently they broke swiping. Normally, you swipe the remote to navigate between UI elements such as squares in a grid or in lists with a light touch. It's very fluid, like a touch screen. But the YT app has added severe "inertia" to touch gestures, and you now have to "fling" your finger on the remote trackpad to navigate. Everything feels syrupy and stuck.
YouTube and Amazon's Prime TV app are the two worst apps I've ever used on Apple TV. I believe they both use some non-native UI toolkit that doesn't respect native OS conventions and doesn't even try to. Pretty incredible given the size and budgets of these companies.
The YouTube app does the exact same thing on Android. I ran into this just yesterday on my gf's phone, as I'd just added her to my family plan, tried to verify the settings on her phone, and it trapped me on an upsell screen for YT Premium that I had to kill the app to get out of.
How is bad UX in the YouTube app Apple's fault? You can mess up Android's back button as well.
Because Apple does not enforce uniformity
If Ah, yes, problems with the UI on the OS which for 99% consists of modals is not the OS vendor problem, noted.
Maybe just the circles I run in but these are not evergreen questions in my experience. I don't even know what "go back" is supposed to mean here, or for that matter what it would mean in a Windows application. Is there a system level "go back" in WinAmp/Excel/SimCity/Photoshop I've never seen before?
I was referring to IOS, not MACOS
Androids do have universal back button at the bottom on the phone or the same swipe gesture if you want but iphones do not.
Sometimes swipe (the direction and position is a guessing game), sometimes and x (right or left ) and the behavior is inconsistent too (back or close)
There are some guidelines but more often than not seems like every app has it's own method and you need to get used to it
In iOS, task manager and closure can't be overridden. You swipe right to return to previous application. You can swipe left for a couple of seconds if you didn't intend to do that.
You swipe up and remove the application from the stack, all processes of the application is killed.
Background processing has strict limits, and you need permissions to run longer than that, and for some use cases, there are no recourse. OS swaps you out or freezes the app.
If you want an app to work in the background, don't kill it, period. Push notifications are handled by the OS and is not hindered by this.
What about going "back" INSIDE an application?
Think for example reddit, you open a thread, how do you go back?
You open the "reply window, now ho you ho back? Maybe close it directly?
I Android this is all handled by the same function and is often ranked as the most frustrating design choice in IOS
I'm not using Reddit in any capacity since they have started giving their content for LLM training, so I can't help you with that, but looking at 4-5 third party applications right now, they all have a left arrow at top left to go back.
They all are very different applications and have very different designs, yet the arrow is there.
To be honest, I baffled at your question for a second or so, because I never thought about that, yet the method is so universal that I was not thinking about it at all.
There is a common way to go back (swipe from the left edge of the screen). Some apps just don't integrate well and ignore the platform patterns.
I believe swiping from left to right is common for both Android and iOS.
Android has both a swipe gesture or a widget that simulates buttons that used to be at the bottom of the screen
...and iOS has both an arrow at the top left and a swipe gesture. I can't see how they are that different.
I feel that some people are just too old to get used to the swipe based ui. I mean friends of mine who just keep buying the only phones with (screen based) back and home buttons.
It's not just that you need to get used to gestures, it's that they are not discoverable at all, and that they can be awkward to perform with mobility issues, old hands, short fingers, etc. It's easy to make the wrong gesture, eg. the phone detects a swipe down instead of left to right, more so if you are holding it in one hand, so it's finicky and frustrating to have to rely on it as the only way of doing a common action. Why is it so wrong to have a simple navigation bar, it doesn't take up any more space than the hideous notch at the top?
I could get used to touch gestures if they were more consistent and tolerant enough for wrong inputs. It may work in one app but not another. One app expects me to swipe from left to right to go back, another wants me to swipe from top to bottom for the same thing. It may mark an email as unread if I start the swipe a pixel too far away from the screen edge. On Android swipe gestures may vary even on different phones from the same brand. In iOS, tapping the top edge of the screen means scroll to the top. Except in the Photo app, where it means "scroll to the top of the current section, or almost the top, or do nothing and make the user guess if they just tapped the wrong way".
Meanwhile when there's an X button or arrow to the left I always know what it's going to do aside from one or two overly creative Android apps.
It's not just mental, as you age you lose moisture in your skin and with that accuracy with touch devices.
Hmm, would explain that frustrated pokey interaction I see elder people often throw at touchscreens... you know, chin up, peering down through their reading glasses, going for a 4th, 5th try at something...
Is that what's going on? So many touch gestures seem to rely on landing in the right 2mm diameter area, but the minimum reliable resolution for touch seems to be a 4mm diameter circle. It's even worse for my father, even though cognitively, he would have no trouble understanding the hypothetical requirement. It's also noticeably worse during the depths of winter.
Android has an option to enable these buttons on a toolbar at the bottom, I always turn it on.
Why change what works fine? Maybe that's the definition of being too old, can't be bothered to change to new things.
I'm in that group.
It's not "getting used to", I feel like that gesture is less practical. It involves or using the "circle" to assist on how to use the gesture (creating a black void on the screen that you need to plan your use of the phone around) or having the swipe that 1) is not as reliable in my opinion and 2) can be triggered accidentally
For me is like claiming that touch screens on cars are the future and people are too old to get used to it.
Maybe saying "too old" is disrespectful indeed, what I meant was more that my kids grow up with swiping everywhere but we grew up with (hardware, then touchscreen) buttons and the older we get the harder it is to get used to new use paradigms.
Swipes are of course nice because they allow for the same interactions without taking any screen real-estate. And I have to say it quite consistent across the iOS apps I use.
I feel that some people are just forgetting what the reason it's easy for them is because they learned that "swipe based UI" ages ago.
When I get handed iPhone I have no clue on how to even open an additional tab in Safari and any finger gestures do not do the things what I expect nor there is a lick of indication on how to do something. It's all just a memorized magical incantations at this point. But hey you are familiar with them so it's easy to bash on everyone who is not in yours eco-system.
It's still easier than Windows CE though.
You swipe backward. Been that way for twenty years.