I’m pretty hardcore when it comes to products carrying an Apple logo. I pretty much own them all (Cinema Display, iPod touch, shuffle, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, and Mac mini). If that’s not drinking the kool-aid, I don’t know what qualifies today. Before I get a host of comments asking, every single one of those devices solves a very real problem in my life.
But, spending 98% of my time on Apple devices gives me some credibility to say that iOS needs a lot more refining than just iOS notifications. Today it leaked that Apple’s looking at picking up a company to completely rebuild Push Notifications. Keep in mind that a little while back Apple also hired Rich Dellinger, the guy responsible for the fantastic notification system built into webOS.
If you’re not sure what notifications are, ask yourself this, “have I every been interrupted by a blue popup while using my iPhone?” If the answer is yes, then you’ve seen a Push Notification. If the answer is no, consider yourself lucky. They’ve been driving most of us absolutely nuts since they were released.
We’re going to leave the prognosticating about notifications to others today (there’s a lot of it currently). In my opinion, the problem here isn’t iOS notifications on a whole. It’s afterthought additions to iOS. If you remember, Push Notifications were Apple’s original answer to multitasking. According to Apple, iPhone users didn’t need multitasking because we’d be able to manage information from other applications with Push Notifications.
Push Notifications had a lot of problems. Apple announced them on June 9, 2008, and expected to release the technology in September 2008, but the release kept getting delayed. 2008 turned into 2009, and by the time it was finally released, it was September 2009. It turned out that Apple had to completely rebuild the APNS services because of scalability problems.
Apple thought Push Notifications would solve battery problems associated with background processes. Turns out they were wrong. Apple introduced multitasking soon with iOS 4.0.
Starting to notice a pattern here yet? Apple has a history of solving new problems and giving people what they want, while forgetting about the technologies of the past. Multitasking was introduced because people kept asking for it, and Apple seemed to abandon Push Notifications. Now that people have multitasking, people are complaining about Push Notifications.
Apple keeps providing patch jobs because people ask for them, instead of taking the time to sit down and design the best solution available.
Folders and multitasking are just as bad as Push Notifications
Folders and multitasking fit into the same category as Push Notifications. All three of the technologies are afterthoughts, and all three are seriously lacking the polish they need. iOS’ handling of folders is laughable, and completely unintuitive. I don’t know about you, but most of my apps in folders get lost in a vortex never to be seen again. If an app finds itself being shunted to a folder, I might as well be telling it, “it was nice knowing you,” because once it’s there, it rarely makes an appearance again.
Multitasking was a pretty lame attempt at quieting the complainers. Can someone please explain to me why we need applications remaining in a hidden toolbar that have no business multitasking? Out of the hundreds of applications I’ve seen go into the multitasking bar, about 1 percent of them have any business being there. Again, multitasking was a patch job. It wasn’t well thought out, and it’s a joke. Why can’t we turn multi-tasking on and off like a notification on an app per app basis? Heck, if there’s no reason for an application to multitask to begin with, why is it even going into the multitasking bar? If an app isn’t built to take advantage of multitasking, why’s Apple letting it rear its head in the multitasking bar? Let’s fix this already.
Afterthoughts
Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Most of the dropped balls that have come as a result of iOS are being dropped on the back of functionality being added because of customer pressures. Apple didn’t spend time optimizing either of these other processes, just like they didn’t get iOS notifications right. Apple set out to quickly quell the tide of complainers instead of fixing the problems properly.
The problem doesn’t end with iOS either. There’s a pretty long list of OS X functionalities that were added, and then abandoned. Most notable for me: Spotlight. Apple heralded Spotlight as a game changer. Filesystems were dead, and Spotlight was going to find our files for us. What’s been done to Spotlight since its release? Alfred, Quicksilver, and other 3rd party applications and launch bars already do a better job than Spotlight.
It’s happening a lot more than I’d like, and it’s nice that Apple’s finally doing something about notifications, but I hope that they’re not abandoning the giant honey-do list of problems that still exist. It’s easy for Apple to innovate—they excel at it—but lately the sustaining isn’t going so well.
New and shiny is easy—tried and true not so much. We need a little more focus on the latter moving forward.
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Some really good thoughts here. Trying to convince people that they don't need a feature then shoehorning it in is a standard yearly cycle for people. This year we'll hear that 4G chipsets are too power hungry and we'll get them in the iPhone 6 next year (probably chips just as power hungry).
For the iPhone world this happened first when Apple declared that we didn't need native apps and web apps were the future. That may be true, but 4 years later, they are still the future and not the present. So a year after making that statement, Apple released the App Store.
What all this backtracking leads to, as you mention, is a less than perfect OS where things work, and deliver features, but probably not in the best and most eloquent ways. I agree that folders aren't the best solution in the world, but since the average user only has 60+ apps, it's probably not a huge concern.
Notifications are another issue. It bugs me to no end that if I while I'm away from my phone I get an SMS, voicemail, etc., and a few minutes later get a SPAM Twitter message that the Twitter message will wipe out the important notifications. Notification manager / stacking are a noticeably lacking feature and one that, as far as I'm concerned, is a required feature in iOS 5.
/Jeff
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LikeHummmm... I don't agree push notifications are a problem. Being connected to one server for push (Apple) instead of several (one for each app) can hardly be an issue, privacy issue set aside. You provide us with a "fact" that push notifications didn't solve battery problems, but there is no real proof to really support that "fact". Same goes for multitasking and folders where you mostly stated your way of using the OS and not the actual widespread problem. I, for example eliminated countless swiping through screen with folders as now everything is on one screen. I do not mind tapping once more to open a folder.
I believe what you are trying to write is the way iOS _handles_ notifications. They do not necessarily have to be push notifications as receiving a text message or a calendar event is not that. Now that needs a serious improvement! Android solved it very well. Palm(web)OS does the same, if not even better.
The only problem i see with multitasking is that the user cannot see what is actually running in the background. Removing those "recent" apps would solve it for me. I don't see what is wrong with understanding that a cell phone is not a desktop machine. So limiting an app in the background by providing it with only MT API functionalities cannot be a bad idea.
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LikeI couldn't agree more. I use folders but they are, by far, the slowest piece of UI on the iPhone. I could literally count 2-3s before the content is revealed.
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LikeThe multitasking bar doesn't exist! It is merely a horizontal list of recent applications (see manual). I use it all the time for that purpose.
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LikeI'm not one of those people who believes you have to be a world-class musical virtuoso in order to make criticisms of jazz or you have to be an Oscar-winning film-maker to know when a movie sucks. Even so, I'm going to come out and ask: What should Apple have done instead? I see a lot of criticisms but few alternatives put forth. Instead of the way Apple does folders now... what should they have done? Instead of multitasking as it currently exists, what would have been better? Instead of push notifications as they are, what should be happening? I realize these things are clumsily implemented and even kludgy, but do I know what I would have wanted instead? No, I don't. Do you?
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LikeI laid out a solution for multitasking, so I'll skip that. As for folders, they could work like the music genre images in iTunes. Click the folder and the folder works just like your home screen, not some random subset of it. There's no need for limits to a folder. Three folders for my games is stupid. It's an artifical barrier that doesn't need to be there. Notifications, see webOS.
That's what I'd do. I'm curious, what would you do? You've got to have some ideas. :)
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