I honestly think Camera Control is the single worst feature ever added to iPhone. This is coming from someone who’s bought the top iPhone model every year since 2008. It’s even less intuitive than Force Touch (RIP).
As currently implemented, it is inferior in every way to onscreen controls when using the camera - poor button placement (somehow for both landscape and portrait!), unintuitive gestures with light tap and double tap, often compromises shot stability and adds nothing that can’t already be done more efficiently onscreen. I’m really surprised this didn’t get thrown out, or at least adjusted, by the human interface team at Apple.
Subjectively, I also dislike how the Camera Control and Action Button take us further away from the original ambition for iPhone to become only a screen (which was reinforced by the iPhone X design language). Is this a conscious new ‘maximalist’ aesthetic from Apple? Time will tell.
It’s interesting that I have the opposite opinion despite us probably having the same history of apple fandom. I’ve been using an iphone since the first one, not every model though. I actually think one the most regretful changes apple made was removing force touch on the iphone. Mainly because it’s replacement, “haptic touch” aka long touch, is just so freaking annoying. I feel like it activates way too easily. And when you do want to purposely activate haptic touch it takes a tiny bit too long. I think the main criticism with force touch was no one really knew it was there. I did and used it often. Deliberate gestures to open things like contextual menus, edit homescreen, and especially track pad function on keyboard came up instantly. Inadvertantly resting a finger on the screen was less likely to cause icons to wobble or focus modes to pop up. If you want to take about unintuitive, what about two, three, four finger swiping on macbook trackpads. People are more likely figure this feature out than pressing the screen harder?
The current implementation of the button could have been better. I’m on the fence on button placement. Sure like everyone else, I had hoped it was closer to the corner. Thinking about it again, I said in an earlier post it would be more difficult to hold the phone one handed if the shutter was closer to the corner, but if you rest/brace your thumb on the screen right side, it would work ok, a little slippery, but ok. I do feel like I’ll use the visual ai often though, so I’d probably be irritated that the button is so low. It’s a compromise that I’m accepting more and more each day. Heck, we’ve been tapping screens to take photos for almost two decades now. I absolutely have no problem double light pressing the camera control button. I’m actually pretty surprised so many lack the dexterity to do this. I do hope they give the option to limit what can be controlled, for instance, I’d never switch photographic styles from this button. I keep mine defaulted to aperture because accidental moving this setting can be reversed after the photo is taken. Plus, I like having depth info on my photos. Also why didn’t anyone tell me iphone 15s allowed portrait with live photo! This was a game changer for me when I found out the 16 had it.
I understand the original goal was the iphone to eventually be a slab of glass. Removing things like 3d touch takes you further away from it though because you’re losing another way to interact with it. Imagine using that with your iphone camera. Light press to focus or just rest your finger on the screen shutter button. Then hard press further to shoot. Tapping a shutter button inherently sounds bad when you want to avoid camera shake. In a way the camera control button is the spiritual successor to the dedicated silent/ring switch that went away with the action button. The switch was created because the iphone originally was primarily a phone, and that switch did one function: turn the ringer off and on. I’d argue for many the iphone has become primarily a camera, and now there is a dedicated button to activate and use that camera. The best part of it is you don’t even have to use it if you don’t want to. As far as I know you can still interact with the camera like you did before. It’s not like they removed an entire row of function keys for it and forced you to use it.
