LMAO!!!!
Sorry but I do use Android as my main. And Windows (10).
Have to say the Settings on my Android make far more sense than iOS.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Why are settings such a mess?
- Thread starter Silver78
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
LMAO!!!!
Sorry but I do use Android as my main. And Windows (10).
Have to say the Settings on my Android make far more sense than iOS.
I have. I do.
Not sure what you are alluding to.
Mine make a lot of sense. Search works well. What I expect to find in a folder is pretty much what is there.
OnePlus 9 Pro Android 11.
I couldn’t agree more. It seems like they just throw everything they’re not sure about categorizing deep into Accessibility.
Yep, which makes it more mind boggling why they moved it from the most obvious settings section of where it should be.
How is that an accessibility setting even? I’d sooner look in battery settings before accessibility settings lol. Matter of fact, if you override auto brightness and have the slider set to high, the battery settings section will inform you with a banner that doing so will drain your battery faster.
The difficult with Android in my opinion is fragmentation. Depending on the device, OS version, carrier, etc. certain settings don't exist, are called something else, are in a different location, etc.
I don't use Android regularly so I can't really comment on general sensibility. However, assisting people using Android in finding settings often devolves to "hunt around" as often an Internet search for a particular setting location is not applicable to their device.
I am an engineer who has worked at a number of companies of various sizes. For something like this I've experienced everything from "engineer does whatever they want with no oversight" to "engineers do layouts exactly as others dictate and there is little to change that". And it often falls in the middle where after someone has a initial suggestions it is reviewed by a number of people. And again, it generally seems to depend on the size of the company. Engineers are often to blame for poor design, but certainly not always.
I have never worked at Apple and can't speak to their development process. However, I would be highly surprised if at a company known for their emphasis on design that an engineer would decide the settings layout with no oversight, review, etc.
Sure, in general an engineer's and designer's mindset will tend to be different. But I don't draw absolute conclusions nor does it always result in better or worse outcomes. I've seen engineers capable of making wonderful design choices and designers whose "forma mentis" was apparently so different their design choices didn't make sense to anyone else.
Certainly could be. They can't agree where it should go, so they compromise and shove it in Accessibility.
Not me.
It comes down to having a certainty about your convictions, logical explanation, and guts.
If the system engineer can out-logic me, then I’ll see that I was wrong to start with.
Corporations are full of people without guts or without brains.
Last edited:
iOS shows photo Description and not the Title. MacOS shows the Title under each photo and you have to go into "info" to get the Description.
For most of the Big Sur releases, exporting photos trashed the IPTC data anyway so I suppose I should be grateful.
True but not true. Most people on Android tend to stick with a brand unless they are feeding from the cheap trough.
It is when you switch OEM's or Carriers that things can get a little odd. Still, Looking at my previous Razer 2, my other half's Z Flip 3, my son's Note 10, or my OnePlus, in all of them Settings is easier to use than Settings on my 13 ProMax. Search though can be a challenge on all of them.
I wonder if Apple has ever had a group look at Settings from a Customers perspective.
But they didn’t, Apple did; meanwhile, the Settings app in Windows is both functional and easy on the eyes. So seethe and cope.
Frankly, settings has always been a mess. The idea that every app should have a settings tab under the global settings app rather than in the app itself always seemed a bit hairbrained…
More often than not, I find what I want without much hassle, but it's true that I am sometimes surprised to find stuff under Accessibility (i.e. mouse cursor). If they could just put these settings in more appropriate places, it would be ok with me.
Really? I thought flat design and all the vague iOS7-remnant interface details that still linger made everything so much better than before. So surprised to hear your viewpoint.
So funny how Accessibility became the junk drawer dumping ground for all the non-minimalist interface settings that were vanquished by iOS7.
Last edited:
Love this post and Accessibility is inarguably a murky wasteland, but not everything in there is “non-minimalist,” such as ‘reduce motion,’ ‘prefer cross-fade transitions,’ and ‘reduce transparency,’ all of which I immediately enable on any iOS device I own in order to save my eyes and extend battery life. Another visually ergonomic must-have is ‘bold text’ which technically does, I will concede, go against the hyper-minimalistic, eye-bleedingly thin typefaces of iOS 7 and beyond.Really? I thought flat design and all the vague iOS7-remnant interface details that still linger made everything so much better than before. So surprised to hear your viewpoint.
So funny how Accessibility became the junk drawer dumping ground for all the non-minimalist interface settings that were vanquished by iOS7.
Last edited:
What I’m alluding to is how in windows, many settings are still in the old windows 7 control panel dialogs - and control panel.
Things are getting far better in windows 11 but an unholy mess in windows 10.
Who is forgetting that? It's not there now, and we're talking about now. Where it used to be is irrelevant.
That is easily the worst app Apple ever made, I really do not like to use it at all. And really sad is, that Apple abandoned Aperture for it.
I do not think, that Photos has any priority at Apple, maybe they fired all developers working at Photos. The App has many bugs which have not been fixed for years and still lacks a lot of even basic features.
Not to mention advanced ones. Why, for example, are smart Albums not synced via iCloud in times where some iPads have the same CPU as some Macs?
This and you still cannot make folders on your iDevice to place other albums in there (this can only be done from the Photo app on the Mac, I think) and it would also be nice to easily see which photos have already been sorted into albums. It is hard to sort photos from your camera roll if you don't do it right away. Maybe put a little icon in the corner of a thumbnail to indicate that it has already been sorted or grey them out (to let me know "hey, those photos have already been sorted"), once you tab "pick / choose"
That something has been hidden, and the way to find it is with something hidden, says a lot about the current status of Apple OS usability.
When I first moved to Apple, one of the things I loved was how all settings were where you expected them to be, unlike Windows that I had been using for too many years (any number is too many, but it was a decade, Amiga before that).
Last edited: