26 (Tahoe) has had a lot of teething problems on ALL platforms, and lacks the typical quality and polish of Apple releases. I couldn't believe how many obvious bugs there were on first use across Macbook and iPhone.
Seconding this simply for data purposes. iOS 26 was the worst release I've ever dealt with coming from an iPhone 4S user to present. Goddamn there were so many obvious bugs and flaws. The .1 release fixed some of them but my keyboard still randomly shifts to the left by a few pixels every time it opens.
Take me back to the days where things were governed by UX and not revenue.
Well, I wanted to revert and wanted a new phone, so bought an iPhone 16 instead of a 17, which comes with iOS 18 installed. iCloud data synced in fine, and the 17 is a very small upgrade anyway, even a downgrade in some ways.
I just hope Apple will fast track a UX update... but they probably won't, due to sunk cost fallacy, and the market and design trends will follow them.
This happens every time, a redesign comes out and people hate it. Same when iOS flat design came out. I dug into the archives, because HN has been around for a while now so we can do that, yay!
(hand picking / editing comments freely because I can)
> I read article after article from historically pro-Apple bloggers/authors explaining that no, flat design was fundamentally a bad move: the strongest metaphor is that of the phone as a tool -- that we needed skeumorphism, we need hints for interactivity, we needed polish.
> I think iOS 7, on the whole, looks worse than iOS 6. The stock icons look outright ugly; interfaces like the call-answer screen and the calculator look poorly designed, and everything has the sense that it just needs another run or two through the review process.
> Look at his iMessage screen comparison [1]: yes, the old screen looks a bit geocities, but you can actually read text very well; the new screen is almost unreadable. The prime aim of iMessage is to make people read text, not to look cool.
> Hopefully I'm not the only one that thinks this is going to kill usability. The reason old people can figure their way around <=iOS6 is that everything that can be tapped looks like a button. A more "mature" audience isn't what apple's good at appealing to.
> I'm volunteering at a center that teaches senior citizens various computer skills. One of the courses we teach is on how to use their iPhones. I'm dreading the moment that iOS7 is released: all of these people are going to have to start right back at the beginning in their understanding.
