I’ve spent the past two decades writing about new features in Apple’s operating systems. Tens of thousands of words about new things, big and small, that improve the experience of using Mac, iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices. And yet, last weekend, I was reminded that most users simply don’t notice new features, even when they’ve been available for years.
If you’re reading this column right now, you’re one of the most educated people on the planet on Apple stuff. But your friends, your family, your colleagues and your acquaintances? They might never know about flashy new operating system features unless you show them personally. It’s one of Apple’s thorniest problems: keeping devices relatively simple while trying to make complex new features discoverable.
Discovery lunch
My family has spent the last few days attending my daughter’s college graduation. After a walk in a trendy neighborhood in Oregon, my wife and I went to lunch at a bakery restaurant. The place was busy and we found a table and sat down and waited for our order to arrive. I put my iPhone 14 Pro on the table and she gestured towards the always-on lock screen, gently pushing me away for using nature pictures on my lock screen instead of pictures of our children.
I explained that the lock screen is set to switch between nature photos in my library, based on machine learning, and it quickly became clear that she had never tried to change her lock screen, a feature introduced in iOS 16 last fall. (Its lock screen also lacks another iOS 16 banner feature, lock screen widgets.)
Foundry
If you don’t read Apple’s feature websites, how are users supposed to perceive these changes? To change a lock screen, you need to lock your phone and then long-press on the lock screen – a rather unnatural sequence of events.
In iOS 17, Apple is introducing a new feature for app developers called TipKit, which gives all apps a unified way to provide helpful tips on features their users can’t miss. It’s a great idea, but Apple itself seems to be really struggling to get users to embrace new features.
But it’s getting worse.
Face the music
Once I explained to her that she could literally create a lock screen that shuffled among photos of her children as identified by machine learning – not a set of images she selected she -even – she was enthusiastic. Unfortunately, my next discovery was that Apple’s shiny new feature was backed by a bunch of rickety tech that couldn’t handle the challenge.
To Photo Shuffle people on the lock screen, you choose their faces from your photo library, but my wife had never spent time in the People album in the Photos app on her iPhone, merging faces and giving them names. (Why would she? The People album is buried on the iPhone. Face and name assignments don’t sync in a shared photo library, so all my work classifying faces on my Mac doesn’t extend to her.)
Worse still, Photo Shuffle’s method of offering people to post seems completely broken. He offered my wife a small number of faces, most of which were completely random and quite rare. She has hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures of me and our children on her phone, yet we weren’t among the faces offered. And if the faces you’re looking for aren’t on Photo Shuffle’s very small list of options, there’s no recourse. You are stuck.
So head over to Photos to spend five minutes quickly going through his photo library to identify his family members by name, mark them as favorites, and clean things up by merging duplicate entries. Unfortunately, whatever process provides the list of faces in Photo Shuffle apparently isn’t updated with any priority – when I came back to it at the end of our lunch, no family members had appeared in his Photo Shuffle options. So much for this clever idea.
How many apps?
The other thing I discovered at lunch was that despite Apple’s innovations in iOS functionality over the past few years, my wife has stuck to the behaviors she learned when she first started using the app. ‘iPhone. In other words, Apple made changes to improve the experience, but they just never registered with it.
IDG
Let me be specific: it’s about apps. My wife has pages and pages of apps on her home screen. We’re at a wedding, and there’s an app you need to download to contribute photos to the happy couple. It is downloaded and stays forever. Need to pay to park in a new city? Download an app and keep it forever. And they’re all stuck at the end of the last page of his home screen, forever.
(In fact, she complained that she hated dragging the apps she actually wanted from the last page to the first page. I pointed out that she could now hold the app wiggly with one finger while quickly swiping with another in order to quickly switch pages, which upset her, as she was still following the old behavior of dragging the app icon to the left side of the screen and wait for the page to scroll. Another new feature she had never heard of!)
Turns out she uses one or two app pages and searches for everything else. She has some records from when she tried to organize her phone, but at some point she gave up and went looking. I ended up deleting several pages from his home screen and showing him how to use App Library.
The truth is that its behavior – a page or two of key apps, then using search to find apps in the junk drawer – is probably how most people use their iPhones. Apple knows this, which is why they added the App Library and stopped requiring users to put every app they downloaded somewhere on the home screen. But if my wife is any indication, this new feature never registered.
I have no answers here. I recognize how difficult it is to make new iPhone features discoverable and how difficult it is to change ingrained user behavior. New TipKit APIs suggest that Apple is still struggling with the issue.
In the meantime, I will continue to write (and igamesnews will continue to post) articles about new features. And you, dear reader, will probably share them with your friends and family. As far as I know, we are perhaps the best way for Apple to get its message across.
