Are Apple products as user-friendly and simple-to-use as the manufacturers assert?

Question

Has some other person noticed that Apple’s products are not as easy to use as the advertising suggests?

Answer 1

Several people, including myself, have stated that Apple products have a lot of advantages but are at times confusing. For instance, the adding a Google account in order to work with the iOS calendar app is a pretty convoluted process, and iOS keyboard has reproachful shortcomings that Android users would never even think of. Even with the change and improvement over the years, there are still places where Apple can do better when it comes to making it intuitive.

Comments

As someone who went from Android to iOS to make communicating with my client base easier, I 100% agree with every single point you made, which is rare for me. Check your panic logs, does it show a "wifid" error causing the restart? Because this is a huge issue people (including myself) have been dealing with FOR YEARS that Apple has yet to acknowledge. Would love to see a deep dive into this.

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I just upgraded yesterday from iPhone 11 to 16 Pro…took me 20 mins to figure out how to add my various email accounts and calendars to the new phone. You were not alone, and I’ve been iPhone since my Nokia N97!

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I recently switched to an iPhone and even though I plan to stay on it I share so many of your frustrations.

I 100% share your opinion that there is nothing more "intuitive" about iOS than anything Android does. For example:
- Going back is sometimes inconsistent within Apple's own menus. That's just mind-boggling.
- I have relatively small hands and I hate how swiping down on the home screen doesn't open the swipe-down menu but instead opens up the useless search for some reason. This infuriates me even more because from a UI standpoint the search button is on the bottom of the screen, so why not have swipe up to open search and swipe down for the menu? Instead I need to hold the phone in a very uncomfortable (and borderline dangerous) position to reach the top of the screen, while swiping up doesn't do ANYTHING.
- Swiping away notifications on the lock screen only works in one direction for no apparent reason.

It's been 3 months and I'm still not used to the keyboard. Just like you I've been using Swiftkey on Android but the iOS version completely sucks.

My biggest gripe by far is how there is no separate setting for volumes. Since the dawn of time I use my phones in a permanently muted state. Vibration only. And on Android I had a radio app that I would use as an alarm clock. But Apple decided that "mute" means anything and everything except for their first party alarm clock will be muted. This alone almost made be give back the phone. I can handle some inconvenience during usage but changing the way I wake up in the morning is a totally different thing.

Also this passive aggressive marketing where it keeps telling me there is no space to backup my iphone into the cloud. But of course it isn't enough that you paid money for the phone. You should pay for the cloud as well. Screw you Apple, I'm doing manual backups to my PC.

But at the end of the day I'm just a casual user and it works at least 95% like any other phone I've had in the past. And since I'm not a rich techtuber who can use a new phone every week I'll stick with it for now. I just don't see any reason to consider iPhones superior or more "intuitive". That's all. I've been saying this for ages: if Apple actually bothered to implement the thousand small QoL features that Android users love they could easily convince another 50% of them to make the switch. But they're too stubborn on their "vision" or whatever you want to call it. I mean come on, the year is 2024 and just now we got movable app icons.

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This content feels so validating.

I swapped from android to iOS two years ago, after using android for like 10 years straight. I noticed almost instantly all the same issues you have had and I firmly will say that I beleive that most android phones are way easier to use, and way more user friendly than iPhones are today. Which is wild, because I literally always heard from my friends with iPhones that my phone was too complicated.... but really, it just had more options lol. It worked how I wanted it to, not how apple wanted me to use it.

Regardless... still using my iPhone 13 mini cause it's the best tiny phone available and still getting updates.

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This is exactly the reason i am switching from iPhone and Macbook to Android and Windows. Apple doesn't let you do things your own way, but forces you to do it the Apple way.

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"it just works" = "this is the only thing I've ever used and I'm used to its shortcomings"

Android for me "just works" too. But that's because I'm so used to it at this point that I'm sure there're a lot of small annoying things that I don't think about.