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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Not true at all. Read Apple’s HIG it’s all spelled out there. Some apps deviate from this but that isn’t the fault of iOS. Instagram on android is just as bad.

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Go to Clock, Sleep|Wake up (yes that's really the label!), click Change, scroll down a bit, click "Edit sleep schedule in health". It opens another app in hyperlink style, which the article recommends against.

A lot of apps deviate constantly from the "blessed" patterns. The result is that as a user new to an app (or update), you have to click and gesture around to see what happens, and probably miss a lot of UI features because of that.

> Go to Clock, Sleep|Wake up (yes that's really the label!), click Change, scroll down a bit, click "Edit sleep schedule in health". It opens another app in hyperlink style, which the article recommends against.

Most of the alternatives would be worse for either usability or maintenance, or both:

- don't track sleep in the Health app

- track sleep, don't provide alarms/notifications for the sleep/wake along with the schedule in the health app

- put almost all the UI for Health's sleep/wake in the Clock app instead

- provide almost identical UI in both the clock and health apps

I'm sure there are better implementations of the current UI tho'. E.G still link to the 2nd app, but have it _after_ the normal alarm clock in the vertical/reading order, and use better wording to explain the function and behaviour.

I wonder if they're trying to avoid having Clock ask for permission to read the HealthKit data, which presumably they would have to do in most other possible implementations.

It's the right thing to do, but it shows how broken "hyperlinking" is on iOS: after clicking the button, you get the health app on some specific screen. That screen has a "< Settings" button on the top left, which will obviously take you somewhere unrelated now. Assuming that we somehow recovered from clicking that, in the OS status bar there is a minuscule and ephemeral "< Clock" label, which _does_ take you back to the clock app, but disappears as soon as the user switches applications or to the home screen. However, the screen that took me there in the first place was some kind of "modal" which closed itself when the clock app went into background, so that's also broken.

I see little problem with most of that. Most of it follows the design language of the OS. I agree somewhat about the modal in Clock, but actually that one bothers me MUCH less than the endless 3rd party app use of pop-up web-views that really should just be a direct link to Safari (with the < Back_to_previous_app).

The < Back_to_previous_app is too small. It was clearly shoved into the OS long after the overall design was set. I feel it's correct that it doesn't take over the regular swipe-right-to-go-back navigation. Doing this better would have forced a significant redesign of the fundamental UI paradigms, IMO. That could have been very interesting.

I have not tried Android's event history thing. Whenever anyone hands me an Android to show me something, as soon as I hold it I manage to activate some "home" or "back" or "change app" feature that takes me away from the thing the other person was trying to show me. I've no idea what control I'm accidentally tapping, just by holding the device, but it's pretty consistent. So I'm not yet convinced of Android's improvements over iOS.

But here's the key question - were you able to edit your sleep schedule? Do you think other people have been able to edit their sleep schedules?

UI has no 'correct' approach, the only thing that matters is if people can happily use it.

> Some apps deviate from this but that isn’t the fault of iOS.

Then I suppose it's the fault of the App Store reviewers. The point is that Android handles the activity stack on the OS level and has much stronger control over what a back button does.

There's this phenomenon where people only notice an interface if they don't like it. There's heaps of well documented and well used patterns in lots of apps in iOS, I think when rplnt says "There's no patterns" he's happily ignoring everything that works.

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