iPhone 16 Plus: User Experience Challenges and Discoveries

Apple's iOS offers impressive features but suffers from frustrating design inconsistencies and limitations.

### iOS Challenge: A User's Journey Through Love and Frustration
* 📱 Initially, the author questions if Apple products are designed differently for **dedicated fans versus casual users**, feeling overwhelmed by the iPhone 16 Plus's **unintuitive design and bugs**.
* 💖 Despite early frustrations, the author finds value in features like the **App Library** and the efficient handling of **media playback**, appreciating the **organization it brings to their chaotic app usage**.
* 🔄 The unification of call interfaces across apps enhances usability, especially while driving, making it **easier to manage various communication methods**.
* 🔋 Battery management impresses the author, who discovers that they can **go a week between charges** thanks to smart suggestions from iOS.
* ⚙ However, the author expresses frustration with **slow animations and inconsistent navigation**, which detracts from the overall user experience and makes the device feel **sluggish**.
* 🛠 While acknowledging improvements in hardware, such as the iPhone's **display and call reception**, the author criticizes the **lack of intuitive design** in areas like **account management and volume control**.
* 🔍 The author concludes that while iOS has made significant strides, it still has a **long way to go in embracing user customization and intuitive functionality**, ultimately questioning if the **Apple ecosystem is the right fit for them**.
* 💻 The video wraps up with a promotion for Squarespace, encouraging viewers to **create customized websites effortlessly**.

Just a few days into my iOS challenge, I started to look a little differently at the Apple users in my life. They describe Apple products with marketing slogans like, "It just works," as though they actually believe them. And it made me wonder: does Apple have one version of

their products for the True Believers, and then a different one for the scrubs like me? Because my time with the iPhone 16 Plus has been absolutely riddled with unintuitive design choices, unnecessarily limited functionality, and some of the weirdest bugs I've encountered

on a supposedly finished product in years. But Mama Sebastian didn't raise no quitters, so I've stuck it out for more than the month that I promised, and I've compiled a lot of thoughts, both from myself and from helpful members of our community who see the world through more

pink-tinted lenses. And some of their points were extremely valid. Turns out, I really was just holding it wrong. And over time, there's a lot about iOS that I've learned to love, even on my own. But there's also a lot that... well, to say how

I really feel, I'd probably have to use language that might not sit well with my sponsor.

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for any black or white themed AMD build. Check it out using our link today. Let's kick this off with some positive vibes. I am a big fan of the App Library. I know it isn't new, but as someone who hasn't daily driven an iOS device in a while,

It's new to me, and any effort to organize the pure chaos that most of us carry around in our pockets is much appreciated. Like, finally, the ability to put your icons anywhere you want! I also appreciate the intuitive and slick way

that iOS handles switching between picture-in-picture and background media playback. I mean, how cool is this? As for my other primary use of my phone—you know, phone calls—that got a big improvement too. I get so many different kinds of calls these days: phone teams,

WhatsApp, whatever—and iOS streamlines this experience by unifying the interface between all these different apps, which is especially nice when I'm in the car. It even consolidates my call logs so I don't have to remember who prefers what when I mash a contact to

call them back. Multi-widget stacks are super cool. I don't actually know if they're new or not, but I don't really care. Quick access and high information density always get a thumbs-up from me, and I use them all the time to

quickly check the weather, quickly check my calendar. Now, I've heard that these are a thing on newer Samsung devices as well, but look, this video is not a comprehensive comparison matrix of every software feature that's ever existed. It's my thoughts on coming back to iOS

after an extended absence, and some of those changes really are refreshing. Screenshot management has leveled up in a big way and is full of nice-to-haves. Like, I love the ability to quickly delete, rather than archive, my screenshots after I've shared them with someone, and I

Love the little popup in the Dynamic Island to help manage my AirPods. If they're paired to my laptop already and I'm sitting working, but an incoming phone call comes in, it'll be like, 'Hey, want me to grab those?' And I'm like, 'Yeah.'

Thanks! Actually, any sort of interaction between the iPhone and other Apple devices is pretty great. Like my Apple Watch unlocking without needing to punch in the PIN if I have my phone unlocked nearby—so efficient. Speaking of efficiency, I probably plugged this thing into my nightstand to charge maybe four

or five times over the entire month plus that I was using it, which probably sounds bonkers. But what I found was that just plugging in during my daily commute, plus the occasional longer trip, was enough to keep me going for literally a week at a time, unless I was binging a

show all day or something. iOS then noticed this and piped up with a suggestion that I switch to 80% maximum charging in order to prolong the life of my battery. That is the kind of proactive user hand-holding that I can really get behind. And the same goes for how

aggressive iOS gets about prompting the user to mute or block app notifications and tracking. To be clear, Android's tools for managing these things are pretty good too—actually, very granular. But what Android doesn't do is get all up in your grill about them like iOS does, which

results in an experience where if you get a notification on your iPhone, you can be pretty darn sure that it's something you wanted to see, or you can easily get rid of it. Now, pretty much everything so far has been mostly to do with the software, but I've got to say I

Kind of like the hardware, too. The screen on the iPhone 16 family is incredible, with outstanding brightness for watching videos outside. Not to mention their super dim mode that supposedly gets all the way down to one nit and makes nighttime reading way more comfortable. Uh oh, here's a fun one, you know,

how phones are supposed to be. You know, I'm getting way better call and data reception near my house, and not just against my ancient Note 9, but even against my wife's Galaxy S23 Ultra. So I can finally close my garage door from the driveway. All right, you guys think

that's enough positivity to appease the Apple Stans? If not, I could probably keep going for an entire video's worth, but unfortunately, I could probably go multiple videos about the things that I didn't love so much, so we should probably address at least some of them.

Let's start with how slow the device feels. Which, okay, no wait, hold on, step away from the comment section. I recognize this is absolutely not a slow device, but that makes it all the more frustrating when it feels like Apple's interface decisions are holding me back.

Like the animations; they're beautiful. I love the way the home screen icons come flying in the first time that it loads after you set up a new iPhone, but I don't need to see it every time I unlock my phone. Guys, guys, I've got urgent

Facebook Marketplace doomscrolling to do. And yes, before you ask, I did turn on Reduce Motion, and I even tried Prefer Crossfade—another gorgeous animation, by the way—but none of that had the desired effect of getting the fluff out of my way so I can just use my phone. I'm just

Picking what I get to look at while I wait for the UI to catch up with me. While we're at it, by the way, why is this setting and so many other useful ones hidden away in accessibility options? I can't change that unnecessary

slowdowns are going to bother me. Like this thing that Apple does where it animates all the steps to get to a setting that I have searched for or clicked a shortcut to. The rationale that I've heard for this behavior is that it's trying to teach me where I should

have gone, but I got there with a shortcut. Is that not an okay way to do it? Who cares if I know all the breadcrumbs? Adding insult to injury, depending on how I try to go back, I get to click through all of those screens that it zipped through on the way back

to the thing I actually cared about. Which brings me to a pretty big subject: going back on iOS is objectively bad. Okay, all right, something can't be objectively bad, but what it can be is objectively inconsistent, which from a user interface and user experience

standpoint is, well, objectively bad. I can't believe that Apple still hasn't mandated an official Apple way to go back. They seem to be big fans of the swipe in from the left, but they only use it just enough to trick you into thinking that it should work all the

time, and then bam, an app hits you with clicking on the top left, like my old iPhone 4, or cancelling in the top right, like this, and even the occasional swipe in another direction. Now, app makers absolutely share some of the blame for this, but guys, we are 17 years into this

experiment, so I think it might be time for Apple to just relax the restrictions, or maybe in other cases, loosen them overall. I found CarPlay to be pretty okay. Uh, my car doesn't have a physical button for the previous track, so if I wanted to have media controls and my map on

screen at the same time, I had to use split screen, which I don't prefer. I like a nice big map, but that's probably more of a car problem, and you can't blame the handset makers for all the dumb things that the car manufacturers are going to

do. So let's not worry about that. Let's worry about the bugginess that I experienced. Every once in a while, the volume would change itself, and I ran into this issue twice. It's probably worth noting I saw this with some random

Bluetooth earbuds, too, though, so maybe it's not CarPlay related. Actually, now that I think about it, there were more problems with audio. Notification volume would occasionally go super loud. There's also the cabling issue, which is apparently an iOS 18 bug. And compared to Android, adjusting

the volume level of anything you aren't actively using is super non-obvious. Like, Andy, how do I change the volume of my, like, system tap sounds when I'm listening to media, for example? You just... I mean, but like, how do I change the volume of that? I don't

know. If you've never touched Android, this is going to blow your freaking mind. No matter what I'm doing, if I touch the volume button, I can adjust my ringtone, my notifications, my media, and my system sounds. The fact that that doesn't exist in iOS—users should be rioting in the

streets. I know this next one is going to get lost in translation, as Android and iPhone users are coming from completely different experiences here. But oh my goodness, the iPhone keyboard is missing so many things that I completely take for granted as basic functions of an

Android keyboard. For example, while the iOS keyboard does let you hold down a key in order to modify your letters with whatever diacritical mark you need, or even sneak in the occasional thorn, yogh, or eszett, Android lets you use the same technique to access numbers and

common punctuation from the first layer of the keyboard. You can even dial in the delay so that you barely have to slow down to insert one of those secondary characters. And this is an absolute godsend for those of us who write our texts like our AP English 12 teacher. My

greatest on them. Now, I tried switching over to my usual alt keyboard, SwiftKey, on iOS, but somehow, all these years later, it is still trash on the iPhone. Core features are missing, like the aforementioned long-press tuning and even the ability to resize the keyboard,

and in general it just feels off, with worse predictions and a more tedious process for going back and making corrections. Like, maybe I want to type 'rhis'; it autocorrects to 'this'. I go back, 'when no, no, I meant rhis,' and I should be

able to fix the accidental autocorrect and my capitalization at the same time on the iPhone. Not so much. Now, if I had to guess, I'd say that this limitation probably comes down to Apple giving keyboard apps far less access to user inputs, which is probably a good thing.

But it makes for an overall significantly worse typing experience on my keyboard of choice, which also just would occasionally disappear, leaving me with the default, weird...

Now, one thing that's better about iOS is the super responsive long-press keyboard shortcut to reposition the cursor. I like it, but I

also don't struggle with fine motor control, and it's usually faster for me to just tap the point in the middle of a word anyway. So not being able to do that on the iPhone actually kind of drove me crazy. Now I've got a lot more things to

get through, so let's uh, rapid-fire a few. I can't get to the home screen without physically swiping the screen after authenticating, and then it's animation time again. Just get out of my way and let me use my phone! I can't change the

size of the app grid. I'm stuck at four wide on the normal iPhone.  16 that would be fine, but if you're giving me all these extra pixels on the Plus, I'd really like to use them. It's like they intend for their larger devices to

just be for the elderly or people who have trouble with smaller screens. And here's a weird one: I ran into this problem while rearranging apps. I think maybe the ones I place manually might behave differently than the ones that are automatically placed; sometimes it

just gets confused. I don't know. In fairness, Apple's new to this whole "putting things where you want them" thing. And here's a funny one: when I was migrating in the first place, Apple's Move to iOS app failed twice before actually

working, and even then it basically just copied SMS photos and WhatsApp. I had to manually sign into everything, including my Google account, which left me wondering what exactly was the point of this. I'm not sure, but I'd like to talk about that Google account for a

minute. In the past, iOS had an account section in the settings app where you could centrally manage and sync your different accounts for email, calendar, contacts—all that kind of stuff. That seems to be gone now, but I work for a G Suite organization, so I'm going to need

my Google Calendar to tell me what it is that I am doing today. This is where past experience with iOS got in my way. The account setting was gone, and I couldn't find an obvious way to add an account in the calendar app, so I started looking

for workarounds and ultimately discovered that if you open the iOS mail app, it immediately prompts you to add a Google Mail account, which will also sync my Google Calendar in the native calendar app. Now, I ended up getting attacked pretty hard for calling this

out on the WAN show, but I'm holding firm that this is a prime example of spectacularly unintuitive design. The justification I was given for this is that app settings, including accounts, should be managed from within the settings app and the apps menu, and then

the individual app, and that is Apple's aspiration, but as we've seen with back functionality, Apple's aspirations don't always match reality. So let's play a quick game called 'Find the account management menu in the app.' Yeah, this one's in the app; another one that's in the app. Hmm...

They're pretty much all within the apps themselves, and while the first-party mail app does have account management buried four layers deep within the menu—the Apple preferred way, for some reason—it still prompts you to sign in the first time you open it.  Meaning that if

you're trying to sign into an account from within an app, that is a perfectly reasonable expectation, even if you had no prior experience with other platforms. The good news for Apple, though, is that the solution to this is simple. When I click 'Calendars,' 'Add Calendar,' 'Add Calendar,' and then I have this account

thing here that should just be a drop-down that should prompt me to add another account instead of it just doing nothing. You're welcome! Now, to be clear, this isn't a deal-breaker by any means; it just means the next time that an Apple fan tells me it's just so

gosh-darn intuitive, I don't know if I'm going to be able to help it—I might actually laugh in their face. Maybe a little doomscrolling will calm me down. And oh boy, if you want the long version of this rant, you can check out the W

show from a couple of weeks ago. But the TL;DR is: when I flick my finger in my newsfeed or on Reddit, I expect the screen to move at the same speed that my finger moved and then decelerate from there. I do not expect it to move at

whatever relaxed, chill pace that some Apple focus group has determined is the most aesthetically pleasing in order to hide their 60Hz refresh rate. Another thing I touched on during that WoW segment is buttons, particularly this new camera button here. Out of the box, I kept

accidentally hitting it, only to have a user point out to me that I could configure it to require a double-click. Huh, well that's super cool! I thought, I wonder what other apps I could make it... LO, no camera and camera-adjacent only. Speaking of the camera, boy was that an

upgrade though! As someone coming from a six-year-old device, I don't know what to say other than I should hope so. And besides, my main focus isn't on the particular iPhone, but rather my overall experience with iOS 18; an experience I could probably go on for hours about, but

Tim Apple, a more relevant meme than ever these days, doesn't have hours to watch this video, so how about I boil it down to just one thing that I need fixed? Let's talk about rotation locks. Most iPhone users I run into don't even realize this, but for a good 10 years now,

you've been able to lock an iPad in landscape orientation, but not an iPhone. Now, we use iPhones as our teleprompters here at LMG, and because we can't lock them in landscape mode, we have to train all of our camera operators in a maneuver that we call the

dip to reorient the screen. It's something we do so often that we don't even really think about it anymore. So why bring it up? Because when I was going through the list of apps in my account, since the migration wizard didn't actually copy my apps over like it said

it would, and I had to do so manually, I came across Jetpack Joyride and I was like, "Oh my goodness, I haven't played that since the last time I updated iOS!" It's been years, and I immediately fired it up. I played it for a second, then I put my

I put my phone down to make a note, and when I picked it back up, the game was upside down. I showed this on the "W" show as well. I gave it the old wiggle; I tried to reorient it, but no, it would only work in one of the two

possible landscape orientations. What the heck, Apple? These kinds of arbitrary distinctions—like, which way is the approved landscape orientation, assuming I'm allowed to be in landscape at all—do nothing for your users; they do nothing for your profits. So why?

To be clear, iOS has come a long way over the last few years, and it can do so much more than it used to. Find My is a godsend; Spotlight still rules; AirDrop is legitimately super cool, as long as everyone around me has an iPhone. But Apple still has some work to do to be

willing to accept that after the iPhone leaves the factory, it's *my* iPhone. And if I want to hold it like this instead of like this, or I want to use it as a teleprompter, that's my business. If I want to move the Dynamic Island to the

other side, that should be my decision, too. And until Apple's willing to truly embrace that, rather than begrudgingly give us little breadcrumbs, I just don't think this is for me. Which doesn't mean that it's bad; if you love your iPhone and it works for you, you are not wrong.

Just don't get upset if you run around declaring that your preferred ecosystem is the best, and not everyone agrees with you—especially if you've never spent significant time on the other side of the divide. Maybe we need some kind of cultural exchange program, you know, like

Six months of seeing how the other half lives; that could be a really interesting experiment. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go hide from some fanboys. Oh, but not before I tell you about our sponsor, Squarespace. Make sure that your business

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initial thoughts, why don't you check out the W segment from a few weeks ago? Hope you guys enjoyed this video; make sure you subscribe. See you later.

I really tried, Apple - iPhone 30-Day Challenge

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Initial Impressions and Positive Aspects of iOS

Initial skepticism towards Apple's marketing claims of seamless functionality.

Encountered unintuitive design, limited functionality, and bugs in iPhone 16 Plus.

Appreciation for the App Library's organizational features.

Positive feedback on intuitive media playback and call handling across different apps.

Approval of multi-widget stacks for quick access to information.

Improved screenshot management and AirPods integration via Dynamic Island.

Excellent battery life with infrequent charging needs.

Battery Life, Proactive Features, and Notification Management

Positive experience with iOS's proactive suggestions for battery optimization and notification management.

Comparison of iOS and Android's notification management tools.

Positive comments on the iPhone 16's screen quality and brightness.

Improved call and data reception compared to other devices.

Negative Aspects and Frustrations with iOS

Perceived slowness due to interface animations.

Difficulty in disabling animations despite using Reduce Motion and Prefer Crossfade settings.

Inconsistent and poorly implemented back navigation methods.

Experiences with volume and audio-related bugs.

Lack of granular volume control compared to Android.

Limitations and missing features in the iOS keyboard compared to Android.

Inability to directly access the home screen after authentication.

Issues with app arrangement and placement.

Problems with the Move to iOS app during data migration.

Unintuitive method for adding Google accounts and syncing calendars.

Critique of iOS's screen scrolling speed and animation.

Discussion on camera button configuration and limitations.

Lack of landscape lock option for iPhones, unlike iPads.

Desire for more user control and customization options within iOS.