iPhone Action Button Uptake
Although the poll received relatively low participation because it was limited to TidBITS readers who own one of the iPhone 15 Pro models, the results still suggest that the Action button hasn’t been a runaway success. The most common use was to recreate the function of the Ring/Silent switch, garnering 33% of the votes. Even then, some people aren’t happy with the Action button as a replacement for the Ring/Silent switch because you can’t tell at a glance which state it’s in.
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Another 21% of respondents use the Action button to open the Camera app, which I doubt iPhone 16 users will do, and 20% said they don’t use the Action button at all, like me. That’s a total of 74% who either use the Action button like the switch it replaces, don’t use it at all, or use it in a way that Apple is, in essence, deprecating in future iPhone models by adding the Camera Control.
I really like using the Action button to open the camera. It makes it fast and easy to take out my phone and snap a photo one-handed.
The more I learn about Camera Control, the less appealing it sounds. I think I would have rather seen a second regular button, so we would have both Action A and Action B, or perhaps one that was global and one for use within apps.
With the iPhone 16 lineup, Apple brought the Action Button to all four devices, expanding it from the Pro-only limitation last year. At the same time, there’s a new Camera Control button that eliminates the need to activate the camera with the Action Button, which was one of the major useful functions. At the same time, there are new Control Center options that you can set to the Action Button, expanding what’s possible.
I kind of wonder whether this is going to be another Touch Bar situation where the hardware’s full potential is never realized because Apple proscribes how it can be used without fully opening it up to third parties.
Previously:
- iPhone 16 Pro Camera
- Upgrading From an iPhone 12 mini to an iPhone 15 Pro
- iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max
I feel like I’d find more use for the action button on my iPhone if I could also assign actions for double click, triple click, long click, etc. Basically turns it into multiple buttons.
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I’m not sure how everyone else feels, but life got a bit simpler when I stopped trying to do clever things with the action button, and set it back to silence on/off. I’d almost rather have the physical toggle back.
Also, bring back the 3D Touch!
What frustrates me is that Apple will take years to ship useful features that are on other platforms but will hastily introduce features that don’t have a product market fit.
On the iPhone 15 Pro I used the Action button to launch the camera. On the iPhone16 Pro I now use it for the flashlight. I’m still getting used to the Camera Control button. I don’t like that it’s flush with the body and I wish it was closer to the corner of the phone so it feels more like a camera’s shutter button. The “touchpad” part of it is a bit finicky and requires practice, and I assume and hope it can be improved in software.
My gut says that Apple wanted to ship Camera Control (at least the hardware) but it wasn’t ready and added the Action button as a stopgap and ended up keeping both.
TIL: after you half press the Camera Control button to bring up the controls, you can use the touchscreen to actually control them.
I wonder if Apple created the camera button as a reaction to data about what people were doing with the action button.
What if some wild percentage had used the action button as a way to launch maps for example?
At the moment I use mine for Focus/DND, which is pretty unoriginal but it works and my only real objection is there's no tactile feedback of the state: it's a single vibration for both states, which seems silly and a wasted opportunity. However I'd not sneeze at more control for different button presses, double/triple presses, long presses, etc. Hopefully Apple will work something into newer software. What I definitely don't want is a return to a useless physical switch with only one function. Now that really was daft.
