AirPods Control Center Design in iOS 26
I fail using this UI at least once a week.
It’s the AirPods Control Center volume pane, where I go to put my AirPods Pro into Adaptive mode (which I have configured a hundred times to be part of the long-press selection, but that always gets inexplicably forgotten).
What you’re SUPPOSED to do is tap the circle to bring up the modes.
But right below it is the OBVIOUS LOOK OF A DROPDOWN CONTROL, complete with the double-arrow and tint color, but it is NOT ACTUALLY A TAPPABLE CONTROL AARRGGHHH 😡
You’re supposed to tap the gray icon that matches the background, not the blue arrows that look like a button. What were they thinking?
You get to this screen by long-pressing on the volume slider in Control Center. It does not work to long-press on the volume slider in the sheet that you get after tapping the AirPlay (sound output selector) button within an app.
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This reminds me of the infamous Bill Gates email asking why downloading Windows Movie Maker is such a baffling ordeal, or Steve Jobs asking why the fuck MobileMe (as I recall) doesn't do what it's supposed to do.
We are so far removed from executives who use their own products. These companies are no longer run by technology enthusiasts, but by accountants. Success is not measured in usability or user satisfaction, it's measured in engagement and subscriptions.
None of the buttons work properly anymore, but by god I sure do get a full screen takeover in Apple Music and Apple TV every time they open.
Honestly, I can't say I've ever had this problem ^^;. Looking at other elements in the Control Center UI, they use the double-arrows frequently (Bluetooth, Wifi, Focus Mode, AirDrop); the difference with the AirPods volume UI is that those double-arrows are blue. I've never thought of buttons as just "toggles" but rather "change"; Apple's UI here isn't so-inherently unreadable.
There is certainly design inconsistency, but is it *that* egregious? I ask this because I've considered for myself if my UI frustrations are senseless or just less-than-perfect for me.
@Remy From what I’ve seen, with the other places that Control Center uses the arrows they do behave like normal arrows: you can tap them and they show a menu. Neither is the case here. The blue is inconsistent but the least important part.
I've struggled with this too. I don't know also why it doesn't behave like the AirPods command, and circles through the mode at each tap (instead of opening a sub-menu thing). My personal gripe with sound/music related UIs or iOS though, is that I keep accidentally pressing the streamed-file format indicator ("lossless", for instance) when I try to scroll through a track using the progress bar, because it is right in the middle of it. Every. Single. Time.
This seems like a natural evolution to me. Apple went from a clear design where clickable or tappable UI elements consistently and uniquely looked like things that could be physically pressed, to them looking flat and the essentially the same as everything else. And now they've taken that trend to its logical conclusion where tappable UI elements look like non-tappable UI elements and vise-versa. What a brave and bold design choice!
