Apple changed a lot of things in iOS 11 to make it a far better operating system with a far superior user experience, but it still needs some love in one particular area: notifications. The slightest improvement doesn’t outweigh the gaping hole in the software.
Dismissing Alerts
Another much-needed area of improvement is the dismissal of notifications in the Notification Center. Once you finally get the shade pulled down, you will probably not want to tap each and every alert you have received (could literally be hundreds, or thousands if you’re popular on Instagram). In that case, you’d rather dismiss them as their irrelevance becomes apparent. Annoyingly, this is quite a difficult task. You must swipe it…
and then tap to confirm.
In the technological world of “Now,” dismissing these takes a bothersome amount of time. Conversely, Android currently lets you swipe away, quickly, and efficiently (perhaps too easily, but more on that some other time). It wouldn’t be a huge change, but Apple should definitely make navigating your alerts a far more efficient experience.
Now, yes, in iOS 11, Apple did add the ability to swipe away notifications with a longer swipe, but the effectiveness like there is on Android is still not present.
Grouping Notifications
This is easily the most important of the “bunch.” If you have never used Android 7.0 or later, you probably won’t believe me when I inform you that iOS notifications are archaic. Modern Android phones group notifications by app, which cuts down on clutter like you wouldn’t believe.
I use a smartphone for several reasons: calls, texts, video chats, email, GPS, baseball games, social media, music, movies, smart home control, mobile payments, et cetera. And almost all of these things sends push notifications to my phone to alert me. It would be great if the iPhone 7 running the newest version of iOS could easily manage these, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. Each and every repetitive Facebook comment, Instagram like, group conversation “lol,” and sacrifice fly (baseball) lights up my phone screen and logs itself in the Notification Center.
Needless to say, I often take the Coward’s Way Out and tap the little “X” to simply dismiss all of them. This means I never see most of the push notifications at all. Perhaps I should just turn them all off and rely entirely on the red badge circles.
Android, on the other hand.
And if you want to expand them, just drag down. And combine them again by dragging back up.
No matter how you slice it, iOS 11 promised a lot of cool things that will keep people using iPhones and iPads. But what isn’t included is a simplification of incoming alerts. Hopefully, Apple can figure this out in a way that makes sense, or else they can simply copy Google. We’d be okay with that too, at this point.
