Iphone/Ipad Apps that dont work, and why i wouldnt buy an Iphone.

LincolnshireYokel

My lad gave me his old Iphone3, since he bought a Galaxy Andriod. Now, under normal circumstances thers no way i'd pay £300 for a phone, no matter how smart it is, but if you're going to give me one free, then im quite happy to put some credit on it and play.

Apart from many flaws (listed later), the by far and away worst feature of an Iphone is the fact most of the free Apps and many of the paid for apps SIMPLY DONT WORK!! OK, you might only pay 69p or 99p for them, but I spent Nearly £10 on Apps that either didnt work, didnt work as described, or stopped working after they updated. And there doesnt seem to be a mechanism for getting your money back. After all, i see no reason that apps shouldnt come under the Sale of Goods Act and be 'as described, of merchantable quality, and fit for purpose'.

Bokodo bar code reader didnt work at all. On the other hand, RedLaser barcode scanner seems to work about 50% of the time. Skywalk, a Stars and Constellations program, worked when i first downloaded it, then it updated, and started to crash out on loadup, updated a week after that and seems to work again. Ispeed sort of works, it throws many many false positive for speed cameras such that in urban areas it almost always on. Speed is a similar program, buit crashes on load, another one suffering the fate of an update. NavFree UK shows a map but its so arcane and obscure to use its useless. Panorama Free, was never going to work. Many free one fail to load or run, i just deleted them, since there free then one cant complain apart from the waste of time and data allowance downloading them.

See, i worked in IT 30 years. I started writing COBOL on punched cards in the early 80's and ended up project managing large rollouts of hardware and software, (and were talking LANS and WANs, 100 servers, 300 workstations, 100 locations, £1.5million budgets). I know all about what software should and shouldnt do. And one thing i do know is when you have a software set that works, you dont update anything. So the Apps habit of forcing you to accept updates with no method of rolling back to the original is doomed to create tears before bedtime, especially when they fail to test the app on all o/s versions.

Im not impressed with the idea of upgrading the iphone o/s, either. I remember once when my wife bought an iPod, a few years ago, we installed the software and a week later it enthusiastically offered to update, which i foolishly let it. It subsequently trashed the PC, and took me 8 hours and a complete disc reformat to get it all working again, AND it trashed the iPod and we had to do a factory reset and reload. The moral here is to not roll out so many different o/s's. Theres an old saying, if you fiddle with anything for long enough, you'll break it. O/S updates are a perfect demonstration of this. Even Microsoft tends not to go beyond x.3 and a version every 4 years.

And then you get the User Interface. The problem Apple has with the entire range is not what the manuals tell you, its what they dont tell you, the word of mouth heuristic knowledge that you need to get it to do stuff. The stuff that isnt written down, that you have to spend ages googling for or posting on forums to see if anyone knows how to do it. Theres a principle in writing user interfaces - its should be blindingly obvious what you have to do to make it do what you want it to do. It should be perfectly clear what button to press. You shouldnt have to plough thru hundreds of pages of manuals and web posts to find out how do something. But you do have to. Its possibly not THE most user hostile GUI ive ever seen, but its certainly in the competition.

Then theres the way it bleeds credit off. I dont want a contract phone, i can put £30 on a bog standard mobile and it lasts me 3 months. This Iphone bleeds credit off as you sleep, it worse than a $10 Thai hoe. You wake up at 8 AM and there will be message saying you have used your months allocation of data and you're going to be charged from now on, and all the time you've been asleep. God knows how. You can stop it by turning off 3G, Wifi and location services, but then you have a phone that just send texts and makes calls, and my £12 ASDA phone does that.

Then theres the battery life. Or lack of, in this case. If you dont put it on charge EVERY night, its dead in the morning. My £12 ASDA cheapo last about 3 weeks on one charge. Ideally, you need to walk round with your iPhone plugged into a car battery to keep it working all the time. Theres no point in a phone you cant switch on for fear of running out of credit and power just doing nothing. lets face it, as a design concept, it fails on two very basic requirements.,

I went on to the Apple Public User Forums and had a moan. Within an hour, they had deleted my post off the forum and sent me 69p back. But you think how many of the thousands of peopel how get an app that doesnt work, and dont bother to complain, someone is making thousands of pounds for selling cr*p.

Lifeforms

Is it worth such a moan?
You have a cheap asda phone, please use it, you're obviously never going to be happy ith an iphone, and that's fine! You don't need to be, why not find some random kid on the street, and just hand it over. I'm sure they'll be more grateful that you seem to want to be with it.

It's a SmartPhone, not a Mobile Phone. Therefore it has data charges, and if you're so into things as you say you should be very aware of that, and aware that you need a proper package. There is no issue with using wifi during the night, when you're asleep, or just turn the data off. You do not need a contract to get a decent data package.

As for Apps not working when updated. Such is life. Apple update, therefore apps have to update. When they update off their own back, then be grateful that they are trying to improve, and many apps are not done in a business environment where it can be tested on every apple product out there. Don't just blithely hit Update, check what is being updated and why. Also read the damn comments and maybe you'll see if others have issues. It's not hard.

I can't even be bothered to cover any more points really, but just this:
Honestly it sounds like everyone will be better off if you just threw the phone out of the window. If you don't want to use it, why are you?!

[Deleted User]

Most user hostile UI? Are you joking? My two 1/2 year old happily uses my iPad. Would you prefer a command prompt?

My HTC Desire HD eats battery. Even without use, it needs charging every night. This is the cost you pay for having a smartphone.

However, i do agree they need to adopt a 'refund' model like Android Market does (Google Play now). Where you have a window to try it and get a refund if you don't like it / it doesn't work

BTW, you aren't ever forced to update an app if you don't want to.

Wow, what a rant!

Trinitrotoluene

LincolnshireYokel wrote: »

My lad gave me his old Iphone3, since he bought a Galaxy Andriod. Now, under normal circumstances thers no way i'd pay £300 for a phone, no matter how smart it is, but if you're going to give me one free, then im quite happy to put some credit on it and play.

Depending on what iPhone 3 you have your phone could be 3 revisions out of date - just thought I'd point that out.

Apart from many flaws (listed later), the by far and away worst feature of an Iphone is the fact most of the free Apps and many of the paid for apps SIMPLY DONT WORK!!

Never found one that doesn't work to be honest - might be the age of the phone you have.

Bokodo bar code reader didnt work at all.

Because the camera on your 3g is terrible

See, i worked in IT 30 years. I started writing COBOL on punched cards in the early 80's and ended up project managing large rollouts of hardware and software, (and were talking LANS and WANs, 100 servers, 300 workstations, 100 locations, £1.5million budgets). I know all about what software should and shouldnt do. And one thing i do know is when you have a software set that works, you dont update anything. So the Apps habit of forcing you to accept updates with no method of rolling back to the original is doomed to create tears before bedtime, especially when they fail to test the app on all o/s versions.

The apps never force you to update.

Im not impressed with the idea of upgrading the iphone o/s, either. I remember once when my wife bought an iPod, a few years ago, we installed the software and a week later it enthusiastically offered to update, which i foolishly let it. It subsequently trashed the PC, and took me 8 hours and a complete disc reformat to get it all working again,

You claim to have worked in IT - I do work in IT and this is highly unlikely.

The moral here is to not roll out so many different o/s's.

They don't - there isn't that many different versions of the Apple OS (iOS). Usually one revision with each yearly iphone update.

Even Microsoft tends not to go beyond x.3 and a version every 4 years.

Wrong.

And then you get the User Interface. The problem Apple has with the entire range is not what the manuals tell you, its what they dont tell you, the word of mouth heuristic knowledge that you need to get it to do stuff. The stuff that isnt written down, that you have to spend ages googling for or posting on forums to see if anyone knows how to do it. Theres a principle in writing user interfaces - its should be blindingly obvious what you have to do to make it do what you want it to do. It should be perfectly clear what button to press. You shouldnt have to plough thru hundreds of pages of manuals and web posts to find out how do something. But you do have to. Its possibly not THE most user hostile GUI ive ever seen, but its certainly in the competition.

The GUI is the best thing about the iPhone. My four year old can use my iPhone and he can't even read - that is the sign of a good GUI.

Then theres the way it bleeds credit off. I dont want a contract phone, i can put £30 on a bog standard mobile and it lasts me 3 months. This Iphone bleeds credit off as you sleep, it worse than a $10 Thai hoe. You wake up at 8 AM and there will be message saying you have used your months allocation of data and you're going to be charged from now on, and all the time you've been asleep. God knows how. You can stop it by turning off 3G, Wifi and location services, but then you have a phone that just send texts and makes calls, and my £12 ASDA phone does that.

Then stick to your MOBILE phone the iphone is a SMART phone. Look more carefully at what it is doing. Connect it to wifi.

Then theres the battery life. Or lack of, in this case. If you dont put it on charge EVERY night, its dead in the morning.

Because your phone is many years old.

You are definitely not the kind of person an iPhone is targeted at so I'd suggest you stick to a phone that sends text messages and makes phone calls only!

LincolnshireYokel

Trinitrotoluene wrote: »

Depending on what iPhone 3 you have your phone could be 3 revisions out of date - just thought I'd point that out.

Congratulations, you missed entireely the point about not changing a working configuration.

Never found one that doesn't work to be honest - might be the age of the phone you have.

Yes, its not backward compatible, obviously i didnt make the point clearly enough

Because the camera on your 3g is terrible

exactly, its a heap of sh*t, thank you for confirming that.

The apps never force you to update.

they queue up and wait for you to press the button, and dont offer any advice on the likely reliability or siccess of the upodate, and no method of rolling back

You claim to have worked in IT - I do work in IT and this is highly unlikely.

Thats because I worked in IT far longer than you, right from the early 1980's and ive seen stuff your never likely to see. The update locked up in the middle and i was forced to do a hard reset., when it came back up it blue screened because the hdd was corrupt and the ipod was also screwed. Both had to be restored from scratch. Working in IT in these days requires very little technical know how, thats why many IT jobs are minimum wage monkey jobs.

They don't - there isn't that many different versions of the Apple OS (iOS). Usually one revision with each yearly iphone update.

The phone is loaded with 4.2.1 build 8C148, the current version according to Apple. If it doesnt work with some Apps, thats not really my fault, is it ?

Wrong.

n,o right, do your research, little boy

Domestic versions of windows

Windows 1 (aka the MS-DOS executive - 1981
Windows 2 1987, x.1 and x.2 versions
Windows 3 1990 3.1 1992
Windows 95 1995
windows 98 1998
Windows Millenium 2000
Windows XP 2001 three service packs
Windows Vista 2006
Windows 7 2009

Average issue rate 3.1 years

And ive worked on all of them, as well as FTOS, all DOS versions, Novell 3,4 and 5, NT 4, Linux, and Check Point's SecurePlatform Pro. Not to mention writing in FORTRAN 77, COBOL 66, BASIC, dBAse 3,4,5 Clipper, MUMPS, SQL, Pascal, C, C+, Java, and machine code on the x.86 family. And lets not even get into LANS, WANS, mail systems, VOX systems, POS systems, SAP and dozens of other systems ive specified and implemented

If you want to have an IT big willy competition, ill win hands down, kid. Ive been around longer.

The GUI is the best thing about the iPhone. My four year old can use my iPhone and he can't even read - that is the sign of a good GUI.

The gui is not intuitive. Its itsnt obvious, as I said, to find how to do something requires you to look in the manual or ask someone. That is not a good interface. Good interface programming is when you never have to check the manual on how to do something, because its obvious how to do it by looking at the screen. And ive designed and specified many many user interfaces over the years.

Then stick to your MOBILE phone the iphone is a SMART phone. Look more carefully at what it is doing. Connect it to wifi.

See, its patronizing crap like this make you seem a !!!!!. God help any poor sod confronted with you at the end of the helpdesk phone.

Because your phone is many years old.

You are definitely not the kind of person an iPhone is targeted at so I'd suggest you stick to a phone that sends text messages and makes phone calls only!

I intend to, and ill do the stuff the iPhone claims it can do on a PC, which does it fare better and cheaper.

On the same vien. as if to prove my point, the newspapers are carrying the story that

Apple to offer refund to ALL buyers of new iPad in Australia after 'misleading' 4G claims

AS the romans would have said, "Quod Erat Demonstrandum". AS for you, Trinitrotoluene, i refer you to the reply given by the defendant in ARKELL v. PRESSDRAM 1971

Mista_C

LincolnshireYokel wrote: »

Bokodo bar code reader didnt work at all.

You don't say which iOS version you're using but Bokodo...

AppStore wrote:

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 4.0 or later.

Are you using iOS 4 or later?

Skywalk, a Stars and Constellations program, worked when i first downloaded it, then it updated, and started to crash out on loadup, updated a week after that and seems to work again. Ispeed sort of works, it throws many many false positive for speed cameras such that in urban areas it almost always on. Speed is a similar program, buit crashes on load, another one suffering the fate of an update.

Those looks like issues you need to report to the developer of the app.

NavFree UK shows a map but its so arcane and obscure to use its useless. Panorama Free, was never going to work.

They're free, if they're not to your taste try a different app.

Many free one fail to load or run, i just deleted them, since there free then one cant complain apart from the waste of time and data allowance downloading them.

Why waste data? Download them when you're connected to a WiFi connection.

See, i worked in IT 30 years. I started writing COBOL on punched cards in the early 80's and ended up project managing large rollouts of hardware and software, (and were talking LANS and WANs, 100 servers, 300 workstations, 100 locations, £1.5million budgets). I know all about what software should and shouldnt do. And one thing i do know is when you have a software set that works, you dont update anything.

And things have changed a lot in 30 years. Being a COBOL programmer you should know about buggy programming. COBOL was anything but efficient with resources.
You say you worked in I.T. for 30 years and as a Project Manager, then you should know what updating is about, patching security holes, providing new features, bug fixes, etc. You don't just leave a software set as it is and ignore any security problems that could come out of it. Times have changed, we're not limited to localised networks anymore, we're part of a bigger one full of internet nasties created by people to exploit these bugs so they can rip you off.

So the Apps habit of forcing you to accept updates with no method of rolling back to the original is doomed to create tears before bedtime, especially when they fail to test the app on all o/s versions.

You're not forced to update at all, you have to go into the App Store, click on Updates, choose the app you wish to update, click the Update button all before entering your password to confirm, then if you're not happy with that the easiest thing to do is delete the app and re-install the previous version.

Im not impressed with the idea of upgrading the iphone o/s, either. I remember once when my wife bought an iPod, a few years ago, we installed the software and a week later it enthusiastically offered to update, which i foolishly let it. It subsequently trashed the PC, and took me 8 hours and a complete disc reformat to get it all working again,

How on Earth did a .ipsw file trash your PC? It's just a downloadable file using iTunes as the download manager.

AND it trashed the iPod and we had to do a factory reset and reload. The moral here is to not roll out so many different o/s's. Theres an old saying, if you fiddle with anything for long enough, you'll break it. O/S updates are a perfect demonstration of this. Even Microsoft tends not to go beyond x.3 and a version every 4 years.

I'll give you I've seen iPods messed up by updates to the point of needing to be restored but think about your Microsoft comment. Windows 1.x - 1985-87, Windows 2.x - 1987-89, Windows 3.x - 1990-93, Windows 95 - 95-98, Windows 98 - 98-2000, Windows 2000/ME-2000-01, Windows XP - 2001-06, Windows Vista - 2006-09, Windows 7 - 2009-Present, and the Windows 8 consumer preview is already out. The longest run without shifting to a major version was XP, for almost 5 years (until Vista come out). That's a major revision update every 2.4 years on average and obviously that's not including things like service packs. Most of those iOS updates have been released to fix security holes or offer new features, some in an attempt to prevent jail-breaking and a couple to, well I'm not quite sure if I'm honest.

And then you get the User Interface. The problem Apple has with the entire range is not what the manuals tell you, its what they dont tell you, the word of mouth heuristic knowledge that you need to get it to do stuff. The stuff that isnt written down, that you have to spend ages googling for or posting on forums to see if anyone knows how to do it. Theres a principle in writing user interfaces - its should be blindingly obvious what you have to do to make it do what you want it to do. It should be perfectly clear what button to press. You shouldnt have to plough thru hundreds of pages of manuals and web posts to find out how do something. But you do have to. Its possibly not THE most user hostile GUI ive ever seen, but its certainly in the competition.

What exactly do you have a problem with in the GUI? Maybe we can help you. My 14 year old, autistic, adhd, partially deaf, barely able to speak daughter with learning difficulties and a mental age of 6 years old manages to find her way through her iPod like she's possessed by the spirit of Steve Jobs. It's even offered her a way of basic communication with iMessage (via an iOS update I might add).

Then theres the way it bleeds credit off. I dont want a contract phone, i can put £30 on a bog standard mobile and it lasts me 3 months. This Iphone bleeds credit off as you sleep, it worse than a $10 Thai hoe. You wake up at 8 AM and there will be message saying you have used your months allocation of data and you're going to be charged from now on, and all the time you've been asleep. God knows how. You can stop it by turning off 3G, Wifi and location services, but then you have a phone that just send texts and makes calls, and my £12 ASDA phone does that.

WiFi doesn't use credit, it uses 802.11g radio wireless standards. If you find that your credit is being eaten then you've either a) downloaded a dodgy app, or b) left your apps running in the background. Double-tap your home button from te Home screen to bring up the iOS version of Task Manager. Hold your finger on an app to bring up the red X in the top left, this will allow you to close it. Once you're done double-tape Home again to return to the Home screen.

Then theres the battery life. Or lack of, in this case. If you dont put it on charge EVERY night, its dead in the morning. My £12 ASDA cheapo last about 3 weeks on one charge. Ideally, you need to walk round with your iPhone plugged into a car battery to keep it working all the time. Theres no point in a phone you cant switch on for fear of running out of credit and power just doing nothing. lets face it, as a design concept, it fails on two very basic requirements.,

Againthis is usually down to a) leaving apps running, or b) not configuring app settings in the Settings app. I suggest you read your manual (RTFM) for this one.

Whew, is that over now? :eek:

[Deleted User]

What an ordeal.

callistris

Most likely user error by not reading what IOS is needed to run the apps before downloading, not the phones fault!

Also read the reviews first, you can get good insight from there how good an app is;)

Dreamnine

So the OP is moaning that his 3 year old phone isn't working well with the latest apps?

Why update an app if you don't want to? You aren't forced to.

[Deleted User]

Well, my iPad updates it's OS over-the air, without the need to be plugged in. No chance of it breaking my PC that way (and yes, i have experienced woe when trying to use iTunes)

I'd love to know what you needed to check the manual for. I may have only working in IT for 9 years (Java, JavaScript, Python, Perl, PHP, Visual Basic, C#, XSLT, Amiga AMOS, BASIC, InterSystems ObjectScript {OO MUMPS} plus a couple of proprietary languages if we're playing the IT comparison game) but the only time i've had to resort to looking in the manual is to find out how to do a hard reset after the touchscreen refused to work. The UI is so stupidly simplistic it's beyond a joke

It's far harder to get an OS upgrade with Android - i'm lucky having a HTC since they do seem to keep up gradually with the Android releases. But i really don't expect to be running the latest OS with a 2 or 3 year old phone. Moore's law and all that.

Is the problem between the touchscreen and the chair?

Loopz

i dealt with JCL via punch cards when i left school, mounted 9600bps tapes through the night, messed with George 2, MVS XA 4381 mainframes etc etc.

BUT i love my iPhone

Like with most things in life, it's not going to be for everyone. I'd just go and use what you are happy with and just accept that is the way it is