I'm not surprised since I think most UI overhauls replace one system with another that is roughly equally good, except that nobody is familiar with the new system so everyone burns a bunch of time and attention learning the new one just to get back to par. The new UI often isn't worse in any objective sense, it's just not better and the whole exercise is a giant waste of everyone's time.

Some subset of users like re-learning how to do the same basic things in a new way, such as switching browser tabs, but most people want to spend ~0 time on that stuff and get justified annoyed when it's pushed on them.

Of course over time people will get used to the new design, but even if the new one is materially worse what are people going to do? It's not like Apple cares that much about random user opinion and the joy of a monopoly or duopoly is that the companies controlling one don't have all that much incentive to keep people happy.

I think a lot of the time the UI is objectively worse. Less functionality, more clicks/swipes to do the same actions, less legibility, etc.

It's just that people get used to bad software.

> It's just that people get used to bad software.

Or that it improves silently between several versions. Or that it just keeps getting worse, and people are justified every time.

I don't know a lot about Apple. Android seems to be partially at each of those camps.

It rarely improves above and beyond the level from which it had plummeted, though. More often you get tweaks to reduce the major annoyances to tolerable level. Which users then tolerate because, well, what other choice do they have when literally everyone is doing it?

What's really bad about this is that we (as in the software industry) have managed to teach people to hate updates, and a significant part of that is all the gratuitous changes to established UI flows. Many casual users dread updates now because they just want their shit to keep working like it always did. And this is how you end up with unpatched security issues.

The transition with iOS 7 was a usability downgrade, and iOS 26 is now another usability downgrade. That people are complaining about both of them is perfectly justified.

Just because something happened once before doesn't mean that it's good.

Actually about half of the top comments there are positive. Opinion was clearly divided. Not now though!

Yea I’m tempted to upgrade because I assume that people just don’t like change. But then seeing nn group doesn’t like it isn’t a great sign. Definitively going to wait and see what people say in a few months.

To be fair, the article on the NN site has a top banner with current section which occupies at least a third of a screen and makes it not very pleasant to read on the iphone.

I don’t understand why usability experts’ website has worse experience than 90% of the web?

Hey, but the release of iOS 7 was the worst release in the entire history of iOS releases. At least my personal impression is so. This release completes with that. So I agree, sure thing, we can substitute iOS 7 for iOS 26, and it would be the same. But what’s the sameness we discuss? Is it some corporate culture that inevitably brings us the mediocrity, or us, the users, being thankless plebes with some weird wishes of usability? To me, that’s the first, obviously. You leave them alone for a while and they’ll bring you … this.

I personally believe iOS 7 was terrible but it was step in the right direction and continuous iterations on that design make overall user experience better than it was before. Currently, I'm not a big fan of iOS 26 but I'm willing to give a benefit of the doubt to Apple and see if the vision they have is actually make things better

I’m in a similar position, but also I am so angry that none of the bugs from iOS 18, those I encounter daily with, none of them were addressed. Not even in the slightest. I am so sure there would be a proper release one day, but the plebs with once perfectly working iPhones, won’t get that bug fix and optimisations release. That makes me angry. I remember my iPhone 4S was almost perfect, but the iOS 7…9 made it slow and not very usable in comparison to iOS 6. Same thing I see with my perfectly good iOS 18 iPhone 12 mini, which just brought me back to these 4S times I forgot about.

Plus, I’m ten years older (ten years more experienced) now, and I’m very sceptical that is being some vision. That is rather being a great failure, but since the company basically in the same position as Microsoft with their Windows, they don’t feel they’ll lose their customers, as most of them are willing to give Apple this benefit of the doubt. Then they’ll have at least a couple of years to do something about it.