I do not wish to make a whole big thing out of this, but I have noticed a bunch of little things which make my iPhone a little bit harder to use. For this, I am setting aside things like rearranging the Home Screen, which still feels like playing Tetris with an adversarial board. These are all things which are relatively new, beginning with the always-on display and the Island in particular, neither of which I had on my last iPhone.
The always-on display is a little bit useful and a little bit of a gimmick. I have mine set to hide the wallpaper and notifications. In this setup, however, the position of media controls becomes unpredictable. Imagine you are listening to music when someone wishes to talk to you. You reach down to the visible media controls and tap where the pause button is, knowing that this only wakes the display. You go in for another tap to pause but — surprise — you got a notification at some point and, so, now that you have woken up the display, the notification slides in from the bottom and moves the media controls up, so you have now tapped on a notification instead.
I can resolve this by enabling notifications on the dimmed lock screen view, but that seems more like a workaround than a solution to this unexpected behaviour. A simple way to fix this would be to not show media controls when the phone is locked and the display is asleep. They are not functional, but they create an expectation for where those controls will be, which is not necessarily the case.
The Dynamic Island is fussy, too. I frequently interact with it for media playback, but it has a very short time-out. That is, if I pause media from the Dynamic Island, the ability to resume playback disappears after just a few seconds; I find this a little disorientating.
I do not understand how to swap the priority or visibility of Dynamic Island Live Activities. That is to say the Dynamic Island will show up to two persistent items, one of which will be minimized into a little circular icon, while the other will wrap around the display cutout. Apple says I should be able to swap the position of these by swiping horizontally, but I can only seem to make one of the Activities disappear no matter how I swipe. And, when I do make an Activity disappear, I do not know how I can restore it.
I find a lot of the horizontal swiping gestures too easy to activate in the Dynamic Island — I have unintentionally made an Activity disappear more than once — and across the system generally. It seems only a slightly off-centre angle is needed to transform a vertical scrolling action into a horizontal swiping one. Many apps make use of “sloppy” swiping — being able to swipe horizontally anywhere on the display to move through sequential items or different pages — and vertical scrolling in the same view, but the former is too easy for me to trigger when I intend the latter.
I also find the area above the Dynamic Island too easy to touch when I am intending to expand the current Live Activity. This will be interpreted as touching the Status Bar, which will jump the scroll position of the current view to the top.
Lastly, the number of unintended taps I make has, anecdotally, skyrocketed. One reason for this is a change made several iOS versions ago to recognize touches more immediately. If I am scrolling a long list and I tap the display to stop the scroll in-place, resting my thumb onscreen is sometimes read as a tap action on whatever control is below it. Another reason for accidental touches is that pressing the sleep/wake button does not immediately stop interpreting taps on the display. You can try this now: open Mail, press the sleep/wake button, then — without waiting for the display to fall asleep — tap some message in the list. It is easy to do this accidentally when I return my phone to my pocket, for example.
These are all little things but they are a cumulative irritation. I do not think my motor skills have substantially changed in the past seventeen years of iOS device use, though I concede they have perhaps deteriorated a little. I do notice more things behaving unexpectedly. I think part of the reason is this two-dimensional slab of glass is being asked to interpret a bunch of gestures in some pretty small areas.