5 ultra-petty tech gripes that are ruining my life

The first one would be so easy for Apple to fix

POD! A massive episode of The Abundance Agenda this week. We talk about calls to revive Crossrail 2, a massive pile of rubbish in Oxfordshire, and speak to Laura Ryan from the Tony Blair Institute about her pitch to revolutionise British science by building new laboratories focused on creating ‘disruptive’ inventions. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

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Hey everyone! I had intended a slightly more cerebral essay this week about industrial policy and China, but it needs more time to cook. So in the meantime, here’s something a bit more fun.

You’ve probably noticed by now that I’m a tech optimist.

For all of the doom-mongering about AI, and the scepticism towards our tech overlords, I pretty fundamentally believe that the march of technology is a sign of progress.

But I will concede that it doesn’t always feel this way.

Now, I’m not talking about scary surveillance technology, misaligned AI, or the fact that one of our most important communication platforms is basically a donation-in-kind to Tommy Robinson.

What I actually want to talk about in this post is much more trivial: The user experience frustrations that plague the devices I use, even though they would be relatively easy for the companies involved to fix. So please enjoy this extremely petty list of grievances, and for the love of god, if you know anyone who works at a Big Tech firm, forward my gripes on to them.

Apple’s maddening playback buttons

The cat staring back at you from behind the player is Boudicca.

Since the iPhone first launched, playback controls have appeared on the lock screen if you’re listening to something. And to be fair, this is a very good design choice. Or at least it was, right up until Apple added two key technologies to the iPhone: Tap to wake with the iPhone X in 2017, where just tapping the screen would light it up, and then always-on displays, which was added to the iPhone 14 Pro in 2022.

In theory, they are both great additions as they mean less friction between the user and their apps, and it makes it possible to glance down to quickly check the time or notifications. But it also added a big problem.

Because I can now wake my lock screen with an accidental tap, and because there is a big fat playback progress bar somewhere on the screen, it has become incredibly easy to accidentally knock the bar and skip to some random other part of whatever you’re listening to.

I’ve found it, repeatedly, absolutely infuriating – especially when listening to a long podcast where I don’t want to lose my place. As one inadvertent swipe can knock me back to the beginning of a show, with no clear indication where I’d been before.

In fact, this has become so annoying that when I’m listening to something particularly long, like the excellent Acquired podcast, I’ll literally take screenshots when I hit pause, just in case I fuck it up later when I’m sliding my phone into my pocket.

However, the most frustrating thing about this is that it would be really fucking easy to fix.

For a start, Apple could make it so that pressing a playback control button on the lock screen requires an extra-long press, to reduce the risk of an accidental tap.¹ And secondly, it could add a “playback history” feature, which makes a note whenever you skip around during playback. So that when I do make an accidental press, I can see where I should have been, and skip back.

Come on Apple – forget fixing Apple Intelligence – you could have this sorted in an afternoon.²