The new flashlight control is the worst UI/UX from Apple in a while

[CrysisDeu]

Hi everyone,
I’m starting a series of posts/threads to provide feedback (and rants) on various aspects of the iOS 18 UI. I’ll break them into three different posts for now:

1. the new flashlight dynamic island control (this post)
2. the new Photos App (planning to write)
3. the control center (planning to write)

I know iOS 18 is in beta and subject to change. And the changes are sometimes driven by user feedbacks. I will send the posts as feedbacks to Apple as well.

Disclaimer: I am not a ‘professional’ UI/UX designer, in the sense that it’s not my main job, and I don’t earn a living from it. However, I have a passion for human-computer interaction and UI/UX. I’ve watched almost every design-related WWDC session over the past ~10 years, designed numerous UIs as side projects, and I’m a ‘full stack’ content producer using various design and editing software.

Why am I spending time (3 hours) writing this?​

I’ve provided numerous feedbacks on previous iOS iterations as a beta tester, and many of them were implemented by Apple. This year’s iOS 18 is quite a disaster, with numerous poorly considered elements that violate basic design principles and are confusing to me. It’s wrong on so many levels that I’ve almost given up on providing feedback—there’s just too much to address! I have no idea how non-tech-savvy or elderly people will use this new iOS version, and I suspect the design inconsistencies will only worsen in the coming years.
I want to raise awareness with Apple about this ongoing design oversight, which has driven me and many others away as hardcore Apple fans who once admired their design philosophy. I hope to resonate with my fellow forum members who are core Apple users and potentially gain media coverage to push for change within Apple.

Topic for this post: the new flashlight control in dynamic island is badly designed​

This is going to be a hot take: the new flashlight control is one of the most confusing UIs I’ve seen from Apple in at least three years—yes, even worse than the Safari redesign and the new Photos app.
I learned the new flashlight implementation is an intern project, and I really hate to hurt some intern engineer’s feelings—I wouldn’t want someone to trash my intern project. But at the same time, I hate to see this new implementation shipped to the general public. I don’t see how a normal user is going to understand how to control the flashlight with this new UI.

What's new about the flashlight control?​

Let’s start with what’s new about the flashlight control before diving into what’s wrong with it. You might have seen videos about it already, as it gained a lot of popularity on social media. The reason it was popular?

1. It utilizes dynamic island
2. It has some cool animations
3. You can control the spread of the flashlight with the new control

When you click the flashlight control, instead of holding the control to adjust its brightness, the control now moves entirely to a new UI in the dynamic island.

The dynamic island UI will minimize itself after a second, leaving just a flashlight icon in the island.
To control the flashlight, you need to click on the dynamic island, then drag up/down to control the brightness and drag sideways to control the spread.
While it’s neat and flashy (pun intended) and works for social media posts, it’s absolutely abysmal for regular use. Let me explain:

What's wrong about this new design​

Most user won't know they can control the flashlight with this new UI​

First, many users won’t even know they can control the flashlight with this dynamic island implementation. Most of the dynamic island content, apart from music playback control, purely displays real-time information. Users don’t expect to interact with the dynamic island unless it explicitly shows buttons. There’s no way to expect them to drag the dynamic island to control a functionality.
Additionally, the flashlight UI only appears in an expanded state for a second before minimizing. How is a normal user supposed to know they can click the dynamic island to expand it and control their flashlight?

Need to reach to the top​

This is plainly wrong! Across iOS, the dynamic island is mostly used for displaying information, but not for interaction. Why? Because it’s located at the least reachable part of your phone—the very top! You might manage to click a button like music playback control, but performing gestures on dynamic island content? That’s a real challenge.

Need two hands to adjust the flashlight​

Since the dynamic island is at the top, you now need two hands to adjust the flashlight. But why should you? The worst time to require two hands for a simple task like controlling a flashlight is when you’re in the dark, trying to feel around or use a tool.

Why do you need to adjust the spread on a phone's flashlight?​

Many people praise this new UI because it allows you to adjust the spread of the flashlight. While it makes sense for traditional physical flashlights, it makes zero sense on an iPhone. It’s change for the sake of innovation.
On a physical flashlight, adjusting the brightness controls the spread and focuses the light on a smaller area, making it brighter. An iPhone has no lens to adjust, so you’re not focusing a light source; it’s merely switching between inner and outer flash LEDs, each lighting up an inner or outer ring.
So, adjusting the spread doesn’t gain you any more brightness already availble. The spread control isn’t even accurate, and it doesn’t make much difference. It only makes it harder to light up all LEDs with maximum brightness.
Realistically, you only need brightness control on a phone’s flashlight.

There is no (or it's just bad) visual cue on how to adjust the flashlight​

Take at most 1 second to look at this UI (since it minimizes after a second on iOS 18). Tell me: what potential controls are available, and how are you supposed to control the flashlight?
I was so confused when I first used this:

1. What is that bar on the top? It’s probably the spread because the light cone’s width matches it, but how do I change the spread?
2. There is a tick on the left and right of the 'spread' bar, so do I pinch to adjust the spread?
3. How am I supposed to pinch such a small element? Am I supposed to swipe?
4. Does swiping to the left focus the light? Or does swiping to the right focus the light?
5. What about the vertical bar on the right? What is that? Is that a draggable handle? It looks like the draggable handle you usually see on a bottom sheet.
6. Nothing really seems to happen when I drag the vertical bar.
7. How do I control the brightness of the flashlight?

There are so many questions that I had no idea how to answer when using this. I literally had to watch a YouTube video to understand that you just drag sideways to control the spread. It’s so poorly designed that you can’t understand it within a second.

The actual adjustment sucks​

Usually, you learn how a control works after a few guesses with trial and error, but the actual adjustment here sucks! I couldn’t instantly tell what was happening because the adjustment is incredibly unpredictable!
Why is it bad?

1. If you drag diagonally, the brightness and the spread change at the same time! Why would two changes happen with one gesture? They should lock on one axis and only change one control at a time.
2. The UI lags behind your gesture because the control levels are discrete, not continuous. So you drag for a while, nothing happens, and then suddenly, both brightness and spread change simultaneously.
3. The brightness and spread levels are discrete, but there’s nothing in the UI indicating how many levels there are and where the boundaries of each level are.
4. If I want maximum brightness, which spread level should I choose? What if I don’t want to accidentally adjust the brightness level and just keep the brightest default?

The control is so bad and so unpredictable, making it even harder to learn how to use it.

The control patters collides with dynamic island's default controls​

There are two swipe gestures you can do with Dynamic Island:

1. Drag up to minimize an expanded island
2. Drag left to dismiss the content in the Dynamic Island

Now in the same small Dynamic Island, two of the gestures directly collides with the default controls available for other Dynamic Island controls. It makes me very uncomfortable to drag this UI to control the flashlight. I am afraid to minimize or dismiss the UI, because that's how it works everywhere else across the board.

What do I propose​

I have many ideas on how this UI could be improved while still utilizing the dynamic island. But I think it’s just a poor choice to have the entire control on the dynamic island. At most, they should embed a button toggle in the dynamic island to turn the flashlight on/off, like iOS 17 did (preferably with an actual button indicating it’s clickable). Given this thought, I won’t even present my suggestions for dynamic island-based changes.

There are really two choices:​

Honestly, I don’t think the spread adjustment is needed on an iPhone. Just revert it to iOS 17, where the one-handed flashlight control was infinitely better than this current implementation.
If Apple insists on keeping the spread adjustment, fine, there are two ways to implement it elegantly:

1. Keep the iOS 17 adjustment, and add a bottom segmented control group to adjust the spread. You know how you can adjust the transparancy mode of your airpods in the volume slider in control center? Spread adjustment should be implement like that, with three discrete levels to choose from (narrow, normal, wide)
2. Remove manual spread adjustment and do it smartly. If the user selects the maximum brightness, turn all of the flash on. If they selects the minumum brightness, only turn the inner flashlight LEDs on a low brightness. The user really don't need to know the spread and how it's controlled. The simple flashlight on the iPhone should 'just work'.

Other than that, the new fancy animations are lit, the chromatic aberrations also adds a nice touch. I have nothing against it and I would like to see more such designs and details from Apple

Rant over! I am very glad if you read through this. How do you think about this?

 

[HuNay]

I do think the controls are iffy and could use a few explanations, but you also raised some other good points.

As for the spread, it feels nice not having it look like a vignette all the time, since the flashlight defaulted to what’s now the narrowest setting in iOS 16/17.

 

[CrysisDeu]

I do think the controls are iffy and could use a few explanations, but you also raised some other good points.

As for the spread, it feels nice not having it look like a vignette all the time, since the flashlight defaulted to what’s now the narrowest setting in iOS 16/17.

> it feels nice not having it look like a vignette all the time

This is an interesting point, I think it's a good thing to solve if they can, but not at the cost of added complexity, and it definitely should not be the reason to implement the spread control.

It should preferably be solved at the hardware level, globally, since the camera also uses the flash to take photos

 

[shad0wf0rce]

TLDR. I appreciate your time and writing such stuff. Don't get me wrong. IMHO as a Developer for the Apple Platforms i am really a person who against judging a feature in a beta. Especially a feature in the first beta... Apple made some horrible design choices in the past (like Battery Symbol at the macOS. It was like condom if you remember) but they manage to polish them as they collecting the feedback from the people who did install the beta. This is clearly a same thing. I hope you will consider your judgment when we get the final version of the 18.

 

[CrysisDeu]

TLDR. I appreciate your time and writing such stuff. Don't get me wrong. IMHO as a Developer for the Apple Platforms i am really a person who against judging a feature in a beta. Especially a feature in the first beta... Apple made some horrible design choices in the past (like Battery Symbol at the macOS. It was like condom if you remember) but they manage to polish them as they collecting the feedback from the people who did install the beta. This is clearly a same thing. I hope you will consider your judgment when we get the final version of the 18.

To add context: This is supposedly an intern project done from last year (not changed in a while), and it gained consensus within the teams (from the already deleted Twitter/X post by the creator/Apple employee of this UI).

And you are not wrong, feedbacks are also important factors for Apple to make design changes. I will be submitting this post to Apple via feedback app. However, I cannot submit 100 posts asking apple to fix designs. I want to get traction and raise awareness to Apple. They should implement some internal mechanism to pump out better designs - for their demos and for the betas.

 

[ManuCH]

To add context: This is supposedly an intern project done from last year (not changed in a while), and it gained consensus within the teams (from the already deleted Twitter/X post by the creator/Apple employee of this UI).

And you are not wrong, feedbacks are also important factors for Apple to make design changes. I will be submitting this post to Apple via feedback app. However, I cannot submit 100 posts asking apple to fix designs. I want to get traction and raise awareness to Apple. They should implement some internal mechanism to pump out better designs - for their demos and for the betas.

I also saw the intern's tweet. Any clue as to why he deleted it? I thought there wasn't an NDA about beta releases anymore, so I'm not sure what Apple rules he breached by making that post.

 

[contacos]

There are a lot of new UX / UI choices to be questioned. Another one is the „select“ button in Photos only appearing when you move up slightly in your photos, otherwise you are only presented with the search button. I have seen a LOT of people asking how they can select more than one photo in the new photo app on threads

 

[shenfrey]

It is very early days and Apple has a tendency to change just about everything in some way during the developers beta.

 

[bigjnyc]

I mean I thought it was a little odd... But not 3 hour blog post odd lol.

 

[CrysisDeu]

There are a lot of new UX / UI choices to be questioned. Another one is the „select“ button in Photos only appearing when you move up slightly in your photos, otherwise you are only presented with the search button. I have seen a LOT of people asking how they can select more than one photo in the new photo app on threads

That’s why I am writing other posts as well

 

[CrysisDeu]

I mean I thought it was a little odd... But not 3 hour blog post odd lol.

Someone needs to do it. This is getting fundamentals wrong. I cannot just say: I don’t like it because it’s new.

 

[gwang73]

Siri, summarize to a 1 minute pitch...

 

[betabeta]

I use the flashlight a ton and it worked just fine before. I don't like how many things are moved toward the top, one handed use gets to be difficult. I always thought the 4 levels worked good and gave you haptic feedback moving to each level, you could tap them or slide, it all worked fine. Spread? I don't know they keep adding options and sometimes it's best to keep it simple.

 

[CrysisDeu]

Siri, summarize to a 1 minute pitch...

But Apple Intelligence is not out yet

 

[CrysisDeu]

I use the flashlight a ton and it worked just fine before. I don't like how many things are moved toward the top, one handed use gets to be difficult. I always thought the 4 levels worked good and gave you haptic feedback moving to each level, you could tap them or slide, it all worked fine. Spread? I don't know they keep adding options and sometimes it's best to keep it simple.

Exactly

 

[bhagemann]

i use flashlight a LOT. I also have a 13mini because I like being able to use one handed (mostly) and the flashlight control is great as is, tap on.. hold to adjust bright. Not sure how this would be anything but frustrating. Thanks for the review and analysis! As an aside, I wonder if there could be a 3rd party flashlight app that puts back the simple control center tap/hold feature if it comes to that.

 

[sammy2066]

Great post, fully agree, completely unnecessary change and awful UI.

 

[GeneticBloom]

I didn't really mess with it before, but on beta 2 it seems like the two sliders do the same things. Shorten the beam and the brightness slider goes down. Make it wider and the brightness slider goes up. Same for the reverse.

 

[TravelsInBlue]

At least on the iPhone 13, there hasn’t been much changed related to how the flashlight app functions from my experience.


However the Photos app is godawful and it’s just a continuation of apples commitment to making each app as ****** as possible from a UX perspective.

 

[puggles]

I'd say the action button settings and share play in car play screen are still far worse.

 

[zakarhino]

Another one in my evidence drawer for "Every new design thing they showed off at WWDC '24 sucked"

You're right on all counts. Trying to adjust the beam width or brightness on its own without adjusting the other is like an Operation style minigame built into the OS, you have to be ultra precise and intentional with your swipe direction. I think someone spent the whole sprint working on the flashlight graphic and forgot to test it in the real world. What the hell happened to all the UX guys at Apple? Was Imran Chaudhri really the genius holding Apple together? lol

1. Photos app is overly confusing, messy, and less functional. Tabs are actually useful for browsing one collection (all photos) in one tab while referencing an album in another. "Collections" are not clearly defined. The order of photos in "collections" is very inconsistent. It's harder to find the stuff you care about when ironically the marketing pitch for the redesign was about getting better at that exact thing. They could have kept the Photos app exactly the same and added a single feature to filter "real" photos (pictures I've taken) from "other" photos (screenshots, memes, etc.) in the main Library view and people would have rejoiced.
2. Apple Intelligence design language is disgusting. It looks like Microsoft designed it. In fact it has the same color theme as Microsoft's Copilot+. BTW calling something "Microsoft" is the most derogatory of all insults when it comes to tech. The background gradient applied to the keyboard when using Apple Intelligence looks like one of those tacky third party keyboards everyone used to use on their Android phones back in 2014.
3. Flashlight UI is like something a beginner dev would have made with no attention to usability as you've pointed out.
4. Tinted icons look bad and the whole icon personalization thing looks like an afterthought, zero effort made to make it "Apple." Missed opportunity to create a new generative AI icon system. Google's Material You somehow does the whole color personalization thing better (and I HATE almost everything Material UI). Even Apple's marketing photos look bad.
5. Passwords app is unbelievably rudimentary, no unique flair or innovation and it doesn't hold a candle to 1Password's set of features. Did they hold themselves back from a full Sherlock because they were concerned about a government getting upset?

What else are we missing so far?

I conditioned myself to stop expecting major new features years ago. I didn't expect for the OS to get worse though (I'm mainly talking about the Photos app here).

 

[zakarhino]

At least on the iPhone 13, there hasn’t been much changed related to how the flashlight app functions from my experience.


However the Photos app is godawful and it’s just a continuation of apples commitment to making each app as ****** as possible from a UX perspective.

I'm worried this trend will continue the more these companies like Apple think AI means "magically showing you what you want" which almost always translates to less control and consistency in the user experience. I bet at least one person in the design workshop for the new Photos app said something about "simplifying the Photos experience" so that they can use "AI to show you what you really care about"

I'm not anti AI, I want more of it in my life, but it should not come at the expense of usability and power users.

 

[contacos]

Did they change it back in beta 2? I don’t have it like that. iPhone 15 Plus

 

[atiffarooq]

Siri, summarize to a 1 minute pitch...

"Sorry, you're iPhone 14 Pro Max is too old to use this feature"

 

[one more]

i use flashlight a LOT. I also have a 13mini because I like being able to use one handed (mostly) and the flashlight control is great as is, tap on.. hold to adjust bright. Not sure how this would be anything but frustrating. Thanks for the review and analysis! As an aside, I wonder if there could be a 3rd party flashlight app that puts back the simple control center tap/hold feature if it comes to that.

So far (DB2) the flashlight button itself works exactly as it did before and I guess it will stay the same way once iOS 18 is released to the public. The OP makes some good points about unnecessarily complicated controls added to the Dynamic Island, but it will not affect your mini nor any other iPhone with a “normal” notch or top bar.