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A small Apple UX failure that perfectly explains a bigger one

I make maybe three phone calls a day. Two of them are to my husband.

He is favorited. He is pinned. He is saved everywhere iOS allows. And yet, calling him requires five separate taps across multiple screens.

This isn’t a bug. It’s a design decision.

And it’s emblematic of a deeper problem in Apple’s UX culture: optimizing against edge cases while punishing real behavior.

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The real-world scenario

I unlock my iPhone. I want to call my husband.

Here’s the current path in iOS:

1. Open the Phone app
2. Navigate to Favorites (or Recents, or Contacts — all equally bad)
3. Tap the contact
4. Tap a small icon or submenu
5. Confirm or wait for a UI transition
6. Finally — the call starts

That’s five taps to perform the most common, intentional action a phone exists for.

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This used to be solved

Apple solved this problem years ago.

• “Favorites” used to mean tap = call
• Contact cards surfaced primary actions clearly
• Muscle memory was respected
• Regressions were rare and treated seriously

Today, Apple treats accidental taps as the cardinal sin — even when the user’s intent is obvious, repetitive, and deliberate.

Calling your spouse should be easier than calling a stranger, not harder.

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Apple optimized for the wrong fear

Modern Apple UX feels shaped by one anxiety:

“What if the user accidentally does something?”

So Apple adds:

• confirmation steps
• buried icons
• secondary menus
• ambiguous tappable regions

What they remove:

• speed
• intent recognition
• confidence
• flow

This is how you get a phone that is terrified of placing phone calls.

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The workaround proves the failure

Here’s the punchline: I fixed the problem myself.

I added a Single Contact widget to my Home Screen.
Now calling my husband takes one tap.

The fact that this workaround exists proves two things:

1. Apple knows the correct interaction model
2. Apple refuses to make it the default

If a widget is required to restore a core phone behavior, something has gone very wrong upstream.

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This isn’t a “me” problem

I’m not disabled.
I’m not confused.
I’m not new to smartphones.

I’m exactly the user Apple claims to design for:

• daily phone user
• long-term iOS customer
• someone with one or two high-frequency contacts

And yet my primary action is buried under friction designed for someone else’s hypothetical mistake.

Multiply this by a thousand tiny regressions, and you get what iOS increasingly feels like:
polished, pretty, and quietly hostile to lived behavior.

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Why Apple doesn’t catch enough flack

Apple avoids criticism here because:

1. Reviewers focus on new features, not regressions
2. Power users silently work around the problems
3. Each issue is “minor” — until you live with it daily

No single tap is outrageous.
Five taps, every day, forever? That’s design debt.

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What should have happened instead

A sane default hierarchy would be:

• Favorite contact → tap = call
• Long-press → other actions
• Widgets and shortcuts → optional accelerators, not fixes

Primary intent should never be hidden behind safety rails meant for edge cases.

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Apple should hire people who get annoyed by this

I’m not joking when I say this:
Apple needs more people who feel physical irritation when common actions are slowed down.

People who ask:

• “What’s the most frequent action here?”
• “Why is the primary verb hidden?”
• “Who are we protecting, and at whose expense?”

Because right now, Apple is protecting itself from embarrassment — and billing users in taps.

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The quiet truth

Calling my husband is faster from my lock screen widget than from the Phone app.

That sentence should embarrass someone in Cupertino.

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Epilogue: The fix Apple won’t ship

Until Apple restores sane defaults, I’ll keep my one-tap widget.

But I shouldn’t need a workaround for love.

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San Francisco is going through one of its evolutions. The last big one I was here for was was the late 90s tech boom, with all the growth and business revolution that followed.

Before then, the working class could afford to live here. Artists could afford to live here. San Francisco was the home to freaks and artists and those dancers-to-a-different-drum.

In a few short years, the art collectives were pushed out. Freaks drifted away. Seems like half the people of color were gentrified out of their homes.

And the next decade took care of the stragglers.

We’re in it again: in the midst of chaos and imbalance. This time, it’s the Tech Industry – that mighty, unassailable engine of ingenuity and economic prosperity, brought low by the simple realization that people prefer to work from their homes.

I think this one will will last as long as the last one. A decade of chaos and imbalance and heartbreak as the commercial real estate industry goes straight to hell (and hopefully takes every loathsome YIMBY asshole with it).

The loss of so much of the tax base will terribly hurt San Francisco now and for years to come. This ball is just getting rolling, too. I can’t imagine anything other than widespread gut-wrenching economic upheaval for businesses in the downtown area that depended on foot traffic. My dear friend Julie who opened Julie’s Kitchen, for example. What will happen to her?

What happens when it shakes out? What happens when the commercial buildings, empty for decades, are finally torn down and replaced with residential towers? Do the rents come way down? Do the artists come back? Do we see a return of the freaks? Will I still be alive to see it? Who the hell knows?

The answer won’t be found on twitter. The answer will not come from morally bankrupt YIMBYs using images of Black people on the street or fentanyl ODs to achieve their short-term political ends.

Guest post by Naomi Muller

In a public Linkedin post shared on September 8th, former Patreon security team member Emily Metcafe wrote, “So for better or worse, I and the rest of the Patreon Security Team are no longer with the company.” This news came as a shock to staff and creators who utilize the platform alike and quickly spread to Twitter. 

Patreon is a popular platform for artists and content creators. Creators utilize the features of the site differently: some use it specifically as a hub for their community; other creators use it as a place for sharing exclusive content with patrons, similar to a subscription service; while others, like podcasters, streamers, and Youtube personalities, share their work elsewhere and only work with the platform as a way to easily accept tips and monthly pledges from fans.

One of the main functions of the Patreon website is payment processing so the type of data that is at risk is not simply customer preference information. Directory information and other contact data is widely available from government databases (such as voter files) and from data aggregators and list-building services. Financial data, however, is much more sensitive and breaches are more likely to result in the kind of fraud that has you looking at long-term credit monitoring, freezes and other inconvenience.

Whoa @Patreon laid off their ENTIRE security team.

Wouldn’t trust my data there. Also there’s some amazing talent to scoop up.

— Whitney Merrill (@wbm312) September 8, 2022

And speaking of competition, other than the new subscriber features on popular social media platforms, such as Super Followers on Twitter, there are not many clear alternatives to Patreon at the moment–at least not with the same level of consumer brand recognition.

Patreon acknowledged the removal of its security staff, saying it would use third-party services instead. This may not assuage the concerns of creators who expressed feeling blindsided by this move. As more social media platforms introduce paid subscriber features, this was not something anyone associated with the popular platform, including Patreon’s own employees, saw coming. 

Guest post by Naomi Muller

Since its creation in 2013, Kiwi Farms has provided a forum for people who find cyberstalking, doxxing private information, and targeted harassment of the most vulnerable entertaining. The site’s founder Joshua Moon, nicknamed “Null” on the platform, was formerly an administrator for 8chan–an unmoderated alternative to 4chan.

In 2017, Moon changed his company’s name to “1776 Solutions, LLC” from “Final Solutions, LLC”–a direct reference to the holocaust. From the beginning, Kiwi Farms was an online space dedicated to mocking marginalized people and destroying their lives.

Users of the hate forum engaged in long-term harassment campaigns specifically to direct online abuse and offline violence to marginalized people especially transgender people, neurodivergent folks, and sex workers but most Kiwi Farms targets were LGBTQ+, including children. Targets families would also be relentlessly tormented–some even after their targeted loved ones died by suicide with encouragement from Kiwi Farms users.

There are at least three known trans targets who have died by suicide over the years and many who lived in fear with their most personal details posted on the site to be openly mocked and ridiculed. This wasn’t something the site’s hosting service Cloudflare seemed concerned with until recently, despite the pleas of targets who have had their lives threatened and derailed. At least, not concerned enough to address it. Kiwi Farms users openly bragged in the forum that they don’t respect laws and Moon ignored any legal correspondences from victims’ lawyers regarding the encouragement and admission of hate crimes on the site.

Popular trans Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti, who also goes by Keffals, was “swatted” on August 5th after she was impersonated in an email which contained threats of performing a mass shooting. Swatting was a common way that Kiwi Farms users would torment their targets–using law enforcement to harass and in some cases, kill their victims as officers believe there may be credibility to false threats sent under the victims’ name. She was arrested by London police and had her devices confiscated by police in her home in Ontario.

Once proven innocent, Keffals, who frequently raises funds for trans youth initiatives, crowdfunded support and fled to Northern Ireland.  And then she chose to fight back—using her platform on Twitter to speak openly about her experience as a target and posted regular updates after talking to the press. She began to use to the tag #dropkiwifarms and call for her followers to pressure Cloudflare to stop doing business with the hate site

And it worked.

With the support of her community, Keffals gathered enough donations to leave her home country and stay safe while continuing to push for Cloudflare to stop hosting the forum.

Cloudflare lost nearly $3 billion in market capital since #dropkiwifarms started to trend and on September 3rd, dropped them citing “an imminent threat to life”. The Kiwi Farms domain redirected to this notice on the Cloudflare’s website. Responsible service providers online, take note. 

Following Cloudflare, login security provider hCaptcha also dropped support for the site. Then the Russian hosting company DDoS-Guard that Moon tried to host from instead of Cloudflare followed suit. Though Kiwi Farms has popped back up sporadically with other Russian and Chinese hosts, these also go down almost immediately. And this was to be expected. There will probably always be splinter groups in private Discords and on Telegram but the main hub for organizing the mass harassment and death threats is not easily accessibly anymore and functionally gone—taking with it thousands of abusive threads with identifying information of victims.

Keffals released her final statement on September 5th. “The campaign is over. We won.” 

As of September 7th, Kiwi Farms no longer comes up in a Google search. The results are Wikipedia and articles covering the story. In a public statement, creator Joshua Moon said, “I do not see a situation where the Kiwi Farms is simply allowed to operate. It will either become a fractured shell of itself, like 8chan, or jump between hosts and domain names like Daily Stormer.”

A month ago, Clara Sorrenti was swatted and dealing with death threats like many of Kiwi Farms trans targets and their families over the years. Now, users can’t even access old versions of Kiwi Farms through the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine.

Here’s a quote from “Three Cheers for Socialism”

“Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?”

David Bentley, Three Cheers for Socialism

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist, having run my own business for the past twenty years. But I also believe everything in this paragraph. The contradiction makes my brain hurt.

I come off my latest month-long Facebook ban this evening. I figured I should probably post about it here, where I can do so in relative safety.

I read this story about Facebook relaxing its rules on call for violence as long as those calls for violence are against Vladimir Putin. I was, like, good for Facebook. I don’t like calls for violence, but I can get behind ill-wishing towards that tiny, despotic cretin. If anybody deserves it, he does.

It then occurred to me that I had a mosaic photo of Putin comprised entirely of dick pics. I thought it might work well as a Facebook Cover Photo. So, that’s what I did.

Facebook’s robot immediately told me that it was not an appropriate photo and that it would be removed.

OK, I thought, that’s fine. I guess the restriction only applies to violent statements, not harmless humor. Fine, whatever, I’ll just post a dog photo for my cover photo, instead.

But, then, the next question asked by the user interface is if I agreed with the decision.

I shrugged. Sure, I guess. I mean, it’s their site. If they don’t want it on there, I won’t put it on there.

Click: Agree.

I went on to try to upload another cover photo, and got this message:

I know that popup very well. It means I’m banned. Again. For something the system immediately caught, asked me to take down, which I did, and then it banned me anyway. God dammit.

I clicked on the let us know link, which opened a popup, in which I posted a very brief appeal. And, then, when I hit Send, I get the error message that tells me I can’t appeal being banned while I’m banned:

Facebook can go to Hell. Seriously. Every time their stock drops, I rub my hands together and cackle with glee.

Delusional — NY Times has no “regrets” over Clinton email fiasco

Maintaining the New York Times’ strident, defensive stance of refusing to acknowledge any fault in the paper’s spectacularly failed 2016 campaign coverage, executive editor Dean Baquet last week insisted the paper made no mistakes covering Hillary Clinton’s historic run.

The denial comes as the press is faced with a stunning double standard used to cover Clinton and Trump and their handling of classified documents. In 2015 and 2016, the press, led by the Times, treated that topic and Clinton’s private emails as the defining issue of the day. Today, news that Trump smuggled boxes of top-secret documents out of the White House is treated as a minor event, by comparison.

“I don’t have regrets about the Hillary Clinton e-mail stories,” Baquet recently told The New Yorker. “It was a running news story. It was a serious F.B.I. investigation. The stories were accurate.”

The Times published hundreds of But Her Email articles and columns. Is Baquet vouching for all of them? Here’s one that was corrected twice and still contained a false claim.

Baquet suggests the paper dedicated so much time and attention to the emails because there was a “serious FBI investigation.” But the Times didn’t know the FBI was investigating until August 2015, five months after the paper began its relentless and hyperactive coverage.

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It’s always startling to watch journalists who demand transparency from public officials refuse to provide it themselves.

If you’re not a Press Run subscriber, you should be.

I got yet another 30-day Facebook ban. This time, it’s for spreading “false information about vaccines”.

This might come as a surprise to my friends, who know I am double-vaxxed with a booster, very pro-vaccine and very pro-mask, as well as the fact that I mercilessly mock and shame the unvaccinated and the maskless at every opportunity. (These are just from January alone.).

Here was the offending content that went against community guidelines:

This is talented pianist Mat Eisenstein, who takes recordings of angry anti-maskers and anti-vaxxer nutcases, and sets them to dramatic music. The rants are usually already funny (in a horrible sense) but with the music they are hilarious.

Here’s one I shared last week, which my friends really loved and laughed at and shared a bunch. For some reason, this one did NOT get me banned:

Obviously, this is stupid. Facebook’s reviewers can’t tell the difference between anti-vaxx nonsense and MOCKING anti-vaxx nonsense. It’s really infuriating. And I’m stuck in a ban for a month!

I went through the appeal process, which seems to be all of one click – selecting a radio-button that says “I disagree with the decision.”

And that’s all she wrote. What more can I do? It’s really very frustrating.