Rant about bad product design

[Brenda Archer]

And this is one of the big reasons I will never buy an Apple product.

I truly wish I had something more helpful to add.

Thank you. I need to migrate to something else. This device is my diary/day planner and it’s good for that, and for reading websites in bed. Photos are good. Apps are good. But no way will I ever use anything but actual Android for my actual phone.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Not sure how to do this on the phone itself? It’s not downloaded anywhere else. I didn’t want the hassle of trying to set up iTunes on my aging, small netbook.

Oh, I didn't catch that it was an iPhone. iOS is awful about this. A few years ago I bought all episodes of a TV series and a couple of films to watch on an upcoming plane trip, so I'd have a choice of things to watch. I made sure they were stored locally the day before I left. When I got in the air it had deleted them ALL to save space, even the ones that were in Google Play, even though I had plenty of space*. It was a work trip for an Apple-centric company so I had the iPad anyway and was trying to save on luggage by leaving my laptop. NEVER AGAIN.

Get a cheap Android tablet with a SD card slot, install iTunes long enough to convert all your tracks to MP3 and put them on the card, and celebrate your emancipation. I'll send you my old ASUS Zenpad 8 if you need it.

* The airline had a movie download service, so I got halfway through Fantastic Beasts, and then when I got to the hotel room to finish watching it their movie app wouldn't let me because it only worked on an actual plane.

 

[Brenda Archer]

Oh, I didn't catch that it was an iPhone. iOS is awful about this. A few years ago I bought all episodes of a TV series and a couple of films to watch on an upcoming plane trip, so I'd have a choice of things to watch. I made sure they were stored locally the day before I left. When I got in the air it had deleted them ALL to save space, even the ones that were in Google Play, even though I had plenty of space*. It was a work trip for an Apple-centric company so I had the iPad anyway and was trying to save on luggage by leaving my laptop. NEVER AGAIN.

Get a cheap Android tablet with a SD card slot, install iTunes long enough to convert all your tracks to MP3 and put them on the card, and celebrate your emancipation. I'll send you my old ASUS Zenpad 8 if you need it.

* The airline had a movie download service, so I got halfway through Fantastic Beasts, and then when I got to the hotel room to finish watching it their movie app wouldn't let me because it only worked on an actual plane.

Thank you! I am very tempted to take you up on your kind offer but must wake up first.

That trip sounds like an awful experience. It shouldn’t be so hard to just watch a movie, especially on a trip like that with long empty gaps of time.

It looks like it’s a design assumption on Apple’s part that users will always be online, that they don’t get on planes, drive out of range of a cell phone tower or go hiking. It’s just not reality.

 

[Kokoro Fasching]

Not sure how to do this on the phone itself? It’s not downloaded anywhere else. I didn’t want the hassle of trying to set up iTunes on my aging, small netbook.

I have some songs I bought from Amazon which were also only on this phone. The phone uploaded them to my iCloud and deleted the phone’s copies. I wasn’t using them and didn’t mind. But that was before I tried to keep a song downloaded to use offline.

If it is on phone only, and it is keeping the song on iCloud as a backup, then this may help.

"If you navigate to Settings > Music, you should see a setting called "Optimize Storage" in the Downloads section. If you have this enabled, your iPhone will automatically remove music content that hasn't been played in a while to help you conserve storage space on your device. "

 

[Brenda Archer]

If it is on phone only, and it is keeping the song on iCloud as a backup, then this may help.

"If you navigate to Settings > Music, you should see a setting called "Optimize Storage" in the Downloads section. If you have this enabled, your iPhone will automatically remove music content that hasn't been played in a while to help you conserve storage space on your device. "

Thanks. The Apple support had me in those settings too and there wasn’t anything about “Optimize storage.” At this point they had me fiddling with the Photos and iCloud settings, but it still happened anyway.