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Why is the iOS dialer so terrible?
I'm open to hearing from folks who have used iOS longer than me. How is the iOS dialer so terrible when it's supposed to be the primary usage of a phone, calling people?
- Why can't I type the letters of a name in my contacts list, eg "5-2-6" for "JAM" and have all the "James" show up? Android has had that since forever because it's not rocket science.
- Why can't I type to correct a digit in the middle of the number dialed? Or correct a number I've pasted in?
- Seriously, is there no way to replace the dialer with something better? And if there is and I just missed it, what are your recommendations?
- Same question for the god-awful contacts list. I use Google Contacts, have 3 google accounts in which the contacts are… and the syncing seems piss-poor.
Ok, this turned out to be more of a rant than I anticipated. I've gotten to like iOS quite a bit, especially because the android ecosystem has become a very "worst of both worlds" option. But man the dialer's shit. Someone please tell me I'm missing something obvious.
Instead of searching for a name in the dialer, if you have the contact saved just search them from the home screen. You don't have to open the phone app first and start dialing. Personally the ONLY time I ever actually open the phone app is when I'm dialing a new number, or need to check voicemail
FYI I would not say the primary purpose of a smartphone is to call people anymore. Yes that used to be the case, but there are so many other features now
I am besides myself wtf how have I had an iPhone for 1½ year and literally never used this function before. Like I don't think I have even registered until now that this button in the middle of the screen even exists
The button was added with iOS 16 I believe, but you have always been able to drag downwards from the middle of any Home Screen to pull up the search feature
I think the button was added to bring more attention to the feature 😅
What button?
Towards the bottom in the middle https://i.imgur.com/8HEBfm0.png
After all this time, iOS 18 finally supports T9 dialing.
It's ridiculous it took this long, and of course I'm sure apple is selling it like they got this great idea all on their own.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1dioij0/apples_phone_app_finally_supports_t9_dialing_in/
What’s a dialer?
Seriously though, it’s just unfamiliar to you. It’s not a particularly complex piece of software. The dial pad generally isn’t the first thing you reach for in iOS. Not because it’s bad, but because most people will just access their contacts directly; it’s even integrated into the phone app. You don’t type contact info you are searching for into the dial pad, you type it in the contacts page.
If you make an error manually dialing a phone number, swipe left on the number to delete a digit.
I also have multiple Google accounts synced to my phone. I have never had issues with it. All of my stuff synced effortlessly. It even has separate lists for them if you want them.
I’ve never once had a problem with the phone app so I have never bothered to look for alternatives but I do have Google Voice and I find the experience much worse. To even access the dial pad you have to press this irritating floating green dot, but that disappears if you are on anything other than the “Calls” view. The dial pad does not let you search for contacts by name, though it does by number. And the contacts does not let you look through lists, it only shows you all of the contacts at once.
These OS rants always turn in to “new thing is bad/broken because it doesn’t work exactly like previous thing I’m familiar with”
When I first got an iPhone I was upset that there was no option to make the phone vibrate with typing like Android does. Within a month I didn’t care. Both OSs do everything you actually need to do.
FYI, in iOS settings under "Sounds & Haptics" there is an option to have the keyboard provide haptic feedback ("vibrate") when you tap it.
99% of the time (including what you just said) it’s people just not knowing where a similar feature is or how a similar function works.
There is an option to make the keyboard vibrate while typing. It’s under the settings.
I feel like it may have been added in recent years because I believe I did look it up and it just wasn’t possible at the time.
Edit: looks like it was added as a feature last year.
This might be blasphemy, but I actually use Siri to call all my contacts. If I need to make a call, I hold it to my face like a walkie-talkie, hold the side button, say "Call Tony" and release the button. Works every time and much faster than even just typing the name from spotlight, since this also works from the lock screen, if you have the setting for short to no answers turned on
Impossible to do with my contact list. Or really for anyone slightly international / European. My contact list is filled with people with different names and nationalities and Siri doesn’t understand the various pronunciations.
I live in Germany, near both French and Swiss borders, and it works just fine, and to top it off my phone is set to English, but I can see how it might get bothersome
It’s possible to train Siri to learn pronunciations of names in your contacts, I think the phrase is “I want to teach you the name of a contact” or something similar.
I’ve been using Siri for years now, and I’ve taken the time to teach it all kinds of things, because I know I’m in for the long haul and it’s worth the effort to train Siri. If you’re likely to switch OS every other phone, it might be less compelling, but I’ve got a really refined Siri because it’s been trained across now five different phones and probably a decade of active use.
That's really interesting, I had no idea. Do you have some documentation on this?
Unfortunately not — I’ve just used and played around with Siri for so long that I can’t remember where or when I picked up these tricks.
You can get endless listicles if you search online for something like “list of things I can do with Siri” for example, and one thing I came across was that you can literally ask Siri what you can ask Siri! Woo, recursion!
I often do it this way as well. If I have a new number that I didn’t have to look up on the internet, I also use Siri for that. “Call 123-456-7890” works great. If it’s a number that I had to look up online, then I just tap on the number and there we go.
Why would you do this through the dialer instead of the contacts list on the tab just to the left?
I think you might be operating on a slightly different paradigm. I think the idea behind the dialer interface is that ideally you should almost never use it, it's there for when you need to manually punch in a phone number. Using it for text input is a leftover from the days of dumb- and feature-phones, which couldn't so easily replace your dial pad with a querty keyboard.
The dial pad is mostly for calling customer service numbers and then navigating phone trees in my experience.
Nearly three years with an iPhone and I was today years old when I learned of this functionality. Thanks for the tip!
To be honest I’m not sure how often I’ve even used the dialer in the last year or so. I almost always call from the contacts app, or by tapping on numbers.
But that seems to be adopted behaviour specifically because the dialer's a POS.
On android, if I want to call "James", I open the dialer and type the first letters to "James" and it takes me like 3 seconds. Instead of opening contacts, typing in James on a full size keyboard, filtering through, then choosing which one to dial
You don’t have to do that, though. Spotlight can search contacts and it’s one tap to call from there. Effectively, it’s the same number of taps / swipes.
Is spotlight the technical term for when you drag down and search from the home screen?
Yup, that's the one.
On MacOS (where I think Spotlight originates), it'd be Command+Space.
If you have a keyboard linked up, the same shortcut works on iPad (and I assume iOS too, but I’ve never thought to connect a keyboard to this tiny screen so I’m not sure)
Yeah but you don't even need to open the dialer. You can eliminate one step and just search from the home screen
Fair. I never do this, doesn’t come to my mind. I’ll try to adopt that.
Honestly the ability to just pull down from the middle of the home screen and search for whatever you want is huge. My fiancé is still on android and it infuriates me how you have to go through an additional step to be able to search for apps, but even then when you search the indexing seems to be less comprehensive than iOS
Whenever you want to access an app that's not on your home page, try to just search for the app. Eventually it will probably become more natural to search for contacts to call as well
Even better, my phone has started to get really good at predicting what app I’m about to search for, and it’s right there at the top of the screen when I pull down for search, so I’m often into the app I need before I’ve even typed a single letter!
On Android, I used to use KISS launcher to quickly search for apps / contacts etc instead of navigating to them specifically. So even there I wouldn’t actually go to the dialer app to find a contact. It’s an incredibly powerful workflow for me, getting me quickly to what / who I want.
Why would you open the number pad to search for text? Contacts is in the same app. Switch over to that tab and search in the same way that you would in the android dialer. Or skip opening the app altogether and search for the contact from your home screen.
You... actually call people? Instead of sending messages? Weirdo. =) I can't remember the last time I called someone else than my SO, parents or kids. Everything goes via text, facetime or discord voice.
But seriously, I can bet you that out of a 100 people maybe 3 might even know that T9 dialing trick and even fewer will actually use it. That's why nobody has bothered to implement it on iOS.
On Android it was most likely implemented in the days where Android version numbers were still dessert items and it's just been there because nobody has specifically taken out.
The dial pad is literally the fourth tab from the left (and therefore unimportant). I had to look because I almost never call anyone, and they're usually pinned to the favorites tab. There's a much more useful contacts tab right before it, which you can search through without using an antiquated input method almost nobody even knows about anymore.
This is my chance to call out how annoying switching the audio connection is in iOS as well. It sucks that it takes multiple presses to switch to speaker phone or to disconnect from a Bluetooth device.
Only use the dialer when I've looked up a phone number on my computer or I'm dialing a number from a piece of paper. For my contacts usually there is a text exchange indicating the need for a call I just click their profile pic at the top of the text and click call. Or find them in contacts and call from there. If it's a phone number on a website I've found on my phone just clicking the number will bring you to the dialer with the number input already.
I'm also someone who recently switched to ios from Android and I'm definitely missing a lot of the smaller touches from Android and more specifically Samsung too. I still enjoy my iPhone but man the lack of some things like the T-9 dialing and being able to place icons wherever you want on the home screen (how is this still not implemented!) does annoy me.
I think generally the answer to “how is this not yet implemented on iPhone?” is they do not want to implement it. Apple probably has a long list of weird reasons for not yet implementing T-9 or arbitrary app icon placement. They cater to an audience that is less interested in novelty and features than Android’s user base. Any change is put under a microscope with leaving things the same as the default.
For T-9 specifically I think the attitude is that searching through names with numbers is not immediately intuitive to many users. For those that are familiar with it the process of doing that search is simple. But it’s a feature that needs to be taught. In UX you want to avoid needing to explicitly teach anything. Requiring education is seen as an anti-pattern. I suspect that Apple religiously adheres to that mindset even when, from the outside, it seems insane to avoid such a minuscule speed bump.
Oh 100%, my complaints are pretty irrational and the T-9 thing is definitely just me being in the minority of users. Just annoyed by the fact that I need to remove 10+ years of muscle memory while I use my iPhone and then bring it back when I use my Android.
I can't think of a single practical reason to use T9 dialing in 2023 - and I had phones where T9 was the only way for text input for a good decade or so.
You have a weird ingrained habit that most likely the majority of users don't even know exists. Just use the contacts view and type the person's name with actual letters.
I am shocked that people are still using T9 dialing for any reason in 2023, Android or otherwise. I have not used that feature since...2008? When I got my first smartphone with full (physical) keyboard: A Palm Centro. From there, went to a Samsung Omnia, HTC Incredible, then onto iPhones.
I have my contact list, favorites, Spotlight search, missed calls, etc. The only reason I use the dial pad is for dialing a number or interacting with automated phone menus.
Oh yea no I 100% agree that I’m in the minority lol. I just got used to quickly mashing a sequence of numbers and having certain family members names show up on my old flip phones and when I got an Android phone, I was glad to still have it. To go from being able to type “628” and have my phone bring up my contact Nathan to having to type in the name is a small change but messes with the muscle memory I’ve built up over the last 10 years or so. Similarly in the dialer on Samsung phones, depending on which direction you swipe on an entry in your recent calls list you can call or message someone. But on iPhone, you can’t swipe and a single tap immediately calls that person. If you want to message them you’d have to click on the little i icon and then hit message. This again just falls under the small things I’ve gotten used to over the years on Android that just aren’t present on iPhone that has made getting used to the iPhone a bit annoying. I completely understand why Apple doesn’t have it implemented.
You can also tap-and-hold (I think Apple calls this “long press”) on anyone in the recent list and it will bring options — not quite as fast as a swipe, but certainly easier than aiming for the tiny little ( i )
Slightly off topic, but for those on
T-mobile(edit: other carriers too) and iOS, you can access the field info center by typing *3001#12345#*\ into the keypad dialer. I know there are other codes for other things/carriers(edit, carriers are more complicated here)- the code here being 3001- but not off the top of my head. You can see cool stuff about the towers you’re connected to, including bandwidth metrics, etc.It's the same on all carriers, I believe (works on AT&T and Sprint).
(also, markdown messed with the formatting - for readers, it's
*3001#12345#*)Thanks! I didn’t really think of markdown when I was typing it out. Wasn’t sure if other carriers would work, so thank you for clarifying that for people!
I 100% agree. T9 dialing would be great. I understand it's not for everyone and that there are other ways to make calls, but I don't think it's a good reason to not include it.