Searching for settings in all the wrong places
To say that it has been controversial every time Apple rejiggers Settings on any of their platforms is putting it mildly. It is evident that whatever iOS does with Settings is the gold standard for all the company’s other platforms to follow. In theory, this makes the interface consistent for people jumping back and forth between Apple devices. The reality is that the iOS Settings are quite bad, nothing is consistent, and the attempts to duplicate iOS can only ever produce a perfect copy of a bad system under the most ideal circumstances. Relying on search as a crutch only works if search is capable of providing that support.
Top level
Settings on iOS may not be organized in a way that is important to you, or me, but it’s grouped sometimes by type and sometimes by Apple’s orgchart.
The most important part of the interface is the Search box. It’s right there at the top. It’s not collapsed, or hidden. They want you to use to find the settings you need.
Next are promotions and updates from Apple, if they exist. You might have a free trial of Apple TV+ from the purchase of new Apple hardware, or something else. Apple has decided that this is the second most important function of visiting Settings.
Below that is your Apple Account, “and more”. This is incredibly vague, but simultaneously all-encompassing. There are features of your Apple Account that interact with other parts of your iOS device, most notably iCloud. For instance, this is where iCloud Private Relay is, squirreled away under [Your Apple Account] > iCloud > iCloud Private Relay. You’ll need to know it’s here in case you start to have network trouble, so that you can debug whether or not disabling iCloud Private Relay makes a difference to your Wi-Fi settings. I’m sure glad it’s nested two levels down in an unrelated area!
This is also where Payments & Shipping are for your Apple Account. That’s not the same as Wallet & Apple Pay at the bottom of the top-level of the Settings screen. You might have the same card in both places, and the UI might seem familiar, but they aren’t even touching each other. Also, don’t forget that there’s a button in Settings to download Apple Invites. As if that has anything in common with networking, cloud storage, or credit cards.
Back at that top level of Settings we get connected devices like AirPods or Beats headphones, if they are connected. Otherwise we have an assortment of other options with the top group mainly concerning connectivity and power. Then the second group is mainly about how you interact with the phone itself. This includes things like General, which acts as another junk drawer of very important settings for your phone, including AppleCare & Warranty, which is not with your Apple Account, even though I do pay for it monthly with the card that is on file under my Apple Account > Payment & Subscriptions. Devices, accounts, services—all related but separated.
You’ll also find Matter Accessories under General. The Home App keeps its settings inside the app, so why these are here, I cannot say. CarPlay is also under General, instead of the connectivity group.
The third grouping in the Settings pane is about things that have to do with directing your attention (Notifications, Sounds & Haptics, Focus, Screen Time). The privacy and security group (which does not contain Apple Account Sign-In & Security) is followed by an Apple Services group.
This Apple Services group also has iCloud, and it links to exactly the same place as [Your Apple Account] > iCloud. Yes, that means you can also get to iCloud Private Relay here, but not in Wi-Fi settings! It also has Game Center and Wallet & Apple Pay, which are not under your [Apple Account] settings pane.
Lastly, Apple provides “Apps” for everything else. Apps is the same endlessly scrolling list of alphabetical app names that we’ve had forever, but shoved over here to make things look cleaner. There isn’t a section for recently used apps to surface if you need to tweak something in an app you’re running now or were just running.
Apps does have a Default Apps pane at the top of it for managing what apps handle a select set of roles on your iPhone. The Keyboards section is exactly the same as General > Keyboard > Keyboards.
That’s a pretty mixed bag of interface decisions about how things are grouped, and only occasionally linked. It’s not the worst possible iteration of this, but it is flawed.
Apple should really lean further into linking related settings that have a logical relationship to the user and to tasks, even when they might not have the same organizational relationship to Apple—like the division between credit cards when someone wants to adjust all payment methods because they have a new credit card, or in cases where a networking feature like Private Relay is segregated from Wi-Fi settings.
Did you know that if iCloud Private Relay gives up for a Wi-Fi network, but you want to force it to retry, you can’t do that in the iCloud Private Relay settings pane? You have to go to the Wi-Fi network in question and flip the toggle for Limit IP Address Tracking. It’s like when a breaker trips on your house and you have to go outside to access the panel.
Fortunately, to help us find these things, we can always count on search.
We can never count on search
Here’s a simple search for “Notifications” on iOS that no longer produces the Notifications pane as a top search result. Oh it’s in the results, if you scroll down a lot, but the top of the results is completely occupied by Apple Intelligence & Siri > Announce Notifications for a random assortment of apps on your device. When you run the search multiple times it will reshuffle the order the apps appear in, but it will always be Apple Intelligence first over any other setting with Notification in it.
I cannot fathom what had to fail at Apple in order for something this simple to go so wrong. This isn’t a beta. This is shipping software. This isn’t some obscure feature of iOS, it’s Notifications. It used to work, so how did it break and, more importantly, why isn’t there a process to catch that failure?
Someone might point out that Notifications is on the main page of Settings, so a user shouldn’t have to search for it, but it does require scrolling. Because users can’t rely on their memory for where things are, they might be inclined to search before wasting their time scrolling and poking around. After all, search should still find the right result, even if it was at the top where the Airplane Mode toggle is.
Let’s take a more specific example: Notification Summaries. We talk about them all the time. Some people love them, some tolerate them because they might get better, and other people want nothing to do with them. If I asked you off the top of your head where that setting was and what it’s exact name was, would you say:
- Notification Summaries
- Summarize Notifications
The right answer is the second one, but a search tool should be able to handle either of those queries and understand how to match it to the most relevant result. Search 101 stuff.
A search for “Summaries” produces no results whatsoever. The feature that Apple is shoving in anywhere and everywhere to showcase Intelligence has zero matches. I love that.
Naturally, a search for “Summarize” should turn up “Summarize Notifications” but it doesn’t. Instead it’s “Scheduled Summary” in the Notifications pane, and “Web Rotor Summary” in Accessibility. Again, really loving it. Loving it all.
If I manually scroll down the Settings pane to Notifications and tap in, there it is, Summarize Notifications, in all its shining disappointment. Good for me: I can find what search can’t. (When I posted about this on Mastodon I got a reply from someone who didn’t even know this setting existed.)
Naturally, there are other areas where this fails. Remember when I talked about credit cards? Well, if you search for “credit card” the only search result is “Credit Cards” from Apps > Safari > AutoFill. Yep, I didn’t even mention that one before, because it’s buried so deeply, unlike the Payments & Shipping and Wallet & Apple Pay. Search won’t tell you about either of those two, but it will tell you about this setting that Apple buried in Utah.1
Do you recall when I was talking about the alphabetical list of apps? Well, if you don’t want to find it in the list, you can search for the exact name of the app.
If the app has some abbreviated form of the name, or a nickname based on some service from the company, then you must use precisely that, unlike when you search for an app from the home screen.
For example, the Marriott app has a logo that says “Bonvoy” for their membership perks program. You might type “Bonvoy,” which home screen search will gladly accept and ofer up the Marriott app. Settings will not. Why have two search features that work the same? This is Apple after all. Every team should write their own search!
While Apple has historically been comically inept at handling search functions in their apps, this kind of takes the cake because in many ways search is the UI. It’s the first thing you see when you open the app, which means it’s the first thing Apple wants you to use, because it means Apple doesn’t have to care about where it puts anything.
In some ways searching is how users find settings, but not in the way Apple thinks. The world wide web has this thing called Google, which Apple gets over 20 billion dollars from, and Google will point you at a Reddit thread, or an Apple Support page that says where the setting in question is.
You can swipe down on the home screen and type “summarize notifications” into that search field: It will suggest a web search, or point you to the Tips app with the instructions on how to enable or disable notification summaries and where the settings are.
Of course it doesn’t link out to the setting. What are we trying to do here? Help people? This is the Tips app!
Maybe we’ll eventually get to the point where we ask Siri to get to those settings and it will do it, but right now if you type “summarize notifications” into a text-to-Siri prompt it will treat it as a command and start saying all your notifications aloud. If you ask for notifications settings it will only display the toggle for Siri to “announce notifications”. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the Siri team to get it together here (or anywhere else).
Simply shove everything in the room into a closet, and use a magic word to get the items out. Sometimes the magic will give you the wrong thing, or it will do nothing at all, so you have to open the disorganized closet. It’s all worth it when you think about how much tidier the room looks when that door is shut.
- Editor’s Note: Fun fact: when I search for “credit card” I get no results at all.—DM ↩
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber. Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community.