Of all the things I've taken for granted in my life, never did I think it would be the ability to pause a video recording on my smartphone, because I just found out that there's a massive chunk of people out there *cough* iPhone owners *cough* that have never been able to do that. While I've had my fair share of hands-on time with various iPhones over the years, as I've measured them up against , never did I think to check if this feature existed on the iPhones because I sort of just assumed that it did.
Partly because I can't even remember not having this feature on my Samsung phone, and indeed, all Android phones have had the ability to do this for the better part of a decade. It's such a no-brainer and there's no possible explanation one could give for not being able to pause a video recording on the iPhone. The lack of this feature can't be easily explained away, and it's not like iPhone users haven't been asking for it. A simple online search reveals forum posts from years back where users express their frustration at not being able to do this. The only solution for them was to install just to do what Android users could at the tap of a button.
Much of Apple's superiority complex for iOS over Android has been predicated upon the premise of security. That's one of the reasons why you still can't side-load apps on iOS, another nugget of liberty for which users had to jailbreak their devices for, while Android users have had the ability to do this since like forever. Yet, so much of what its users wanted to do on their device required them to rely on security exploits and tweaks from third-party developers that allowed them the freedoms that Apple curtailed.
Side-loading apps will remain a dream on iOS but there's some course correction from Apple. It's finally adding a pause button in the Camera app so that users can pause clips and resume recording when they want. This saves them from having to manually stitch together multiple clips. This feature has been added to the latest iOS 18 beta and would be out with the public version later this year, with the ability to switch between the camera lenses.
I'm no professional content creator by any means but I've found the ability to do this on my Galaxy phones to be incredibly useful when capturing montages of the places that I visit. I can record for a few seconds, pause, reframe the shot and make any other necessary adjustments before resuming the clip. It saves a lot of time as I can produce that montage exactly as I had envisioned it without needing to manually handle a bunch of clips and waste time stitching them up before they can be uploaded to my social media accounts.
Reading that this feature was coming with iOS 18 really took me by surprise because I never thought the iPhone, the blue-eyed boy of content creators everywhere, wouldn't allow them this very simple option. It would be interested to hear the arguments of whoever thought it wasn't necessary to give this feature to iPhone owners for 17 years, yes that's how long it has been since the first iPhone came out, and how it was finally decided that this absurdity needed to be set aside.
To me, this absurdity defines Apple's approach to decision making, whereby despite all its proclamations of having users at the top of mind, it really only makes decisions when it suits the company. It seems that the consideration is not to eliminate a pain point that users have been complaining about for nearly two decades but to make that decision when it's convenient for the company.
It's in stark contrast to what we've been seeing from Samsung, particularly in the software department, over the past few years. The company's biggest achievement is how it turned around the absolute dumpster fire that used to be its software update rollouts and transformed it into . It's the best example of Samsung recognizing that customers had a legitimate concern and it going all in to address the problem and change things for the better.
Samsung has also been much better at rapidly incorporating the feedback from its users in every new iteration of One UI. We see the company taking practical steps to address users' concerns and pain points to take its software experience from strength to strength, to the point where now it's arguably one of the best custom Android experiences on the market today.
One UI has become so good now that even Apple takes inspiration from it time and again, , there are actually !
If you ask me, I'd say that I'm happy that iPhone users can finally experience a feature that my Samsung phones have had since the 2010s. I understand that it can be hard for them to think of a world outside the high-walled garden of Apple, a world where something as simple as being able to pause a video recording doesn't require waiting for 17 years. Cue Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World!
The post appeared first on .
Partly because I can't even remember not having this feature on my Samsung phone, and indeed, all Android phones have had the ability to do this for the better part of a decade. It's such a no-brainer and there's no possible explanation one could give for not being able to pause a video recording on the iPhone. The lack of this feature can't be easily explained away, and it's not like iPhone users haven't been asking for it. A simple online search reveals forum posts from years back where users express their frustration at not being able to do this. The only solution for them was to install just to do what Android users could at the tap of a button.
Much of Apple's superiority complex for iOS over Android has been predicated upon the premise of security. That's one of the reasons why you still can't side-load apps on iOS, another nugget of liberty for which users had to jailbreak their devices for, while Android users have had the ability to do this since like forever. Yet, so much of what its users wanted to do on their device required them to rely on security exploits and tweaks from third-party developers that allowed them the freedoms that Apple curtailed.
Side-loading apps will remain a dream on iOS but there's some course correction from Apple. It's finally adding a pause button in the Camera app so that users can pause clips and resume recording when they want. This saves them from having to manually stitch together multiple clips. This feature has been added to the latest iOS 18 beta and would be out with the public version later this year, with the ability to switch between the camera lenses.
I'm no professional content creator by any means but I've found the ability to do this on my Galaxy phones to be incredibly useful when capturing montages of the places that I visit. I can record for a few seconds, pause, reframe the shot and make any other necessary adjustments before resuming the clip. It saves a lot of time as I can produce that montage exactly as I had envisioned it without needing to manually handle a bunch of clips and waste time stitching them up before they can be uploaded to my social media accounts.
Reading that this feature was coming with iOS 18 really took me by surprise because I never thought the iPhone, the blue-eyed boy of content creators everywhere, wouldn't allow them this very simple option. It would be interested to hear the arguments of whoever thought it wasn't necessary to give this feature to iPhone owners for 17 years, yes that's how long it has been since the first iPhone came out, and how it was finally decided that this absurdity needed to be set aside.
To me, this absurdity defines Apple's approach to decision making, whereby despite all its proclamations of having users at the top of mind, it really only makes decisions when it suits the company. It seems that the consideration is not to eliminate a pain point that users have been complaining about for nearly two decades but to make that decision when it's convenient for the company.
It's in stark contrast to what we've been seeing from Samsung, particularly in the software department, over the past few years. The company's biggest achievement is how it turned around the absolute dumpster fire that used to be its software update rollouts and transformed it into . It's the best example of Samsung recognizing that customers had a legitimate concern and it going all in to address the problem and change things for the better.
Samsung has also been much better at rapidly incorporating the feedback from its users in every new iteration of One UI. We see the company taking practical steps to address users' concerns and pain points to take its software experience from strength to strength, to the point where now it's arguably one of the best custom Android experiences on the market today.
One UI has become so good now that even Apple takes inspiration from it time and again, , there are actually !
If you ask me, I'd say that I'm happy that iPhone users can finally experience a feature that my Samsung phones have had since the 2010s. I understand that it can be hard for them to think of a world outside the high-walled garden of Apple, a world where something as simple as being able to pause a video recording doesn't require waiting for 17 years. Cue Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World!
The post appeared first on .