Has Apple or everyone else got Dynamic Island backwards?
It looks like there’s growing consensus that Dynamic Island’s primary interaction model is wrong. Michael Tsai compiles commentary across two posts, which include people grumping about how a tap on Dynamic Island opens an app, whereas a long-press is required to expand what’s in the island to use its controls. Everyone from Nilay Patel at The Verge to John ‘Daring Fireball’ Gruber seems to want the opposite.
I’ve taken a contrary viewpoint. The iOS Home Screen has long had a similar interaction model. Whether you’re interacting with an icon or a widget, a tap opens an app, whereas a long press (and, previously, Force Touch) exists for actions. To my mind, Dynamic Island follows this existing convention, rather than making up new ones. So if a timer’s in the island, you tap-hold to perform a contextual action, or tap to open the item’s app. Even if you take a more desktop analogy of minimising to a ‘dock’ (which is in some ways how Dynamic Island presents), Apple is being consistent in this regard.
Rob Jonson on Twitter disagrees, arguing we’re effectively talking about a long press for a quick interaction and a tap for a deeper one (that is, opening the app), which “doesn’t seem right to me”. He asks: “Put it another way – is the dynamic island primarily the holder of the full app, or the holder of the expanded dynamic island?”
I’m clearly in the minority here (albeit, at present, a minority that includes Apple), but it’d feel odd to me if a long-press in Dynamic Island was the route to launching an app, just the same as it’d be weird elsewhere in the operating system.
Interestingly, on Android, it *does* work the other way around. If you drag down your quick panel, tapping on an option shortcut turns that option on or off, and long-pressing opens the corresponding app.
This is the exact opposite of how tapping on a notification just below the quick panel works: just tapping it opens the corresponding app, and long-pressing expands it.
Even though these two UI elements are right next to each other, and work the exact opposite way, I’m not sure anyone is confused by that. They both do their “main” thing when you tap, and their “secondary” thing when you long-press. It would be odd if tapping on an option shortcut immediately opened an app, and it would be odd if tapping on a notification just expanded it.
I haven’t used an iPhone with Dynamic Island, but it seems that most people feel that its “main” thing is to be some kind of floating panel for quick interactions, so it would make sense to me that simply tapping it would expand it, rather than open the app.
I completely agree that it’s correct the way it works right now. I think I group it mentally with notification, since it appears in the same place, and they follow the same rules – press and hold to expand, and tap to open.
It’s this way around for a reason – imagine if it was the other way. Users who only ever try tapping on interface elements (which is at least some) would only ever be able to expand the Dynamic Island. This way, they’ll end up in the app, where they presumably can use the app UI to interact (stop the timer, pause music, and so on). It’s the same for notifications – if all you ever do is tap them, you don’t lose anything except some more efficient shortcuts.