I guess I should be glad that at least there’s some information available about status, but… it doesn’t make sense. My internet was working fine at the time, and this wasn’t directly after waking the device from sleep or anything similar. This was after me already spending 15 minutes trying anything I could think of to get this damn thing to download the file I had uploaded from my iPhone (on the very same WiFi, mind you) an hour earlier. I waited another hour longer before rebooting, which did the trick.

This came in a while ago¹ but with the absolute shit show going on right now on Reddit, it fits very well. RIP Apollo.

“A 🌈 rainbow unicorn 🦄” wrote:

Anyway, this is about Reddit. Steps to reproduce:

1. Submit a comment on a post.
2. Observe that Reddit is like “OMG, 1 new comment”.
3. Observe that it’s the comment that you just posted.

Every. Single. Time. No, Reddit. I AM THE ONE THAT JUST WROTE THAT. JUST NOW. You were there, you helped me do it. I was authenticated. WTF is wrong with you?

I recently disabled Screen Time (Downtime more specifically) because “it worked a little too well” to put a positive spin on it. This isn’t the greatest illustration – I wanted to click slowly to better show what’s happening, but that hides the absurdity. What I experienced was that (in all applications, and 100% of the time) when attempting to use any of the temporary overrides, it took several seconds for anything to happen. During that time, it didn’t matter how often I clicked the unlock button, it would just throw me into the same loop until at some random point it finally unlocked. When clicking with normal speed I was able to perform the action 5 times or more before anything actually happened.

I guess it’s iMessage week at AT. I just don’t understand how iMessage is such a steaming pile of garbage. How dare I try looking up something from… *checks notes* yesterday! I’ve cut the recording as to not waste too much of your valuable data, but it went on for almost a minute (full video) before I gave up and force-quit the app.

iMessage, many many years ago, was amongst the very best instant messengers. I was converting people to using the app (or even to Apple altogether) just because how good iMessage was. It’s the opposite now, I’m trying to get the very few people I’m still using it with to change to something else.

That was a new one for me: The “Send message” arrow simply stayed disabled. For absolutely no reason at all. Closing the share dialog and restarting the interaction fixed it. Deleting the message and typing something else didn’t. Weird.

Setting aside how unbelievably cringe the translated versions of these Apple Fitness motivational default responses are (which is why I’m mocking my brother with a Kraut gif in response), it absolutely blows my mind that so many years later they still show up like a normal message in macOS. If I had seen the message on my laptop first, I’d have thought my brother had a stroke or someone stole his phone.

I was subscribed to Apple Arcade about two years ago, for a month. I guess I must have allowed it to send notifications back then. Or maybe I did allow Game Center to send them. Either way, I’m sure that it is technically perfectly fine for this push notification to be sent.

But as I’m currently not subscibed to Apple Arcade and haven’t had access to this game since my subscription ended two years ago, this is basically just a very personalized ad. And apparently an unintentional one at that: Unfortunately I didn’t have the foresight to start recording before I tapped it, but it just opened the App Store app. Not even on the Arcade page, just the default landing.

I choose Apple because I prefer native software over the jankiness of web applications. 🤡

Let’s ignore for a moment how extremely annoying it is that any remotely useful app these days has to jump through these hoops and build a dialog like this, explaining to people how to make their OS allow the app to do its job.

Let’s also set aside how weird the location for this is: The “Accessibility” sub-menu of the “Privacy & Security” settings (while there’s also top-level “Accessibility” settings).

Wouldn’t it be nice if this would at least work as expected, no matter how silly the expectation? Because it doesn’t, at least not after I updated an app that I had already approved before. Regardless of how often I re-checked Espanso¹ again in the list in those “Accessibility” settings, the dialog would not go away, and the app would not work anymore.

As a little bonus, this is what the list looked like before the very first time I re-checked it:

Don’t you just love it when a two-state UI control element seems to have three different states? Is it just a visual bug? A functional bug? Intentional functionality? Who knows, probably not even Apple themselves.

Still, after a click it did show in beautiful blue like all the other enabled/approved apps – but didn’t actually work.

The solution is fairly simple: You need to remove the entry completely using the + - controls at the bottom, then add it again and enable it afterwards. It just works!

Left: What I see about 95% of the time when swiping down since upgrading to iOS 16.

Right: What I always want to see when swiping down, and what I always saw when doing so in iOS 15.

I waited many, many weeks to see if maybe it just had to “re-learn” what to suggest, but even a few updates later, “Siri Suggestions” in Search are still completely broken and rendering the feature basically useless for me – I can search for something, then delete the search term again, and most often (but not always…) the suggestions will then be shown. But that defeats their entire purpose: Being a shortcut that lets me skip searching.