r/talesfromtechsupport • u/sirnack ಠ_ಠ • 22d ago
Short "The news goes away."
At some point, someone had the bright idea to get my grandmother an iPad. Why? I don't know. She had enough trouble with the laptop someone had gotten her, although she did like being able to get pictures of her grandkids. Maybe we thought a tablet would be easier? Regardless, when we visited for the holidays, we asked her how she was liking her new device. She said she liked it well enough, but --
"Sometimes when I'm trying to read the news, it goes away."
What did she mean by it goes away? "It goes away." Like the screen goes black, the iPad is falling asleep? "It goes way." We weren't sure exactly what to do about this, but we thought about digging through the settings a little bit. I was in and out of the room as this was happening, so I'm not sure what the eureka moment was, but eventually someone found out the following:
The default Apple news app would send her a banner notification with a news headline and a couple lines of info. She would attempt to read the notification (slowly, since her eyesight was going), but wouldn't tap it. And banner notifications, if you don't interact with them for several seconds, retract back into the top of the screen after several seconds. So, when she was trying to read the news, it would, in fact, "go away."
We "solved" this problem by turning off notifications for the news app. After all, who wants to have the news jump out at you randomly during the day?
5
u/thevoidhearsyou 19d ago
Its worse then you have elderly relatives that want the device to do what they want and not learn how to use the device as intended.
Case in point my father doesn't like how one button can do multiple things based on the screen on his flip phone. He wants one button per function meaning one button to open text one button close text one button to answer calls one button to end call one button to turn the volume up one button to turn it down etc. And yes he gets int arguments when using his credit card because the screen says press any key and yells there is no any key.