Phone manufacturers: please give us the power button back
by Allison Johnson from The Verge - All Posts on (#675XJ)
It's time to fight the power. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Every major phone manufacturer is guilty of a serious crime, and I won't be quiet about it any longer: they stole the power button from us. Apple, Google, Samsung: guilty, guilty, guilty.
Long-pressing the power button used to bring up an option to turn your phone off, but then these companies decided to get cute and make this a shortcut to summon their digital assistant. This is bad and wrong, and I'm politely demanding that these companies return what they took from us.
Look, I get the logic. When phone screens got bigger, physical buttons like Apple's home button were axed, and existing buttons had to pick up the slack. In the iPhone X, Apple re-homed the Siri function to the power button. Since then, turning your iPhone off has...