Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Autolayout
Raised as a usability problem by 19 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2013–2025), in 18 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Constraint conflicts are hard to debug and triageUnreviewed
20132026- Easy to introduce constraint conflicts that go unnoticed for months, then are tedious to debug2025-03-14
- Too many ways to build a layout, and dynamic changes throw unhelpful constraint errors2016-09-28
- Constraints are hard to reason about and get right for complex layouts2015-06-08
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 24 complaints
- Easy to introduce constraint conflicts that go unnoticed for months, then are tedious to debug2025-03-14
- Slow, unintuitive, and hard to handle UI updates2024-08-28
- Auto Layout is a huge pain to work with2024-02-16
- Auto Layout's console debug spew is frustrating to work through when debugging2023-01-28
- Original Autolayout programming API was horrible to use for developers2020-10-31
- Took years to learn how to use it properly2020-02-25
- Over-constrained layouts break unpredictably, and views vanish to zero size in scroll and stack views2020-01-09
- AutoLayout is verbose and confusing for building iOS UI2018-10-15
- Too many ways to build a layout, and dynamic changes throw unhelpful constraint errors2016-09-28
- Constraints are hard to reason about and get right for complex layouts2015-06-08
- Spends a lot of time figuring out why elements don't line up or behave as expected2015-06-08
- Programmatic Autolayout interface is awful to work with2015-06-08
- Auto Layout is difficult to use in some situations, though web CSS layout is worse2015-05-23
- Adding constraints in code through the API is painful to work with2015-05-22
- Needs three or four constraints per element, often more, which is fiddly2015-05-22
- Auto Layout is slow, limiting UI complexity and per-frame layout updates2015-05-22
- Too many constraints to manage compared to simple frames, a burden for animations2014-12-09
- Error messages about conflicting constraints don't reveal where the implicit constraints come from2014-12-09
- Creating NSLayoutConstraints in code is tedious and annoying2014-10-15
- Layout system is hard to read and write, producing broken UI2014-09-28
- Complex Auto Layout schemes in xib files are hard to understand and change2014-09-11
- When layouts break, it's hard to tell why, since constraint solving is hidden2014-03-03
- Hard to debug constraint conflicts; layout breaks are a chore to triage2013-04-16
- Developers find Auto Layout and Storyboards painful to actually use2013-02-08