Of all the things I've taken for granted in my life, never did I think it would be the ability to pause a video recording on my smartphone. Until I found out that there's a massive chunk of people out there *cough* iPhone owners *cough* that don't have that option.
While I've had my fair share of hands-on time with various iPhones over the years, as I've measured them up against many Samsung devices, never did I think to check if this feature existed on the iPhones. I sort of just assumed that it did.
Partly because I can't even remember not having this feature on my Samsung phone, and indeed, all Android phones have had the ability to do this for the better part of a decade. It's such a no-brainer and there's no possible explanation one could give for not being able to pause a video recording on the iPhone.
The lack of this feature can't be easily explained away. And it's not like iPhone users haven't been asking for it. A simple online search reveals forum posts from years back where users express their frustration at not being able to do this. The only solution for them was to install dubious jailbreak tweaks to do what Android users could at the tap of a button.
It's not a joke: you can finally pause video recording on iPhones
Much of Apple's superiority complex for iOS over Android has been predicated upon the premise of security. That's one of the reasons why you still can't side-load apps on iOS, another nugget of liberty for which users had to jailbreak their devices, while Android users have had the ability to do this since like forever.
Yet, so much of what its users wanted to do on their device required them to rely on security exploits and tweaks from third-party developers that allowed them the freedoms that Apple curtailed.
Side-loading apps will remain a dream on iOS but there's some course correction from Apple. It's finally adding a pause button in the Camera app so that users can pause clips and resume recording when they want.
This saves them from having to manually stitch together multiple clips. The feature has been added to the latest iOS 18 beta and would be out with the public version later this year, with the ability to switch between the camera lenses.
I'm no professional content creator by any means. But I've found the ability to do this on my Galaxy phones incredibly useful when capturing montages of the places that I visit. I can record for a few seconds, pause, reframe the shot and make any other necessary adjustments, then before resuming the clip.
The pause function saves a lot of time. I can produce that montage exactly as I had envisioned it without needing to manually handle a bunch of clips and waste time stitching them up before they uploading them to my social media accounts.
Apple's approach to user satisfaction is in stark contrast to Samsung's
Reading that this feature was coming with iOS 18 really took me by surprise. I never thought the iPhone, the blue-eyed boy of content creators everywhere, wouldn't allow them this very simple option. It would be interesting to hear the arguments of whoever thought it wasn't necessary to give this feature to iPhone owners for 17 years.
Yes, that's how long it has been since the first iPhone came out, and how it was finally decided that this absurdity needed to be set aside. To me, this absurdity defines Apple's approach to decision making.
Despite its proclamations of having users at the top of its mind, Apple really only makes decisions when it suits the company. It seems the consideration isn't to eliminate a pain point that users have been complaining about for nearly two decades. It's to make that decision when it's convenient for the company.
It's in stark contrast to Samsung's approach, particularly in the software department, over the past few years. The company's biggest achievement is how it turned around the absolute dumpster fire that used to be its software update rollouts and transformed it into the industry gold standard for Android devices.
It's the best example of Samsung recognizing that customers had a legitimate concern and going all in to change things for the better. Heck, Samsung has also addressed the fluidity and speed of its software. One UI now has ultra-smooth animations on flagship Galaxy smartphones, with even more improvements on the horizon.
As Apple catches up, Samsung is going from strength to strength
Samsung has also been much better at rapidly incorporating feedback from its users in every new One UI iteration. We see the company taking practical steps to address users' concerns and pain points to take its software experience from strength to strength. It's now at a point where it's arguably one of the best custom Android experiences on the market today.
One UI has become so good now that even Apple takes inspiration from it time and again, like a Galaxy AI feature it's replicating for iOS 18. There are actually a dozen One UI features that iOS 18 has copied!
I'm happy that iPhone users can finally experience a feature that my Samsung phones have had since the 2010s. I understand that it can be hard for them to think of a world outside the high-walled garden of Apple, a world where something as simple as being able to pause a video recording doesn't require waiting for 17 years. Cue Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World!
