recursion

We’ve been potty training our son, and imperfect parents that we are, we’ve given into letting him play with our phones while he’s sitting. It’s amazing how quickly he’s learned to navigate the iOS interface. (And concerning, too. I try to keep an eye on what he’s doing in case he accidentally does something destructive.) His favorite thing to do is look at pictures, and I noticed something odd about the Photos app when he was playing with it.

He would look at a photo, and then drag down, which exposes the map view. When looking at the map view for a single photo, it shows just that one photo on the map. So he’d tap on it…and go back to the photo view screen and do it again. And again. And again…

I made a screen recording to show how this works:

The funny thing about this repeated drill down is that in order to get back to the main photo list, you have to navigate Back repeatedly. That’s a little unexpected! Thinking back to my brief experience with iOS development, I realized it’s an effect of using UINavigationController. Each time he tapped on the photo in the map view, he added another copy of the view controller to the viewControllers stack.

This toddler QA exposed a corner case that I doubt most normal users would ever encounter. I am not sure it’s worth “fixing” – you’d need to special case it to avoid adding view controllers to the stack – but it is funny.