Vision 3.1.2 to 3.1.5: A Check Counter You Can Read, and Hear

The four most recent Vision for iPhone releases, 3.1.2 through 3.1.5, all touch one corner of the app: the small counter on the Detective screen that says how many checks you have used. None of them changes what a check does. They change whether you can read that counter at a glance, and whether you can hear it at all.

This post covers all four in one place, in the order they were made. The changelog has the date for each one.

What the counter is for

Detective is the part of Vision where you paste in a message, an email, or a phone number and get a second opinion on what to do next. Each question you ask is a check, and there is a limit on how many you can run. The counter at the top of the screen tells you where you stand against that limit.

That matters more than it sounds. Someone deciding whether to ask about one more suspicious text should not have to guess whether they still can, and should never be shown a number that is wrong.

Vision 3.1.2

The counter now shows how many checks you have used out of how many you have available, as two plain numbers: "Checks used: 3 of 50".

Before this release the counter displayed a sentence sent by our server, word for word. The app now receives the two numbers themselves and builds the badge from those and nothing else. If either number is missing, the badge does not appear at all, rather than filling the gap with a zero.

Vision 3.1.3

"3 of 50" still leaves you doing arithmetic. The counter now does it for you: "Checks used: 3 of 50 • 47 remaining".

The remaining figure is only honest when the two numbers it comes from are. A count below zero, or a used count higher than its limit, cannot produce a true remaining number, so in those cases the counter hides itself instead of showing one that is wrong. A hidden badge is a small loss. A wrong number is worse.

Vision 3.1.4

The visible badge is compressed to fit the space it sits in. Read aloud by VoiceOver, the screen reader built into iPhone, that compression came out as "checks used, colon, three of fifty, bullet, forty-seven remaining", which is punctuation a listener has to translate back into two figures.

The badge now carries one spoken label, built from the same two numbers: "3 of 50 checks used. 47 checks remaining." It is a single element to VoiceOver, so the label is read in place of the visible text rather than after it. Nothing on screen moved. This is the change behind the release note for 3.1.4: VoiceOver now reads your check usage and the number of checks remaining as one clear, natural sentence.

Vision 3.1.5

The spoken label pluralised "checks" for every count, so a limit of one was read as "0 of 1 checks used. 1 checks remaining."

Each half of the sentence now takes its noun from its own count. A limit of one reads "0 of 1 check used. 1 check remaining." Used up, it reads "1 of 1 check used. 0 checks remaining." One of two reads "1 of 2 checks used. 1 check remaining." Every other count sounds exactly as it did in 3.1.4.

It is a small change, and it was worth a release of its own. A person who relies on VoiceOver hears this label every time they reach the counter. Grammar that is wrong every time is a small friction that never goes away.

One change per release

Each of these shipped on its own, one change per version, with a release note that says what changed and nothing more. That is deliberate. A small release is easy to describe honestly, easy to check, and easy to take back if it turns out to be wrong.

Where this fits

Vision is a second opinion, not a verdict. The counter tells you how many more times you can ask; it does not tell you what to do with the answer. That part is still the habit from how to spot a scam: stop, leave the channel the other side controls, and check through a route you found yourself.