You could say that about every tiny feature and then you'd have a Settings app that has thousands of options. Most people don't want that and, I think, would prefer the device to do its best to guess at the correct setting even if it gets it wrong sometimes.
Tough to say in the general case, but it's often a good idea to adhere to the so-called "principle of least surprise" in UX design. If I'm riding on a trail that periodically approaches and diverges from a nearby highway, which is common around here (Seattle area), I don't want my recorded path to snap to the highway every time I exceed 12 MPH. That would come as a surprise -- an unpleasant one. I'll go so far as to say that nobody would ever expect this to happen, or be dismayed if it didn't.
That's a good reason not to include a given feature, or at least to allow it to be turned off. Someone at Apple obviously thought it was a good idea, but they clearly didn't ask very many other people, or ask any cyclists at all.
> then you'd have a Settings app that has thousands of options
However, some people would actually like that, me for instance. On Firefox, about:config is a great feature: if you know what you're doing, you can tweak any setting that's tweakable.
> prefer the device to do its best to guess at the correct setting
This is actually the worst of both worlds. From a UX perspective, I can understand having multiple behaviors with a setting, and I can also understand having a single behavior with no setting. However, I can't agree with having multiple behaviors that change opaquely at the whim of the machine (like in this case), which is just frustrating.
At the very least, Apple should have surfaced a setting to developers to control this and made it opt-in.
On Firefox, about:config is a great feature: if you know what you're doing, you can tweak any setting that's tweakable.
That said, I do wish they'd make it a bit more organised than a long list of tersely named options; perhaps a tree view like many other apps' settings use.
The idea of providing good defaults, and that of providing rich configuration options, are not necessarily opposites.
> That said, I do wish they'd make it a bit more organised than a long list of tersely named options; perhaps a tree view like many other apps' settings use.
One or two sentences of description per variable/valid option would go a long way as well.
