Just make the user more comfortable by adding a "Save" button!

Genuine answer I got when I pointed out at a previous job that we were mixing immmediately effective toggles with other, non-immediately-effective inputs in the same form.

The save button was meant to do nothing.

I know, this article is about the toggle state (e.g. "Mute" or "Unmute").

But since toggles are more and more part of forms, I'm in for a rant about that.

The no-op save-/done-button pattern has been established for a while now, see the "Done" button in this post. I think Apple started incorporating toggles into forms.

But mixing both is truly evil.

Apple is most times better in its own apps when it comes to that, because they make clear whenever a setting is "dirty", but they started all this.

I don't remember which one it was, but recently I used a web or native app with settings forms, where the pages had a "save" button at the bottom and a "done" button at the top.

"Done" would silently (!) discard your changes.

In the situation I mentioned before, "Done" was meant to be a no-op for immediately effective controls and an "Apply" or "Save" for the ones that weren't.

But as the world moves towards immediately effective controls, it should be really emphasized that the most important thing to me, as a user, is whether the form is in "auto-save" mode or not, and in almost all cases, the same paradigm should apply across the whole form.