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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

My mum is 68 now. I first got her a windows phone. I taught her how to make calls. That was it. Then a month later I got a string of text message.

Hello

Son

This

Working

She worked out how to send texts.

I upgraded her to an old iphone. I sent it to her in the mail. She worked out everything including how to take photos. I told her about LINE and she found the App Store and downloaded it.

Her phone died so I bought her an android cos I couldn’t afford the iphone.

She can’t figure it out at all. She had to go to the store to ask how to connect to wifi. How to use the play store, etc.

I thought cos she went iphone > android she would be able to pick it up. That isn’t the case.

iPhones may have hidden features. But they are a lot easier to pick up than an android phone by a Long shot as far as I’m concerned.

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Once you get used to one O/S, the other becomes harder, because instead of just not knowing any of the conventions, you've actively trained the wrong ones.

My mum went from Windows Phone to iPhone without issue. I didn't have to teach her anything about the iPhone. To me that suggests either Windows Phone / iOS are similar (they aren't) or intuitive.

I mainly use Android, have an iPhone, and the differences are constantly tripping me up. To the point where the claim that iPhones are user-friendly feels intuitively completely wrong to me. I always want to point to the wifi thing, or the lack of periods and commas on the keyboard, or the terrible home-screen arrangement/customization stuff as ironclad proof that the iPhone is less user-friendly.

But that's not actually it. People who go from iPhone to Android find Android difficult to use. People who go from Android to iPhone find iOS difficult to use.

I went from iPhone to Android and struggled but now I have serious trouble using iOS devices.

I'm now convinced the greatest UI innovation this century is the Back button. If IBM PC keyboards had a big dedicated "back" key the world would have a been a much better place.

I very rarely use iPhones but when I do I have no idea how anything is supposed to work without a back button.

I guess they end up being soft buttons on the screen.

In inconsistent places. In many UIs they're on the top left. In the browser it's on the bottom left?

So weird.

That's something I loved about Windows Phone, UI was very consistent.

Yep! That’s definitely true.

You can however consistently swipe from the left side of the screen to go back. There are a couple of apps which I suspect were not written by iOS users where this functionality is broken (such as Valve’s Steam iOS app), but those are far in the minority.

It isn't necessarily consistent.

I used my coworker's iPhone yesterday, opening a link from a text message, and couldn't figure out how to go back to the message. Swiping in from the left side went back... within the browser, which had no back history. I had to go to the home screen and open text messages again.

On Android, you just hit the back button and it goes back to the previous app in the stack if you launched one app from another.

It’s consistently going back in the context of the app you’re in.

If you want to go back to the previous app you can swipe from the left on the home indicator, or on older iPhones swipe from the left with force.

It is consistent but it may not be obviously consistent so I agree there is room for improvement there. The upper left back buttons are always to go to a different "screen" or function. The bottom back buttons are to navigate pages. The confusion with the browser comes simply from the fact that people mix a screen with a page because websites all look different. You're not going to a different screen within the app but you might assume so because you're going back to a different website.

The problem is that the definite way to go back on the iPhone is to swipe over the screen from left to right. That gets you back to where you come from every time.

The other problem is that no application trains the user doing this with for example an animated hint.

Knowing and using that makes the back button for users without disabilities superfluous.

They have the "Esc" key.

That generally means cancel, not back.

Indeed, but since opening dialog boxes was just about the only kind of navigation in apps back then, Esc effectively worked as a back button.

But, as you say, she barely used the Windows phone features.

Yeah I guess. She used Phone, Contacts, Text, Camera, Email, and Browser. On the iPhone she figured out all of the above, and then figured out the App Store / LINE and how to send photos to me.

I’m the same way. I came from a nexus 5, but once I made the switch, it made basic features much easier to work with. Calling, contacts, text messaging, etc. the simple stuff was actually extremely simple on the iPhone.

While the author has mentioned a lot of things that I never knew existed or even care about, I don’t understand why Apple should have to make these things obvious for people who would never use them.

I also propose that people's behaviors become less variable as they age, and thus they are less likely to spontaneously discover new pathways.

My parents have an Android tablet -- I'm not sure when they got it but they've had it for years. They needed new phone so I got them an iPhone and an iPad. I figured it had to be easier for them than an old Android but they trouble with the sort of same things -- connecting to Wifi, getting email, etc -- so they mostly continued to use that tiny old Android tablet.

After 6 months number of "send from my iPad" messages is finally starting to increase.

Both my parents had a similar experience migrating from Microsoft Windows to Macos. It literally opened a new world for them.

OH, I got my mum a Macbook Air, best thing I ever did, I talked her through setting up Team Viewer, I setup her icons so she had only what she needed. Then I've never done anything more. She finds all her recipes online, does emailing, finds her tv shows. Mum and Dad no longer argue over the TV now.

The old Windows computer caused lots of arguments and angry text messages with me. I'm not a fan of mac os, but best thing ever for my parents.

I don't know. I am a senior developer in my 40s. I have been using Android since G1 phones came out. The few times I tried to use iPhones I couldn't do anything, pretty much everything I needed was counter-intuitive and I had to ask someone. How to switch to a different app? How to go back to previous screen? How to change wifi or other settings? How to setup or switch on/off an alarm clock? And many other things that I just couldn't find.

I'm 34 - my first smartphone was an iPhone 3G. I upgraded through the 3GS and 4, then moved to Android and didn't come back until the iPhone X.

The X's interface is so different from my old 4 that it took a few days to get adjusted, but I can honestly say that I like it better now. I can't think of anything I miss about Android at this point.

My first smartphone was an Iphone and I hated the shit out of that thing. Everything was so unintuitive, nothing works unless you know exactly what arcane input sequence you need to perform on the device's single button and you cannot do anything not approved by Apple™®©, such as installing normal apps, or even stupid shit like, I don't know trying to get your data off your phone without getting apple's malware all over your computer.

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