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Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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