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Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

I don't know... my lock screen has a camera icon always visible. When you tap it, you get an isolated camera mode that only shows you photos taken in that session. That's the standard screen now, so I think Apple is doing okay on the discoverability front (for that specific use-case -- possibly the only case where something is discoverable in iOS).

But I still don't know how to take a picture on an Android phone. I have no idea what the Android virtual buttons mean or what they do at all. With similar logic, my wife still has an iPhone with a physical home button because she doesn't like my (now old) iPhone with the "swipe up" home motion. She doesn't really want to learn how to use a new (ish) gesture.

And while I'm on a roll... I also don't understand the buttons on Playstation controllers, preferring the direct lettering of the Xbox or Switch.

We are all ultimately creatures of habit.

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> my lock screen has a camera icon always visible. When you tap it, you get an isolated camera mode that only shows you photos taken in that session. That's the standard screen now, so I think Apple is doing okay on the discoverability front (for that specific use-case -- possibly the only case where something is discoverable in iOS).

Huge discoverability hiccup with that camera button on the lock screen: you have to tap and hold the camera button to get into the camera (not long, about 1 second). The first time I picked up my partner's iPhone to take a picture for her, I just about pulled my hair out trying to get that button to do anything. I tapped it about a thousand times before she got frustrated and showed me how to operate it.

It's to prevent the phone accidentally unlocking. But your experience does highlight a big problem. They should show a message when you "frustrate" tap explaining what you should do.

> my lock screen has a camera icon always visible. When you tap it, you get an isolated camera mode

Maybe they screwed this up on home-button iPhone models but got it right on the X and newer?

Here's my lock screen: https://i.imgur.com/tyOYZXW.png

I don't see anything resembling a camera icon that I could tap. I can swipe sideways to get to the limited-session camera, but only because I happen to know that shortcut exists.

It's not as if the 4" SE is too small to fit a camera button on the screen, but there isn't one. Unless I turned the button off and forgot about it, but I can't imagine Apple offering that sort of UI customization.

It's almost invisible against your background photo, but at the very bottom, there are a bunch of dots just like on the home screen, except the rightmost dot is a camera icon. It's not a button you can tap, it's an indicator of what is on the page to the right. It's the same on my 7. World's most subtle indicator.

With android it varies. Samsung has a camera icon on the lock screen by default that you just use, so that is very easy to figure out.

By default, quickly doubletapping the power button also opens the camera, screen on or not.

Gesture navigation is also better on Android, but this is probably because iOS never had a back button.

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