I'm a technology librarian and I spend around 20 hours a week helping seniors with their devices. I really wish that phone and TV engineers could shadow me for a few weeks and see what problems people really have using their devices (yes, people drag their TV to the library for me to look at). The number 1 complaint by far is getting rid of the home button on iphones and ipads. I've had a few patrons switch to android because it has fewer touch controls.
Even with Android I had to enable the "3-button navigation" at the bottom because they defaulted to Gestures whenever they introduced that (google search says it was Android 10 in 2019).
On my last two phones I have been asked what I prefer. When I selected gestures, I had to do a course.
Which is better than iOS in every way, because there is just one way to go back and there being no indicator in the app how you should do it. Do I swipe or do I look for a back button?
I'm really tired of this (now long lasting) UX trend of getting rid of physical buttons and sometimes software buttons, and replacing them with vague "gestures." Totally undiscoverable, and also, by the way, not easy for people with limited dexterity. I'm hanging on to my iPhone 7 for dear life, even as Apple and 3rd party developers abandon it and try to shame me for keeping it. The last time I tried to use my wife's newer phone, I had no idea what to do. I just kept randomly swiping from top to bottom and bottom to top and all over the place at random speeds until it did what I wanted it to do. Infuriating.
Even if touch screens are not remembered as one of the worst inventions of the early 21st century, they are going to at least be remembered as enablers of terrible human-computer interaction patterns.
1. Swipe down on the center of the screen to get to Siri suggestions / search
2. Swipe down on the top edge of the screen to get notifications
3. Swipe down on the bottom edge of the screen to move the screen down
4. Swipe down from the top right corner of the screen to get the control center
5. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen and hold for a moment to get the app switcher
6. Swipe right from the middle of the screen to get to the widgets screen
7. Swipe right on the bottom edge of the screen to get to the previously activated app.
8. Long-press on an app icon to get the contextual menu for that app
9. Long-press on an empty spot on the home screen to edit the home screen
If you include buttons:
B1. Click or hold volume up to increase volume
B2. Click or hold volume down to decrease volume
B3. Click the lock button to lock the screen
B4. Hold the lock button to start Siri
B5. Click lock and volume up simultaneously to take a screenshot. (But not lock and volume-down, that locks the screen. Lock and Action Button does nothing.)
B6. Hold lock and volume up simultaneously for a few seconds to bring up the shutdown screen
B7. Whatever your action button is programmed to do.
B8. Click the camera control button to launch the camera
B9. Hold the camera control button to launch visual intelligence, which looks kinda like the regular camera but then does AI things after you take a picture
B10. Hold lock and volume up simultaneously for even longer to activate Emergency SOS
B11. Double-click the lock button to bring up Wallet
B12. Triple-click the lock button to activate your Accessibility Shortcut
If you have a Live Activity on your Dynamic Island, such as a video playing:
10. Tap the Dynamic Island to take you to the app
11. Long-press the Dynamic Island™ to bring up the controls for that activity
12. Swipe left or right on the Dynamic Island to hide the little activity indicator
13. If the activity indicator is hidden, swipe left, right, up, or down to un-hide the little activity indicator.
(Note that this is about a 5mm difference from gesture #1.)
In iOS 26, if you're in Safari, gestures #2, #3, #4, #5 and all the buttons still apply, but you also get:
14. Swipe left on the bottom edge of the screen to switch back to the next app in your app switcher, assuming you switched to this app using gesture #7.
15. Tap the top left corner of the screen to go back to the app that launched Safari, if applicable.
16. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen briefly to go to the home screen. (Note the subtle difference from gesture #5)
and these Safari-specific gestures:
S1. Swipe down to scroll up and hide the URL bar, back button, and ... menu.
S2. Swipe up to scroll down and minimize the URL bar, back button, and ... menu.
S3. Swipe right to scroll left
S4. Swipe left to scroll right
S5. Swipe down while already at the top of a page to refresh
S6. Pinch to zoom out
S7. Unpinch to zoom in
S8. Pinch while already fully zoomed out to get to the list of tabs (literally just discovered this by accident)
S9. Swipe right on the URL bar to switch to the previous tab (Only about 5mm difference from gesture #7)
S10. Swipe left on the URL bar to switch to the next tab (Only about 5mm difference from gesture #12)
S11. Swipe up on the URL bar to get to the list of tabs. Note that this is only about 5mm different from gestures #5 and #16, and even looks very similar to bringing up the app switcher until you release your finger -- the previous tab shows up on the left side of your current tab, but when you release your finger you get a 2xN grid of tabs.
S12. Swipe right from the left edge of the screen to go back to the previous page, OR if your current page was launched on a new tab from a link on a different tab, then it closes your current tab and switches to the previous tab.
S13. Swipe left from the right edge of the screen to go forward to the next page in your history. Note that this doesn't work if your S12 gesture closed your tab.
S14. Tap on the URL bar to edit the URL and bring up your Favorites
S15. Long-press the URL bar to bring up a contextual menu
As a long-time iPhone user, I've had time to learn all of these gradually as they added them. Originally you had volume up/down, lock, and home buttons. They added double-click and long-press behaviors to some of these, as well as chords for screenshots. When they got rid of the home button, all the things that you used to do with the home button became gestures (e.g. app switcher) or moved to other buttons (Siri, screenshots, shutdown menu), so I found the migration fairly intuitive (click home button -> short swipe from bottom of screen; long-press home button -> long swipe from bottom of screen.)
But I don't envy new smartphone users or people switching from iPhones with a home button. This is a lot of stuff to learn. Even I get frustrated with this sometimes -- the loss of the tab button on the Safari bottom bar in iOS 26 combined with the finickyness of gesture S11 made it a lot harder to get to my tab list until I discovered S8.
That's not a great list for this case. A lot of these are not even gestures, just trivial operations. Click volume up to increase volume? The lock button to lock? On the other hand, others are obscure and not everyone needs to know them. You're not too be lost in any way if you don't know B9 for example. The ones actually need for typical operations are possible to learn from just reading the list once.
I wrote the content above in context of "The last time I tried to use my wife's newer phone, I had no idea what to do" - for use like this you need very few examples from the list.
