[tempaway41114]

My daughter has a very serious learning disability and she loves to swipe through home photos or videos on an android phone or on an ipad. She can mostly get on OK but when you look at it from her point of view, its _amazing_ how complicated 'swiping through pics' has become.

Swipe from the top? that brings the notifications

Swipe from the bottom? Brings up photo options. Press on one of those by accident and you end up in a nest of menus and features that can be hard to get out of.

Want to play a video? Tap once, the video controls fade in, you've then got to tap the play button in the middle of the screen within half a second or so, or it fades out again

Long press while scrolling through list of photos? Now you're in 'select mode' and every photo you press gets added to the selection rather than getting displayed. Can be very confusing.

Press the wrong button in IOS and you end up in very confusing picture-in-picture mode

One great thing about iOS is the 'guided access' feature, you can use it to lock the ipad into one app and even disable parts of the touchscreen so that a child can use the ipad without accidentally finding their way out of the app and into your email. I dont think Android has an equivalent. edit: ah yes it does - App Pinning - thanks

[moritonal]

Yep, imagine how difficult it is for the blind. I had to explain that tapping and swiping this light brick in their hand could order pizza. Pretty much witchcraft.

Android does have that feature on some phones, it's called App Pinning.

[Tade0]

Insisting on just one button for basic interactions and swipes for the rest was a mistake.

On top of that apps (looking at you, Instagram) are often simply buggy. You can have the same video play or not play depending on how the winds of load balancing blow. No graceful degradation or anything.

[Tempest1981]

"Hidden affordances" are hard for novice/elderly users too.