Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gfodor 5009 days ago
People are reading way too into my mention of Android's hardware button here. My point is that before iPhone 5, iOS had a sane convention of back buttons being at the top left corner of the screen. (And Android had a relatively sane one in the form of a hardware button, for comparison.) Now, with the bigger screen, this sane convention has instantly turned into a regular pain point. It would be much better now, for example, if navigation in an app were exclusively in the bottom bar so it could be reached easily by the user, and the top bar is a "read-only" information bar with perhaps buttons for destructive or rarely-needed actions.

Two of the most common actions in apps on the iPhone are to tap the top left and bottom parts of the screen. To do this on iPhone 5 for many users will require continual readjustment of the phone in their hand. For me, this is a showstopper and actually makes the iPhone 4S I own now feel better designed since the hardware size is in tune with the layout of the software. The new iPhone is shoehorning a UX that works well on a smaller screen into a larger one and it fails.