Why on God’s green earth can I not have an #iPhone interface that works?
To say that Apple’s “gestures” suck is entirely too kind. They are a fundamentally broken idea anyway, but that gestures have regions and therefore that a gesture may mean any of three different things, makes my phone desperate–and I do mean desperate–to do anything other than what I’m telling it to do.
Whoever said “there’s no such thing as a wrong opinion” never encountered a post like yours.
Touch-screen gestures are the best part of having a touch screen, and Apple’s implementation of such gestures is so well-received it’s been licensed and borrowed and imitated by all of its rivals.
I can’t imagine having a touch screen without swipe to scroll / pinch to zoom / press-and-hold for pop-ups, and so on.
It completely eliminates the need for physical buttons or on-screen real estate being covered by fake buttons.
All that being said, have you explored iOS’s robust Accessibility features? Geared toward people with limited abilities / handicaps, you can modify how some gestures respond and even add on-screen buttons in some ways. It might be worth checking out.
To be honest, the gestures for notification center and control center are terrible. At times I am still doubting which one does which, and control center should be way easier to reach (and I am on a mini), reachability requires too many steps and reaching for the top left is quite a stretch.
I think a combination of both of them like Android is a better option.
The pinch to zoom and scrolling features generally work fine. I did explore the accessibility features and found nothing that addresses my need for easy predictability.
The reason I like the buttons is because I know what they do. And they do it every time.
The reason I hate the gestures is that I’ll think I’m doing one thing and get something completely different, often when I needed it to do the right thing five seconds ago.