I spent the day teaching seniors how to use an iPhone
(forums.macrumors.com)120 points by dabinat 5 hours ago
120 points by dabinat 5 hours ago
I have a couple of older relatives with Macs, and every time you fire them up for the first time in a while (these people might go several months without using their computer) the Apple ID sign-in nagging is insane. It'll pop up the same sign-in notification a dozen times and seems to lock up the settings app until you deal with it. I usually think of myself as quite patient but when I see that little window it inspires strong feelings.
I've been a software engineer for quite a number of years now. I bought a mac and iphone a few months back because I wanted to look into iphone development and there was a lot of cursing involved.
First the forms were incredibly bad for a new Swedish user. Then there turned out to be some kind of sync issue between account creation and when it can be used, but the error message did not reflect that in any way whatsoever. The next day the same thing worked.
On the one hand they have a support chat to contact and it's great, just being able to contact an actual person was a shock. On the other hand support couldn't help with my problem and I would not recommend the onboarding experience to anyone.
I'm never buying a mac again if I can avoid it.
Yeah, as somebody who switched from Linux to Mac recently, I feel that MacOS is a nuisance. Yet it's a nuisance I can tolerate with some tweaking, when in return I get much better battery life, screen and keyboard compared to any other options provided by my company.
> I've been a software engineer for quite a number of years now. ... I bought a mac and iphone a few months back ... and there was a lot of cursing involved.
I'm not sure what's worse: the inane keyboard compared to Linux or the ridiculously dumbed-down featureset that makes it effectively impossible for a power user to even try to transition into macOS.
I’ve been a Mac user for >20 years, Linux before that, and lots of FreeBSD on the side. The rewrite from System Preferences to System Settings was one of the worst changes I’ve seen.
Preference panes used to be customized for each function to do what was necessary. Often there were hidden sheets with additional features for power users.
Now everything is just lists. Lists of identical looking, but actually very different settings. List of permissions that drill down into more lists which may or may not be what you want. The lists are unsortable and the order seems arbitrary.
I’m sure there was some push to SwiftUI preferences, but in my opinion, Scott Forstall’s Maps decision pales in comparison to the mess that Settings continues to be.
Not to defend the new System Settings, but the old Preferences app was some 1999 iMac CRT stuff. Everything crammed into different tabs and sub-dialogs, (and secret tabs and sub-dialogs), just to "keep it small". Some of the panes had 'character', but it really was not a good UI on modern systems.
not being in osx development any more: is custom UI no longer possible at all, or is it just significantly easier to go with the flow?
though I have seen settings sections that are simply a "launch the actual config" button. but Wacom was doing that back in System Preferences days, so I'm not sure what to think.
It’s possible, and some exist, it’s just less common now. Previously each preference category would take over the whole window. Now it gets a vertically oriented list. Previously all content fit within the window. Now all of the categories require vertical scrolling of some overly padded list control.
I would mind Settings much less if they at least fixed some bullshit. For example, there's no easy way to find the network in the Wifi network list. There's no search field for it, in 2025!
And the whole window can not be resized horizontally. It's just jaw-droppingly bad.
I guess this is what happens without a dictator to tell people they’re fired for shipping garbage, and when a company worries about meeting quarterly KPIs rather than doing something great.
Instead, the whole company has become a dictator of its "users".
Took 3 tech savvy family members to figure out why mom couldn’t sign back into an app she was paying for: every time she “signed in with Apple” she also hit “hide my email” (first option) and so registered with a new random email address every time she signed in
It was also illuminating how complex sharing app purchases can be. Some apps allow it, some apps it’s a different payment tier to enable it. It was unclear who had paid for what app and why they didn’t show up on some devices.
This is part of why I absolutely LOATHE the multiple "sign-in-with-Y" prompts on everything.
Federation's not a terrible idea for people who don't "get it," but many places are then starting to _hide_ the standard email-based login form... it's bonkers.
Google can go DIAF for their browser-based forced popover that so many sites have opted-in to (so they can sell more expensive ads, of course). [I use Vivaldi which is Chromium-based and AFAIK there's no way to shut off those prompts]
Hide my email replaces your email with an apple controlled intermediate address, right? Is there any reason apple couldn't reuse the same intermediate address for you?
I thought the main things were making it so they don't have your actual email to track/trace, that when you unsubscribed they couldn't continue to spam you, and maybe let apple track spammers, all of which would be fine with a persistent fake email...
I mean, facilitating multiple accounts, while it could be nice, seems way beyond the UX apple provides and isn't a typical paradigm for most software... this seems like an apple issue.
It’s because the Sign in with Apple dialogue failed to recognize that it already has an account with said service.
>making it so they don't have your actual email to track/trace
Indeed solved with persistent email (also solved by creating random new Gmail one time without paying for iCloud+)
>when you unsubscribed they couldn't continue to spam you
Once pwned (or in case of dishonest company selling data or changing outbound sending domains), it’d be one email to get spammed from all over the place
>maybe let apple track spammers
Suppose they could do this if folks used a single regular @iCloud email too, but it’s very important it’s a new email every time to prevent spam as mentioned before.
Big big point: we don’t want to be tracked by data brokers buying data then correlating emails across services. (Sorry for ineloquent reply, someone can do better but I’m pretty sure I’m barking up the right tree)
They turned macOS into an iCloud client and subscription sales funnel.
Is there an example of a platform that serves almost 2 billion users, across 40+ languages and many more geographic locales, countless possible hardware configurations etc., introducing dozens/hundreds of new features a year, without falling into all those traps?
Of course I wholeheartedly agree with your critiques. But the original iPhone - or even macOS circa 2005 - were very different products, much more limited in scope and capability.
It's already hard enough to make a product a paragon of simplicity when the number of things it needs to do are so limited (as evidenced by all the products out there that are even more confusing than Apple products, doing even less), but I'm not sure it's even possible to do it when you reach such planetary scale.
Seems to me that the only way to have a product that's a paragon of simplicity is to have a product that does much, much less. But you don't become a trillion dollar company with 2 billion active users by doing less.
It doesn't matter.
If there is a definition of doing it right then it is a better experience in following that rather than adding new features that don't match the definition no matter what it is.
And if the definition changes then you should be changing everything which takes resources away from new features. Unfortunately new features grab the attention of media an influencers and so that is what gets you the money.
I've been really disappointed in iOS 26 for this reason. I thought it was going in the completely wrong direction, but maybe that was just me being grumpy. Then I noticed that the less computer savvy were having an absolutely abysmal time with it. We're back to computers being really hard for the normies, with apparently no mainstream option that's simple and easy for Grandma.
Unless you want to ship her over to Linux Mint or something similarly not mainstream, but actually user friendly.
I doubt Jobs would have let things get this bad. He would have been ruthless if he had noticed the setup and nagging being this bad.
Jobs seemed like he actually used everything himself, and he wanted a good experience as a customer. I don’t actually believe Tim Cook uses most of the stuff Apple makes, nothing beyond the basics, and he’s likely willing to compromise that experience to increase the stock price.
I’m still of the opinion that iOS 6 was peak iPhone. Say what you will about skeuomorphism, it was easy to understand, apps were visually unique from one another, and the friendly UI was a nice juxtaposition to the clean minimalist hardware.
This is insane to me. How could they make the simplest thing so complicated?
lol yes. I’ve had my iPhone for a few years now and there’s still a red bubble on settings because I never set up Face ID.
Last week I spent hours debugging our application. Something was broken in the remote request layer, and I spent quite a bit of time debugging it with curl.
The culprit? Apple. I missed a notification hidden below all the windows that iTerm was requesting access to my local network. So curl installed via Homebrew and activated using direnv was not working because it was not getting the required entitlement.
But curl in the `/usr/bin` directory was working just fine because it has the necessary entitlement from Apple. So "/usr/bin/curl http://192.168.20.1" was working just fine, while "/opt/homebrew/bin/curl http://192.168.20.1" was silently failing.
Fun. Fun. Fun.
Can you disable this bullshit? Nope. Permission grants need to be renewed every 30 days. And they pop up at the most inopportune moments.
The post says this:
"I know there are accessibility modes, but you don’t want to have to go through all that and spend hours trying to customize the phone."
I don't think the author has actually tried "Assistive Access" mode: https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/abou...
It is ideal for the elderly or those with cognitive disabilities. It removes almost every complex feature and reduces the rest to large clearly labelled buttons. And it doesn't take that long to enable.
I highly recommend it.
Earlier this year I set an iPad up for my elderly dad - it was going to be used for podcasts and YouTube, only - and it looked like it was going to be ideal. "What a great feature," I thought!
Except... There is no way to turn off screen rotation. None. It can't be done in the Assistive Access menu, and doesn't respect the setting in normal mode. It just always rotates. I spent an hour on the phone with Apple Support, and there's nothing to be done about it.
My dad couldn't deal with his icons rotating around on the screen, nor not being able to watch videos while lying down. It gathered dust.
The author says this in their OP:
> The phones are too fiddly now, and pressing random things as they try to hold the phone meant the phone got lost in a sea of opening stuff up. So, I tried the assistive access, but why isn’t this an option from the get-go? It asks you the age of setup; why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode?
> why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode?
Damn... I'm guessing OP is pretty young or something. I know people 80+ who have hardly any problems with regular iOS. I also know people under 60 who do. Age isn't a great thing to assume ability from.
Maybe it's the best compromise, but there's something sad about Apple essentially making an entire second set of apps because they couldn't make the main ones accessible enough. It's like siloing people off into their own universe instead of making this one comfortable for them.
I can’t speak to whether it’s the _best_ compromise but if you see a screenshot of the way they dumb down the Camera app I think it does make it more clear that for example perhaps not a single reader of this website would ever find it remotely acceptable.
Like no video if I recall correctly. I mean I’m sure with infinite time someone would find a better compromise.
There's a quote from Bjarne Stroustrup showing it's not just Seniors having trouble:
I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.
Bjarne Stroustrup is 74, so he probably counts as a senior too at this point, although surely more technically literate than the stereotypes.
Still, I'm in my early 40s and I find myself baffled when I help my mom with her iPhone. I've been an Android guy ever since that was an option.
He was around 40 years old when he said it and he wasn't talking about smartphones - at least what we call smartphones today.
> "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone".
> I said that after a frustrating attempt to use a "feature-rich" telephone sometime around 1990. I'm sure the sentiment wasn't original, and probably not even the overall phrasing; someone must have thought of that before me.
He worked for AT&T at the time, right? Those corporate PBX systems had all sorts of crazy features which people mastered by pounding the 12 keys really fast. And he was probably on the bleeding edge of that. (In many places digital voice mail commonly predated email.)
edit to agree: obv Stroustrup in 1990 was not talking about your cell phone.
Telephones only seem intuitive because we got taught to use them as kids. If you look back, there was a massive effort to teach people to use them.
You can still find some of the educational films: https://youtu.be/p45T7U5oi9Q?si=5fiNEiqccg41nxQb
The biggest thing when teaching someone to use an iPhone - do NOT assume they need to know all the things YOU know how to do.
Instead, ask them what they want to be able to do, and show just that. The temptation is to show too many things.
Also, you can still configure an iPhone with no passcode, which is honestly the way to go, probably.
Encryption by default is always scary, especially when it's very, very strong. If you forget the key, your data is gone forever. I don't think most people in the world need that level of security; those who do already know who they are. Everyone else may be willing to accept the risk that someone unauthorised may gain access, if it means reducing the risk of losing access themsleves.
(I have some very sad stories on this topic.)
You can opt to not add a passcode, but the option to skip on setup is hidden, and people generally aren't going to go back to the settings to remove it once it's added. It's a dark pattern I kind of get, but it's still not ideal, especially for a market segment like the elderly.
Regarding passcodes, for Android phones I've learned to avoid under-display fingerprint readers - they're okay for you and me but just hard enough to use that some people never converge on the right angle/pressure/duration combination to get them to work reliably. Several of my relatives have gone back to typing in their password (or to no password) after moving from a device with a back-of-phone to an under-display reader.
Mostly agree, but also - if someone's genuinely new to phones, they might not actually know what's possible that they might want to do. You have to be a little bit opinionated on how to use the phone, at least until they know enough to have opinions of their own.
I remember I last counted iOS and macOS features in 2022, since 2012 I barely count 5 features that is useful to me.
Without Steve Jobs, everyone work with their own incentives, if shipping features is how you get promotion and raise. That is what we end up with.
I know this is controversial take on HN. 10 years spend on Swift and SwiftUI. It would have been better if we continue some small and iterative improvement with both C23 and Objective C.
Every year we see Apple SoC improvements, but my iOS or macOS is still not instantaneous. Safari 18 got better, and now 26 as well. But comparatively speaking it is still behind Chrome and Firefox in terms of responsiveness, and resource usage.
In terms of Design, the Home Screen is still a mess.
Compare to Old Apple, new Apple's rate of improvement and productivity has dropped significantly , with double or triple the resource but half of the execution in terms of Software. ( Hardware they are doing fine if not exceptional )
But if Apple software is really this bad, it just shows Microsoft and Google have been absolutely appalling in the past 10-20 years.
I do this fortnightly, and the feedback I'd give their UI /UX would be very explicit: you're letting a significant cohort down badly by some confusing choices.
"Why can't I delete those photos in icloud from here"
"Why does the thing I have to select move around?"
"What are all these ghost windows in safari and email and how do I get rid of them?"
"How do I yell at the clouds when this does not work?"
"How do I tell which bits are decoration and which bits are active?"
"What do you mean I can't take over my dead husbands account or move data from his account to my account"
The last iOS device I owned was an iPad Mini and I basically interact with iOS now only in emulators, besides doing small things on someone's phone when their hands are tied or whatever.
To an outsider, the iPhone UX is heavily dependent on non-discoverable gestures. Some of the gestures are obvious and shared with the design languages in other operating systems, but some aren't. Some of them "make sense" once you learn them, but others feel arbitrary and non-obvious.
If I was ever handed an iPhone and asked to contact someone specific in an emergency, I'd probably end up fumbling around for a dumb amount of time. I'm sure the necessary steps are easy once you know them, the issue is going in blind not knowing them.
Having worked a job getting seniors acquainted with using desktop computers as a teen, I don't imagine the same task would be easier today with iPhones. It feels like the UX assumes you're already fluent in their language.
I empathize. My dad is 98 and can mostly use his iPhone fine, but I just wish I could turn off all the “shortcuts”: He doesn’t get swiping down from different edges of the screen for control panel vs notifications. He doesn’t get hard-pressing on icons for different options (like the flashlight), and so on. Wish I could turn off Siri and Apple Pay, because hitting the “sleep” button just slightly wrong can invoke them and then he’s stumped.
Not just your dad but the vast majority don't use these features either.
The human brain has a natural upper limit in how many times it's beliefs can update per year. If the Total new features shipped by every company in the land, every year exceeds that limit, most of it is a gigantic waste.
Large, cash rich companies beyond a point attract opportunists. And soon they outnumber innovators.
After that happens we get run away Involution (change without purpose).
There is never ending amount of work going on, hyper specialization, elon/trump style self glorification/back patting, and all happening with very little purpose or meaning being produced.
The solution is well known. Orgs which have purpose are tuned into the Limits baked into the system.
Try Settings -> Apple Intelligence & Siri -> Talk and Type to Siri
You can individually turn off 1) voice activation phrases, 2) press and hold side button, and 3) double tap bottom edge to type
For the flashlight, I assume you're talking about on the lock screen. You can customize the lock screen and remove that button entirely. If he has a newer iPhone, flashlight is probably a good use for the "Action Button" on the left, if he doesn't want to use that for toggling ringer/vibrate.
Two things stand out:
1. The setup process should have a heavily simplified mode right at the beginning. It may not be simple for Apple to decide what to exclude from the standard setup process, but there are several obviously time consuming, annoying and unnecessary steps in it. A lot of behaviors with side button double click, camera button swipe, etc., should be off by default.
2. There should be a very short test on finding out the accessibility needs of the user (to the extent possible, because some people may not know how to follow written or spoken instructions).
These are not just for the elderly, but also for many others who have accessibility needs, who lack knowledge about gadgets (or can’t be bothered keeping up with changes in interfaces and disappearing physical buttons), who just need something simple that serves a few actions (like phone calls, video calls, taking photos, viewing received photos and videos, etc.).
I taught my now 83 year old mother to use an Android phone 10+ years ago and now I use Nova Launcher to do my best to emulate the experience she's used to every time there is an OS update. She does pretty well, but recently Google changed the default Phone app and she hates it. It's tricky keeping the experience stable once they have learned it. There are also several "senior" launchers meant to simply the UI but all of them have been a little too restrictive.
My parents were always good with tech, we always had the latest PC at home. As they now enter their 80s their patience / resilience has evaporated to nothing. If it doesn’t work immediately the get stressed and give up (or ask me).
I’m not sure as developers how you get round that.
It's incredibly hard to teach a senior how to angle the phone correctly for face unlock to work (there's also no feedback that you've done it wrong). If you're using the power button, then you have to teach how to not hold it too long, or else, siri shows up. Or maybe you want them to use siri voice command, then you have to teach them to hold it down long enough (and there's no feedback if you're off of the spot you're supposed to swipe up from). Swipe to unlock (password or otherwise) was impossible.
I gave up and returned the phone.
I was desperately wishing some hipster had refurbished an old style rotary or physical push button phone with a Sim card, but not even that exists.
Also, when you age your skin dries out and touch screens are less sensitive to your presses. So not only are these things exceptionally complex to use (eg many abstract concepts) the interface also does not really function well, making it a double whammy. I've had multiple cases watching my aging parents where I say press that or drag this, and it literally does not work, and makes them feel completely inept.
For the sake of our parents, we (as technology builders and buyers) need to be more comfortable saying the latest iPoop Galaxy S might be just not the right choice for a big segment of our society, and we need to make phones with buttons.
I've always thought it's a bit unfortunate how having a smartphone (which almost always also means having an Apple or Google account to download third-party apps) is slowly becoming a near-necessity in today's society, rather than a nice-to-have. Even some places like national parks (in the USA) require you to download an app just to enter.
I’m lucky my dad worked in IT and has kept up on things. He’s retired now and has started teaching classes through AARP. He’s done a few on the iPhone. More recently he did one on ChatGPT. The ChatGPT class was so popular they are moving to a bigger venue for the next one.
The important thing is to keep it focused on what people might actually use and care about. For the ChatGPT class, he wasn’t talking about generating code, he talked about how he used ChatGPT to help him understand results from medical tests, which led to getting bypass surgery 6+ months sooner than if he had waited for the doctors to call him every time.
I’ve found most people want to know the bare minimum to get what they need done. People are busy and they aren’t looking to be technology experts. They just want to know how to do the basics they used to know how to do without feeling lost.
These days, for someone who had issues with the complexity. I’d turn on Assistive Access[0].
There is also the option to refer them to Apple. That’s what my dad would do during his class if someone needed more hands-on help than he could provide when teaching a whole room of people. Apple offers classes at their stores, and people can call support. So he made sure to cover that to shift some of that to the experts.
[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/welc...
My parents are seniors. My dad has never had interest in computers, and only used them to the extent he had to. But my mom has mastered the iphone/ipad stuff.
> Nokia "dumb" phone
I don't think this exists anymore. I got one for my dad because it has an emergency button on the side to call mom. But its really some android front-end with a bunch of modes, and not at all 'easy' if you weren't into this interface back in the day. He has lots of problems with it. Next plan is Apple's 'Assistive Access' on an old iPhone.
https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/welc...
I think there are still Nokia branded "dumb" phones being released. It seems they are now developed by HMD Global, another Finnish company who brought the Nokia mobile phone business. Seems like they still run the same software. They might only be widespread in some parts of the world though. Perhaps not available at all where you are.
Here's one, which is some sort of retro-revival. I've just chosen that because there is a Wikipedia page for it.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3210_(2024)
There are quite a few other examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HMD_Global_products
Yeah, thanks, it was a 2780 which runs KaiOS (and not android).
I am really disputing the premise that this interface is really in any way easier or "dumber" than an iPhone. It is more primitive and maybe people learned it's ways a long time ago and don't want to learn anything new. But it has loads of modes and it's really easy to get stuck in some place where you can't do something basic. It is not at all a "dumbphone", it is a complete smartphone with a dumb interface.
(IMO it was a total mistake on my part, and the only thing good about it is the emergency button.)
If you came up with a rotary phone, a keypad might feel unintuitive or even difficult to learn a new technique- even though it’s faster and easier. For the first 60+ years of life for this cohort the only option was to remember phone numbers or keep records of them. The concept of not having to “know” a phone number anymore, and of a searchable contact list is pretty far out. In the past 20 years there have been plenty of people who saw no problem with what they had. Now we can push virtual buttons on glass to do things that used to take a phone call. Some people really enjoy talking on the phone. Some people need it. The fact that the smartphone is so mutable means it’s a phone new relationship with a device and its makers. Not everyone is ready to commit to that sort of relationship, and I think that is a freedom we should fight to maintain. App-only services aren’t really accessible, and says they only care about a certain kind of customer.
I've been using an iPhone for the first time in 10 years, and it confuses me as to how Apple has somehow managed to make them as opaque and arcane as they are today. Most interactions with the phone are noticeably and negatively affected by bizarre UI decisions. With how much it frustrates me, I can't imagine what it would be like trying to learn it as an elderly person.
> There were too many apps; all they wanted was the phone app, but it doesn’t default to the keypad, which was too much for them to find.
Then why buy an iPhone? There are phones designed for seniors that do just that. You don't need to pay 10-30x more for functionality you don't need and can't understand. Buy a Doro if you just want to call.
> Buy a Doro if you just want to call.
The thing is that even the elderly want to do more than just that. Some want to be on Facebook. Some want to do their banking, especially if their PC is 17 years old and a smartphone makes for a cheaper purchase than a new PC.
A Doro or equivalent is if you literally only call (and maybe text), but even the elderly generally want to (or are functionally forced/compelled to) do more on their phones.
Older/earlier iOS was more simple, intuitive, and usable from my point of view (mid 30s tech oriented male). Now even i find myself getting lost in the endless settings menus and too many different home screen / option screen / extra screens. I don't even use MacOS Launchpad. Just give me a desktop, window manager, and simple notifications.
I dread the day my older mom updates her iOS and calls me for help.
What really has been added in terms of endless menus? Control Center was like 2013, Widgets were like 2014. Today, 90% of things are still controlled via the settings app, except for a few app-specific settings that are controlled via the specific app. The latest iOS has some rougher edges, but I can't see how it's confusing.
Here is a practical example: When I simply want to switch wifi networks at home or work or the coffee shop, or I want to disconnect my car from bluetooth and go with just my AirPods (for a private call with the kids in the car), it takes more than 3-4 clicks to do the "right thing" from that slide down menu.
The UI reaction feels more delayed now. If i'm in the middle of a call and want to go private, or some how got connected to the slow network, and i want to switch to the other one.
I feel like I used to be able to do it with 2 or 3 simple clicks. Now i cant remember if i need to click once, or click and hold, and by then the animation changed and now I tapped again and its doing something i did not expect.
For me personally, I used to be a wiz at navigating this phone on older OS versions - and now i feel like a klutz and it doesn't do the thing I expected anymore.
Not to nitpick, but just because it's the example you gave: Wi-Fi settings in the control center are the same as they have been for years (or easier, as I don't remember the dropdown menu in the earliest versions).
The UX paradigm of a tap for the primary function and a press for alternate functions (for Wi-Fi: On/off, or to select networks) is the same across much of iOS, including Safari and 3rd party apps.
Admittedly it's not the best for discoverability, and the elimination of Haptic Touch has made it slightly more awkward to trigger, but it's not a totally new behavior to learn.
Are you on a significantly older device that might be having some performance issues? Supposedly the new glass UI is heavier and could be slowing down the device enough to cause issues.
Don’t you just need to put the AirPods in your ears for them to connect to the phone (and for the phone to switch from the car automatically?) Unless you’re always wearing them while driving..
It’s still 3 clicks for both operations (slide from corner, 1. Tap the wireless cluster where there’s a group of four small icons, 2. Tap either WiFi or Bluetooth where there’s a list with up/down arrows. 3. Select from that list)
the fact that it allows more screen space for content is appreciated, but the way it was forced on everyone pisses me off.
You can change it in settings -> Apps -> Safari, under the "Tabs" section - "Bottom" is like what it used to be. I immediately switched to that after the update to 26, but once I realized you could swipe up from the address bar to get to the tab view, I switched back so I could get more content space.
I don't like that it's two taps to get to the share button now though.
Someday the cellphone will "come to us". The standard telephone did that and was a marvelous success for a century and a half. Cellphones will likely suck until manufacturers figure out what their customers really want/need.
Time spent learning, training and relearning your cellphone is time forever lost. I chose a different path and refused a cellphone for years. A year ago I got one. I use it for "away" situations only (when I'm out of pocket). Otherwise it sits in my office, just like my old AT&T phone did. If someone needs to get me, there's always e-mail.
I remember a bug/feature report for some Android ROM complaining that switching the 3-button navigation layout to have the back button on the right side, and someone mentioned that they probably wouldn't do that, since button navigation was going to be deprecated in favour of gestures anyway, so no point in putting in the effort.
The comments following that one weren't very kind. And I agree with them. I'd hate for gestures to be the only option, and find the 3-button layout option to be the saving grace saving me from dreading to use my phone. I can't imagine that option disappearing, precisely because Grandmas and the like need that option to use their phones, but the fact that there are people out there who see that option as deprecated, and not even as an accessibility option at best, scares me. That thought is the start of process that eventually ends with some critical functionality being removed and never coming back, breaking a category of device for a large group of people, in a similar way to how the X11 to Wayland migration has broken several accessibility features on Linux.
iPhone is full of unintuitive, undiscoverable “features” that you either stumble upon by accident, or someone shows you, or you just never find them. Even within their own apps they are not consistent, let alone what third parties do. It’s a pretty terrible experience but Android isn’t much better so we just have to tolerate it.
We tried to get my grandma to use an iPad (not my idea), she ended up locking it in a drawer because she got upset with it. I can't blame her.
Ultimately, I don't think it's to her detriment. There would be some ease of mind if she had a cell phone and were comfortable using it (over a home phone) but tech is not for everyone.
The question is what motivates them.
My mom wanted conservative social media. I just had to install it, and off she went.
She barely answers phone calls correctly. She can't pull up her contacts or voicemail. Google maps is something that somebody else needs to do. The refusal to learn is solid and hard.
What to do? Parents.
My mother's brain immediately blanks out the moment I tap something on screen. I can see it. If it's 3 taps she says "oh it can do so much, I'll never remember it"
And that's it. Complete refusal to learn. She uses her phone daily but struggles "to go back," pressing every x and back button until there's nothing, then finally swipe up to reach the iPad/iPhone's Home Screen. She's not that old.
My relationship is not like yours, but...
What's her favorite novel?
Load it as an epub and spend as much time as you wish in visits reading it to each other.
Make her run the ereader app. Expand on that.
If you don't want to spend time in this way, connect her to the grandchildren on facetime. Wow is that a critical function that I was not expecting.
I placed a Facebook Portal at my 90-year-old grandma's and she video calls me with it. Extremely easy to use.
I fear the day Facebook finally kills it and I have to navigate the nightmare that are tablets, their ever-changing UIs, and endless unprompted prompts.
I am a senior and a techie all my life.
I think that if it were simpler, I'd be less inclined to do more with it than it is actually useful for.
In particular.
Selecting anything is a struggle. No exceptions. And selecting more than one screenful is a horror.
Scrolling often clicks on something I didn't want to click. And just try grabbing that invisible scroll bar.
Any auto correct or suggest is ludicrous. I had to kill them all.
Swipe text refuses to type "and". I get Anna's or Ava ( that was a live demo) regularly.
Searching for an image is good for laughs, except for ocr'ed text.
Paste? HOLEY MOLEY. Any "action after a delay" infuriates me, especially when it's hit-or-miss. Give me a paste button!
These are "99%" things, not outlying operations.
Disclaimer: the ipad with keyboard case, trackpad, pencil, ARROW KEYS!!!, and BT mouse is better. Almost a laptop, but right/control click is NOT macos like.
Okay, enough rant. It's basically the clumsiness, compared to the precision of a desktop, that gets me.
Advantage? I can use it on the easy chair in the living room.
No $1800 computer chair. The desktop is harder on my anatomy.
Just to say that some "features" stink regardless of user age, though no doubt harder in seniors. I figure out one of the 140,000 obscure options/tricks via internet search, something that decades of experience helps me do, but especially in recent years, is next to useless for normal people.
And! When switching apps, more often than not, safari loses all my typing in a text area!!!
I lucked out this time.
> safari loses all my typing in a text area!!!
One feature I like about Chrome is somehow it saves it if you go back, so if I've got a long ass comment I've typed out, and then I get distracted, I'll go back to the tab, the text I wrote won't be there, but when I go back, it reappears.
My experience helping my Grandma begs to differ. Not to mention that Facebook and banking is what they're actually trying to do. That's the end-goal they're motivated to achieve. Random account setup bullshit and notifications about shit they don't care about is nothing but a hindrance placed in their path for nebulous reasons they don't understand.
I'm a retired 72. I've been programming in C, C++, Fortran, ASM etc. etc. for over 40 years, and used just about every OS/GUI going.
But, but, but I really cannot get along with mobile phones! Whenever I pick one up I swipe or press the wrong thing. Just answering a call usually goes horribly wrong! And I have literal nightmares about it. So I am pretty much stuck with my VOIP landline, but am worrying things like my bank will stop supporting the tech.
Luckily, I guess I've done my three-score-years-and-ten, so I don't probably need to retrain. But I can completely understand non-techie oldies having problems.
One of the things I’ve noticed with senior people is that fine motor control tends to start to go,
Things like double click a mouse is difficult to perform two very fast clicks, without also moving the mouse,
Same with iPhone, swiping without deviating, pressing TINY buttons, and even what constitutes a tap are difficult for the elderly. Yes there’s zoom but that only makes it 10% better, as I watch them
Touch screens can be difficult for seniors to use due to the reduced moisture in their fingertips, which often leads to multiple attempts for the device to register a touch. I'm not yet a senior, and I'm already experiencing this issue myself.
This is why I believe the future lies in touchless technology, like META Glasses. We should be able to control devices using voice commands or simple hand gestures. The need to touch icons or swipe feels outdated.
I think some of the comments on the post summarize it nicely: if an iPhone is a struggle, maybe that person doesn’t need it at all.
Alternatively, I think OP actually should look into the accessibility mode (“Assistive Access”) because it doesn’t take “hours” to configure. It basically turns the iPhone into a wildly easy dumb phone-like experience.
The iPhone - and macOS too - used to be a paragon of simplicity.
Today the setup experience on a brand-new iPhone or Mac is abysmal. Entering the same username and password multiple times - then sometimes a different username and password - competing notifications, irrelevant feature nags, a popup from some random product manager about their pet thingy. Permission questions from some meddlesome privacy team about the feature you just said you wanted to turn on. Uncertainty about whether you’ll break something irreparably by “skipping” the expected setup path. A choice of several inscrutable interface modes because no one has the balls to commit to a single solution. Just terrible.
I guess this is what happens without a dictator to tell people they’re fired for shipping garbage, and when a company worries about meeting quarterly KPIs rather than doing something great.