> Greentext

As a mobile developer, tiny unhittable buttons drive me batshit. I used to get handed app design documents all the time that had these little buttons, along with image files for these buttons that were just large enough (width and height) for them. I would always do a trivial amount of extra work to make the actual tappable regions larger than the images to improve their usability, but when I mentioned this to the designers they would go apeshit and demand that I restore the original tiny tappable regions, usually with the bullshit rationale of that being what end-users expected and they didn't want to verify that what I'd done to my best judgement was OK. Management would go along with the designers, on the grounds that enlarging the tappable regions required more time and effort - even though I'd already done it and undoing it would require even more time and effort.

It eventually occurred to me to just do it without telling anyone and I had no further problems.

A fun little fact about iOS: the operating system includes a private method (which is something developers supposedly can't use without getting their app rejected) named _warpPoint. This hack was put in when they started supporting landscape, because the top toolbar and its tiny buttons became even tinier and virtually unusable in that mode. _warpPoint intercepts touches near the toolbar and changes the coordinates to the middle of the nearest button - basically doing the same thing I was doing by enlarging the tappable regions, just doing it at the global level. The irony is that they still don't really work very well, despite the very existence of this method proving that Apple knows it's a general problem.

So apple has slowly added some of these swipe features and a lot of iPhone users were basically trained how to use them over time.

I'd honestly say swipe is a bit of a misnomer for them, it's more like eases. There's a specific way you to swipe for different things, it's nuanced. When I switched to iPhone for a year, I had to ask my gf a few questions to get the hang of it, but once you do it's super intuitive. On almost every app a swipe from the left is back and a swipe from the right is forward. And there was a different in finger action for a back swipe and a side menu. Once you get the hang of it it genuinely feels like second nature, I almost never missed my android buttons. When I switched back I tried androids swipe features and was immediately disappointed. Android's backswipe is really oversensitive, meaning that it's way too easy to swipe back when I'm not trying to. Also they're multitasking up swipe is less sensitive meaning it's harder to get to multitasking than on iphone. And of course the final nail in the coffin there is no forward swipe from the right, a swipe from the right is also just back on Android which was a real mind fuck. Currently I just use the Android old buttons, or I use the Android gestures where you have a home and back button and then you swipe for multitasking stuff. I can say that the multitasking swipe stuff seems to be better than the last time I tried it.

I would say the biggest difference is when you swipe on the iPhone it's like turning a page, a smoothe slide. Where as android it's just a flick. So when I accidentally swipe the screen, I'm going back on Android, but on iPhone I have to definitely be doing an intentional slide, and for me that slide was just short enough to not be annoying.