iPhones are crazy now, there are so many types of interactions, press, hard press, double press, swipes in different directions. Press a program too hard and suddently icons start wobbling, the interface seems very undiscoverable to me.
My parents don't want any of these features, and to be honest I don't really want them either.
Having searched for and not found a reasonable cheat sheet, I made my own cheat sheet of all of the "gestures," laminated it, set it down for my mother. She still couldn't get it.
I think the gestures are just not a great way to go for the elderly, for a few reasons. First, gestures are not explicit, you have to discover them, be told about them, see them used by someone else. Second (and this one deserves subclassing) is motor control. Finger-tapping speed, for one, declines notably with age. Fine motor control, for the gestures, can also be impaired with age. Third, there's a lack of feedback when using gestures: no haptics, no titles to relay during phone calls, no "you just closed this program by swiping up!"
I'm on my 1st iphone after decades with Android and it's crazy how many secret gestures or taps there are with nothing telling you about them until you accidentally trigger them or look up how to do something.
Maybe my Samsungs had a lot of gestures I wasn't aware of but I feel like most things on the phone were very intuitive. Example, to end an incoming call and not just mute the ringtone you need to hit the power button. I didn't know about this for weeks and would drive around annoyed at a phone call ringing (but muted) in my car because it would stop my music playing.
On Android the buttons are right on the screen, I forget exactly but it's something like swipe left to mute, right to decline, etc.
I had to actually google "how to decline phone call on iphone" awhile back.. push the power button. If Android did that I'm pretty sure there'd be an arrow saying "PUSH THIS TO DECLINE."
And people in this post are talking about doing 3 finger taps. I didn't even know that was a thing..
I'll never forget the first time I accidentally turned on my flashlight at a dark movie theater and panicked because I hadn't learned that you can turn it on/off in the pull down bar yet. I think I had it on some button shortcut that if I hit a few times it'd turn on, and I didn't know what button I'd hit.
My parents don't want any of these features, and to be honest I don't really want them either.