Your feedback is legit. Unfortunately the app has to initially cater to the early adopters of Ethereum, but making Ethereum and Dapps approachable is the #1 goal of this project. I will be spending a lot of time on further simplifying the UI/UX of the app and the what you see on the website. If anyone wants to help, please let me know.
Status is still unreleased and supports testnet only whereas Cipher is available on both iOS and Android stores and supports Ethereum Mainnet. Cipher is also primarily a Dapp Browser before anything else, and we try to be compatible with as many Web 3 Dapps as possible and implement the latest enhancements to Web 3 API as quickly as possible. (e.g. https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/pull/712 - eth_signTypedData)
I gotta say Status is a very cool project though (and really well-funded too and I own some SNT tokens as well) and I really appreciate all the work they are doing with Whisper protocol.
Now that it is available on both iOS and Android app stores, we will be open-sourcing a lot of code in the coming weeks - this is one of them: http://github.com/petejkim/wallet.ts
Things like this make me appreciate Hangul(한글) more and more. It isn't immediately obvious to me how I can enter basic characters like "国". (I still can't figure it out.)
type "F" for 囗, and "z" for 戈, if you were using cangjie you'd have to add the extra "口" and "一" but i'm guessing this system proposes that 國 is just 囗 + 戈 because that's good enough to identify what you're going for.
edit: the problem seems to be you need to switch to simplified. "F-q-g-e" got me the character.