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Maybe you can make computers easier to use by providing abstracted, context-dependent views of the data instead. Mobile phones rely on that prerty successfully. But they also do not merge these views with the single file manager the system has. Therein lies the true madness of the Windows Explorer in my oppinion.

If you want to have a view for the barely computer literate average user, (ab-)use the myriad predefined folders in the user profiles and create a launcher for dummies that starts a comtact manager for the address book, a photo gallery for the photos and so on. And hide a file manager in this set of tools that has no stupid extras like forced OneDrive integration and Libraries.



Mobile iOS don't abstract complexity; they don't have complexity. Mobile apps are just silo's that can barely communicate with each other. Nobody working on a PC wants that.

You cannot simultaneously give people the power to work on files between multiple apps, organize them how they want, and make it as dumb as iOS. You want to zip up your photos and email them to your boss? Good luck getting your photo gallery to do that.


For sure you can do that on Android, and I guess with the new iOS file extensions as well.


How many smartphone users do even know what a zip file is? I'm fairly certain that at least 70% don't and that is an optimistic estimate. Even more, I think that almost every advanced use case relies on some deeper than average knowledge that the user must have about how some particular technological thing works. This means that at least 70% or 80% of users likely won't even understand what that use case is even about.




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