Please detail which phone you use and which apps were unintuitive.
I hear complaints like this a lot, then try to replicate them on hardware I have to hand, and shockingly I am unable to do so! It's almost as if these stories are massively embellished versions of real interactions.
For example. Have you actually seen how complex the home button on an iPhone is?
That's part of the problem. There is diversity in the Android ecosystem. Android hardware and software differ among models and versions. There isn't necessarily a common way of doing things.
Some might argue that the iOS' "one-way-to-do-things" design guidelines are constraining and limit innovation, but in practice they are very well thought out.
Just playing devils advocate here... how complex is the home button? Clicking it does one thing: takes you to the first page of the home screen. If you're already there, it takes you to Spotlight.
And if you were in a folder before launching your app, it takes you back to the open folder. I never understood that part and it throws me off every time even with 1+ year of experience with it...
You can just hit the home button again. I always think of open folders as just another state of the home screen, just like any of the apps maintains a state.
As far as I can tell, they made double click launch the multitasker, and the mystery swipe left and right in it (without even any indicators this is possible), just to hide that stuff from novice users.
I'm not sure if you meant "hide" it so that they'd never use it or hide it so they wouldn't see it before they were ready. I think the intention on Apple's part was the latter.
It isn't that hard to accidentally double-click the home button and get to the other running Apps. This is a natural effect that good UI depends on. Rather than filling the screen with a control for every possible option, you get this "hidden" functionality that users discover by mistake.
Once there, swiping left and right is an obvious thing to do, but even if you don't think about it, you again can do it by mistake.
I found the voice command functionality by mistake when I held the home button down while thinking about what I wanted to do next (And have occasionally accidentally invoked it in this way since.)
And you click and hold to get Voice command. I've gotten that a couple times by mistake. So, I guess I've experienced the usability downside of this "complexity".
Still, one of the things I experienced in best buy was that the buttons at the bottom of the screen were pretty confusing.
The home button is really intuitive in comparison.
I hear complaints like this a lot, then try to replicate them on hardware I have to hand, and shockingly I am unable to do so! It's almost as if these stories are massively embellished versions of real interactions.
For example. Have you actually seen how complex the home button on an iPhone is?