I was very late to the smartphone game, transitioning somewhat suddenly from a Nokia to an iPhone SE. I found the discoverability to be against everything I was taught as a programmer. It really felt like I was expected to have grown up with the iPhone from the first generation.
Worse yet, the gestures ... I searched in vain for a decent printable sheet of the commonly used gestures, only to make my own set of diagrams for an iPad I tried to get my mother to use, leaving her with a set of laminated sheets: the green one detailing the parts of the iPad, the red sheet showing the different screens and how to get there, and finally a blue one with the gestures.
I think iOS really needs a "Tutorial mode" app bundled with it. This of course requires that someone resist the temptation to interject with all of the bundled apps that Apple wants you to know about but aren't needed to do the basics. No Focus, no Stocks, no Apple TV ... just show me how to get around in some Settings, practice locking and unlocking a screen, drills for all of the basic gestures.
It's worse than that. If you started with iPhone from the first generation, you'd have remembered how to use the home button (which also had a lot of functionality crammed into it, with double- and even triple-clicks). Which eventually got removed, so anyone who got used to that - like, say, my parents - had to re-learn once they upgraded.
Worse yet, the gestures ... I searched in vain for a decent printable sheet of the commonly used gestures, only to make my own set of diagrams for an iPad I tried to get my mother to use, leaving her with a set of laminated sheets: the green one detailing the parts of the iPad, the red sheet showing the different screens and how to get there, and finally a blue one with the gestures.
I think iOS really needs a "Tutorial mode" app bundled with it. This of course requires that someone resist the temptation to interject with all of the bundled apps that Apple wants you to know about but aren't needed to do the basics. No Focus, no Stocks, no Apple TV ... just show me how to get around in some Settings, practice locking and unlocking a screen, drills for all of the basic gestures.