I am not talking about myself personally. Users like my mom, who have trouble navigating AirBnb, are going to have trouble remembering 8 different swipe actions, even if they go through a tutorial. A designer needs to anticipate users skipping tutorials or just forgetting them. A tutorial is not an alternative to usable design.
You’re now conflating usability with discoverability which are very different things.
Many very usable actions are left to intuition and discovered as such or by on-boarding.
Pinch to zoom is a classic example.
The swipe to dismiss gesture is very usable once it’s discovered. iOS does a very good job at training people that actions from the edge of their device do things. It’s fundamental to the design of the OS and has been so since day one.
I also feel like comparing navigating an app with its own unique idiosyncrasies that you do so sporadically to navigating an OS daily are very different orders of magnitude on developing muscle memory.
Anyway I think you’re arguing very different aspect of UX design
So there is an onboarding process that is skippable, and it would appear that either most people either do, or at least click-through. While the onboarding doesn’t show every gesture and shortcut, it does show how to “figure out how to use this device”.
And herein lies the problem, and it’s not exclusive to iOS. No matter how much hand holding there is, if the user doesn’t engage, then it’s a lost cause. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
Discoverability is as much about trying something that you know works elsewhere as it is showing direct affordances.
> It’s fundamental to the design of the OS and has been so since day one.
Swipes, and especially swipes from behind the edge were definitely not "fundamental" in the first version of iOS. I don't even recall them being fundamental in the first iPad.
