Patrick Rhone:
I believe Apple should set a standard for what specific gestures should do and what results a customer can expect from them. While I don’t think these should be enforced through the approval process, I do think it should provide developers with a baseline as to what users should expect a gesture to do and that not doing so means you will be working against said expectations and intentions.
Two thoughts:
- In a way, Apple already created a baseline for how to implement gestures in 3rd-party apps: iOS 7. In the same way that the stock apps in iOS 7 give a baseline for 3rd-party devs as they design their apps, the stock gestures in iOS 7 give a baseline for how 3rd-party devs should consider adding gesture support to their apps.
Right now the main new system-wide gestures are slide left-to-right to go back and slide up from the bottom to bring up Control Center. Which is just 2 more gestures than there used to be (sliding down for Notification Center). So, in short, gestures are being added sparingly. But I bet we’ll see more gesture support in future iOS versions because…
- As I’ve been using and testing iOS 7 on my iPhone, I find myself wanting to do even more gestures that don’t even exist. Such as a 2-finger pinch to close an app and return to the Home screen.
In short, as you get used to gestures which are implemented right, they feel incredibly natural. Just as swiping a list view gives a quick and jitter-free scroll of that list makes you feel as if you’re actually manipulating the pixels underneath your finger, so too does being able to control the interface with gestures.