Title should have been "iPhones are hard to use - For old people", it's bad for them, but it's not the fault of the iPhone itself, I bet if you give them any other piece of technology it will be equally hard for them.
You are right in pointing out that it could be better, I think that the "Tips" app can have a dedicated section for accessibility features and video tutorials on how to use certain features of inbuilt apps.
They could also have an app dedicated to Accessibility features, pull out the existing accessibility settings from Settings app and show them one at a time in a UIPageViewController inside that app.
While it's certainly true that people from Gujarat are business minded, I have observed that they are equally narrow minded, especially when it comes to selecting whom they work with and they almost always select a fellow Gujarati.
I have personal experience with this, I had a Gujarati classmate and we had plans for starting up after our college, he later went on to work for his brother in law (who you already guessed it worked in the hospitality industry), he only told me later when I asked that he was pressured by his family to work with them exclusively. You may think that this is a one off example, but it's not, nearly all people I came across had similar mindset.
Also they contributed largely to the election of Modi as a PM in India, who is also (drumroll) a Gujarati, now this may be good or bad depending on how you look at it.
After living in western countries for well over 50 years (calling themselves American, Canadian and British etc), they ooze pride about their entrepreneurial heritage; but they still vote and contribute money towards electing a man whose past screams bloody murder and that is plain hypocrisy!
Java is still at the top of the TIOBE index. Moreover, the familiar Java update progress dialog will display "100 Trillion Devices Run Java Across Thousands of Galaxies".
Asked a question on r/Kotlin as I was bothered by the fact that Google did not include Java samples with the Paging library documentation on the Android developers webpage in hopes that I would get a reasonable explanation of why Java code was being sidelined and in hopes of understanding if future documentation will omit Java completely.
I was bombarded with negative comments and downvotes which ensued no positive discussions and answers, even my reasonable comments were met with anger and disgust.
I want to now highlight these problems on HackerNews, so that people here are aware of the behaviour of the Kotlin community in general and why they should avoid using their language, I also want to get this message across to Google that it should not enforce any particular language on the Android community.
You have it wrong, only the restaurant dashboard app is built using ReactNative, that was done because they had a website earlier and they wanted to convert that quickly to a tablet app and their developers who were working on that web app had very limited knowledge of iOS/Android, refer to https://eng.uber.com/ubereats-react-native/
If only we could learn from past experiences, many companies have done that in the past because some CXO thought that they could save some money using hybrid frameworks, didn't go well for them and they ended up writing native apps. It's like you are asking people to fire "Master of one" and hire "Masters of none".
I've said it earlier, I am saying it again. "Kotlin enthusiasts or rather PR representatives cannot stomach criticism", this is quite visible on the blog itself and here on HNews.
Consult with your CEO, CTO and/or Director of Engineering before switching to Kotlin, there may be things you might not be aware of, think 20 years ahead and think objectively about the pros/cons before heeding to advice of the enthusiasts, they won't be there to help you when your app behaves unexpectedly, or if your tech debt increases or when you are unable to find people willing to work with your messed up code base, remember there's no reverse Kotlin to Java converter built into IntelliJ.
My advice is to sit it out and wait for Java to evolve, which shouldn't be far away, in the meanwhile enjoy writing your code in Java in which you have your actual work experience(8+ years in my case), which has books and resources dedicated to help you understand the pitfalls, design patterns and every trick out there since 22+ years of its existence. Besides I would recommend developers to not waste their time on a language which piggy backs on JVM, many other languages which did that or are doing it have failed, Kotlin won't be an exception. Instead use Java to learn and write complicated Data Structures and Algorithms and learn technologies like Machine Learning, Neural Networks and AI etc to increase your job prospects.
I feel that the Kotlin community definitely needs a "No Jerk approach". I've recently been to a meet-up which was on the advantages of using Kotlin for Android development, the speaker exhibited many characteristics from this article.
1. Bob interrupts others, and ignores their opinions (When people asked questions, he downplayed them and in some cases declined to answer them)
2. Bob bullies, humiliates, and oppresses individuals. With non-technical people, he wins arguments by bamboozling them with irrelevant technical detail, making them feel dumb (When asked about Coroutines he started explaining irrelevant stuff like locks and guards and compiler level instructions without actually answering the questions)
3. Bob engages in displays of dominance in front of groups (He was quite assertive that his language is better than Java, no one could convince him otherwise)
4. Bob is negative. He trash-talks other technologies, companies, and people behind their backs (He trash talked Java)
5. Bob manipulates and misleads. Sometimes he misleads subtly, by presenting facts that are literally true in a way that is intentionally misleading. (He mislead people into thinking that null checks were just wrong and should be avoided altogether by writing code in Kotlin, he also indicated that writing data objects was not possible in Java)
6. Bob uses physical intimidation. Bob glares at those he doesn't like, and may invade people's personal space. (He said that if his team member was unwilling to learn Kotlin he was probably not worth his salt)
7. Bob gives great talks – about himself.
8. Bob refuses to change. (This was quite evident about him)
To sum up, he was arrogant and loved humiliating the audience, I and a few others left the talk after 30 mins.
Part of the reason for this mess is the greed of manufacturers, they want us to buy new devices every 2 years. Consider mid-range devices from OnePlus, Xiaomi and Samsung, these are intentionally sold at a lower price to users who like budget phones and if you would see the device manufacturer distribution list these devices top the list in number of units sold, this is especially true in developing countries. These phones seldom get updates after the (T + 2) cycle.
I hope that with introduction of project Treble this trend can be reversed, Google is literally forcing these greedy manufacturers to include Treble if they ship devices with Oreo and above, but this doesn't mean we will see updates as frequent as iOS anytime soon, one thing I observed lately is that after announcement of project Treble almost all manufacturers are releasing newer phones with Nougat 7.1, this is funny considering that it's mid November now and Oreo was released way back in August.
We must of-course include Israel in this list, as far as I know it is a serial human rights violator and uses technology for inciting violence and fear.
Kotlin was the worst thing that happened to Android, I mean no disrespect but it seems that JetBrains and its team are really trying very hard to shove Kotlin down people's throat, the sad thing is that despite knowing the fact that it doesn't offer any performance improvements over Java, it is being paraded as the next big thing by overtly excited enthusiasts.
As a user of Android and a developer I want something that enhances the user experience of the apps I use and I create, I want the apps to feel and behave as smooth as iOS, the team at Google should focus on that and not on fragmenting the already fragmented community, right now they are solving a problem that doesn't exist.
I wonder if I would ever see 120/240 FPS apps in the future or if I could offload UI work and animations to a different core because you know your 7 cores are sitting idle and you can do nothing about it.