[cykho]

I have no idea why they don't just move the control buttons to the bottom of the screen. The real estate is great - they just need to break the paradigm of sticking the most importance tap targets at the unreachable top of the screen.

[gecko]

You know what phone did that? Windows Phone. And it was amazing. And no one could figure out where the menus had gone to, because everyone was so used to iPhone and Android. So then all the developers, including even Microsoft, got enamored with the hamburger menu as the new action bar, and that was the end of that experiment.

I really agree with you, to be very clear; this is one of many things where I think that Windows Phone had the benefit of hindsight and actually delivered a superior experience to the competition. But Windows Phone is repeatedly finding that there's too much inertia behind iPhone and Android's existing UI metaphors, so Microsoft has steadily been turning Windows Phone into more of an Android-with-fewer-apps than a real alternative.

If Microsoft, with a need to distinguish itself, and a fresh user base, could not move the control buttons to the bottom, I do not have high hopes for Apple at this point.