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The whole gestures thing, besides a few handy ones, requires such a specific set of circumstances (flip the phone over, turn it the right way, make the gesture) to make them workable they are mostly forgotten about.

In general, it's just simpler to press the button.

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This is a constant struggle in design, even (especially) when targeting highly technical audiences. We frequently conflate the familiar with the simple or user-friendly. People will shout "how intuitive!" when a designer repeats an interface that's currently familiar in a context that forgets why the original interface was helpful.

So we get a few nice touch gestures: scroll, zoom, etc. We then expand adding more until learning all your gestures (on that particular os for that particular hardware) is more complex than ASL.

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