As internet use spreads and the older population grows, companies have turned their attention to seniors, adding elder modes to shopping, chat, ride-hailing and news apps that cover daily life. But can older users actually handle smartphones and their apps? Reporters investigated – and found many elder-friendly redesigns fall short and adoption remains low.
Where the redesigns fail
Ads still get in. MIIT’s accessibility design guidelines ban ads and plug-ins, random ads and temporary pop-ups in elder-mode interfaces and standalone elder versions, yet some redesigned apps still push ads and misleading buttons behind simplified layouts.
Font changes stop at the front page. Some apps enlarge fonts on the home screen, but second-level pages revert to the normal layout and type size, so the reading difficulty is not fundamentally solved.
Switching is harder, not easier. Many apps hide the elder-mode entry inside Settings instead of showing it on the home page, so first-time activation takes some hunting. A teacher who teaches seniors smartphone use at a university for the elderly in Hubei said students often cannot find the switch at all.
Why progress is slow
The 48th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China, published by CNNIC, put the netizen base at 1.011 billion by June 2021, with users aged 50 and above accounting for 28%. Seniors are a market the industry cannot ignore.
The core reason is commercial: elder redesigns rarely pay off. The work consumes development and operating resources, user growth is low, and existing users may even churn. Ads are the main revenue source for app developers, and removing them from elder versions cuts income directly.
Most apps are designed for younger users in the first place, so retrofitting elder modes onto that foundation is hard. Touchscreens also give less tactile feedback than physical keys, and smartphones carry built-in complexity that raises the operating difficulty for seniors.
Many seniors still use basic button phones with calling and messaging only. Some tried smartphones and elder-mode apps but found touchscreens and complex operations overwhelming – some did not even know how to unlock the phone.
Researchers also point to insufficient user research: companies guess at what seniors need instead of studying their habits, common functions and pain points, so redesigns stay formalistic. Public awareness of the issue is still limited, and caring for this group remains more slogan than practice.
Even well-designed elder modes face adoption hurdles: seniors’ internet penetration keeps rising but usage skill lags behind. Fraud worries add another barrier – frequent telecom and online scams have made many seniors wary of going online at all. Closing the digital divide for seniors will take joint effort from across society.
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