Am I the only one who is right-handed, but doesn't hold their iPhone like that? I rest the bottom of the phone on the top side of my pinky finger, which puts it higher in my hand and doesn't require the "hook" to swipe right-to-left in the bottom half of the screen.
Most importantly, if you hold it this way, you can easily do a two-finger gesture with just one hand... gripping the phone like in the GIF just feels unnatural.
I too hold my phone as you do, as I read on bart whilst also holding a bike and a cup of coffee each morning... however - the issue with the way we hod our phone is that my grip tends to need to be really light on the phone and I am prone to drop it easily - because to battle the "OW" areas of the phone, I need to rotate between portrait and landscape often...
You only have a worse grip of the device when you actually use the thumb probably. When I hold a phone this way and do not actively interact with it, my thumb usually presses on the edge of the device, making the grip firm.
The author's grip puts the home button halfway outside his "thumb zone" forcing an awkward claw whenever you need to multitask or return to the springboard. Our grip puts the home button in a much more natural position.
