You're kidding right? It's been a feature of iOS for what feels like forever, and it's literally the one thing I miss most when switching to Android. I have witnessed first hand, very un-tech savvy iOS users using the feature, as well as people confused (my daughters) why the same action on Android doesn't product the same result.

I thought this was one of Apple's "protected" features that everyone used/loved - guess not!

I agree it’s useful on web pages but there has got to be an option to disable that in app conversations.

Just noticed something - in safari it requires you to tap it twice, thus precenting accidential clicks, while in skype it sends you straight to the top with a first click.

I like it and use it all the time and many people I know also use it a lot. It is not as good for text that is most relevant on the bottom (e.g. text messages) but really useful for webpages, etc.. Some apps implement some logic to scroll back up when you tap it again (Apollo comes to mind).

The only disadvantage is that many users do not know about this feature (because there is no indication that the status bar tab is supposed to do something like that) which is the reason many use think an app is buggy after they have tabbed on it accidentally.

> The only disadvantage is that many users do not know about this feature (because there is no indication that the status bar tab is supposed to do something like that) which is the reason many use think an app is buggy after they have tabbed on it accidentally.

Precisely why this behavior should be considered unfriendly. It's not intuitive and is prone to accidents by the vast majority of the target market.

Even just making it a double-tap would make it drastically better, and double-taps are closer to convention as well. Double-click the left or right arrows in an overloaded tab bar in Firefox on desktop, for instance, for it to scroll a full row over.

Agree with this. It's a great feature other than in messaging apps. In those, I wish there was an equally useful feature to get back to the bottom.

I've noticed that most people find the feature accidentally, but then once they realize it's an option, use it extensively.

> I wish there was an equally useful feature to get back to the bottom.

WhatsApp shows a small button in the lower-right corner once you scroll up a few messages for this purpose. iMessage scrolls back to the bottom as soon as you focus the input field. I don't know about the others.

But yeah, it highly depends on how the developers decide to implement it, which is suboptimal :(

If you think this is weird, what about the "shake to undo" thing? :-)

Seriously, try to e.g. delete an email from the system's mail app, then vigorously shake your phone in anger. A popup asking you to "Undo delete" should appear on the screen (Many applications hook into this seemingly standard undo mechanism on iOS).

Some things in iOS are objectively weird and unintuitive but I miss them so much whenever I use an Android phone.

> the "shake to undo" thing? :-)

"You appear to be shaking your phone in frustration. Would you like to un-delete that?" :)

I like this behavior for web pages. Not sure it's appropriate for chat history... so I think you are right that Skype probably shouldn't work that way.