> The back button is vestigial tech debt. Gestures are the future.

I don't necessarily think that the back button will remain, but I think it SHOULD remain. Gestures are cool, but the back button is like the undo feature: it gives user a visible, clear button to correct a mistake or cancel an action. Gestures are not immediately visible/discoverable, so while for a tech savvy it might not be a problem, for the average consumer (think of your dad, or aunt, or grandpa) it is a usability regression.

Devils advocate: the iPhone has never had a physical back button and it's a wildly successful device with people across all walks of life and levels of technical experience.

I think a lot of Android users feel this way but it is clear that Android is moving away from physical buttons. It's a crutch that Google is finally getting rid of.

On the other hand, most ordinary non-technical folk I know of don't know about about iOS swipe-to-go-back gestures, as iOS has largely moved from buttons to non-discovered swipes, special presses that most people won't know about unless they RTFM which they never do.

How many people know about Shake-to-Undo?

The swipe to go back gesture only applies to navigation controllers in which case there will always be a back button in the top left corner.

And yes they removed the home button and replaced it with a swipe up. But they have an annoying dark black line to indicate this. And you literally can’t use your phone without this one, simple gesture.

Another devil's advocate: undo on iOS is nigh-undiscoverable.

In the early iPhone-versions almost all apps had a back-button on the top-left corner during nested navigation.

I miss it.

All apps that use UINavigationController i.e. nested still have the back button in the top left corner. Nothing has changed.

More a case that apps have moved away from this UI style in favour of other conventions e.g. burger menu.

Sorry I wasn’t trying to say the UI button is bad, I was referring to the physical button.

> The back button is vestigial tech debt. Gestures are the future.

The back button is discoverable. Gestures are not.

My iPhone is full of magic gestures I dont know or care about, but suddenly they get triggered and ruin whatever I worked with.

And I can’t simply disable the infuriating madness either. It’s not an option. Why?!?

Please, pretty please, give me my buttons back. They are simple. They work. They don’t need documentation, tutorials and instructional YouTube videos.

TLDR: Buttons are real hot stuff. You should have buttons.

I think basic usability and user-friendliness on iOS has been going backwards since iOS7. I still think the platform overall's preferable to Android (hobbyist interests aside) mainly because Android started so far behind and, despite improvements, continues to bumble about, but I miss having an OS that I liked using but that I'd also unhesitatingly recommend as a primary device for my tech-confused relatives.

> Please, pretty please, give me my buttons back.

The problem is you have very loud early adopters who are abrasive and forcefully tell everyone that X is the new hotness and you're an old grandpa for wanting old-X and, ha, by they way, I'm pissing on your lawn. So, the rational majority get tired of trying to be heard and give up. Google and Apple, thus, never hear from them.

Apple never got rid of the buttons though.

They just removed the border but you can easily add them back in by going to Accessibility and enabling Button Shapes.

> if you're thinking Purism is going to have better usability than Android or iOS

Luckily, I don't think that. It's not what I thought of Linux on my laptop when I moved to it full-time either. But here I am a year later, loving it.