> I don't know how iPhone users live without the back button (or more accurately now, the back gesture).

I swipe right all the time from the left edge of the screen, in most apps that goes back.

In the rare case it doesn’t, you can swipe down. But the animations help a lot, it is pretty idiomatic after a while. Something came in from the left? It goes out there as well. I converted like 2 years ago and it didn’t take a lot to get used to it.

Am I misunderstanding something, I think that gesture exists on iOS?

Swiping from the left screen edge to the right navigates back in any properly designed app.

Alternatively sheets are usually dismissed by swiping down.

Do you have particular apps or contexts in mind where this did not work?

On iOS it's app dependant, it might work or not. On Android, swiping left guarantees a going back event sent from the OS, it'll always 100% work.

90% of apps (that don’t override the default UINavigationController behavior or use some custom cross-platform framework) support the back swipe gesture.

Except if the gesture recognition is bad, which it has always been on the phones I’ve used it with. But maybe it improved recently.

That's not so bad, swiping right works well.

The _real_ pain is how bad ios autocompletion is, compared to Android's

Thankfully this is getting fixed in iOS 17. Users trying the beta are saying it's a dramatic improvement.

It is. I have the beta on my daily driver iPad and I prefer texting on it.

I had no idea ! This is great news, it’s a pain I learned to live with

Luckily gboard autocomplete gets worse with every single update of the keyboard app so just wait a few more months and it will be comparable.

... there is a back swipe gesture. And it works much more consistently than Android's "Where the heck is this gonna take me" back button. Every app you can swipe back, and it's a much nicer animation than Android.

The back button is a cudgel: a sign of a poorly designed UX. Apps aren't websites, the concept of "back" is not universal, so a universal button doesn't make sense. It only exists on Android because it started off as a non-touch OS.

> It only exists on Android because it started off as a non-touch OS.

That doesn’t really make sense, it has very little to do with the actual interaction. It seems Android apps were originally envisaged as a collection of islands rather than one solid block. In that context the back button does make sense, you’d be jumping from “activity” to “activity” rather than app to app, and the back button would provide a logical thread through all of that.

But it didn’t work out that way at all, apps became just as centralised as iOS ones and the back button’s original functionality became kind of vestigial.

> there is a back swipe gesture

> Every app you can swipe back

> the concept of "back" is not universal, so a universal button doesn't make sense.

> It only exists on Android because it started off as a non-touch OS.

... so android has the exact same gesture and it's a bad thing only there because it started as a non touch OS, iOS has it but it's totally not the same concept at all and perfect.

Hmmm.

The back swipe on iOS is per-app, not a global function. I should have clarified. It is different, and a better implementation.

You misread. Parent said the back "button" is a cudgel, not the gesture. Though unfortunately someone at Google decided to give the gesture the same behaviour as the button, so yeah, it is a bit silly on Android.

Android had the back button since the beginnings. They added an option a few years back to hide the usual three buttons at the bottom of the screen and to enable an ios-like navigation with a swipe up for home, etc. That made a swipe from the left or right edge recognized by the OS trigger a back button. That is quite different from the app itself recognizing an in-process swipe left, showing the underlying screen you would be brought to. Though some android apps do support this as well.

It works better because iOS had this for many years and apps implement it natively. Android's implementation is basically a workaround. The back gesture is recognized by the system and forwarded as back button event to the app. On iOS the gesture is handled by the app, which can provide proper animation, giving users the ability to “preview” what’s behind (and pull back to the left to stop going back). Android is trying to copy that right now (as they should because it works really well), but it will take many years for apps to adopt it.

> it will take many years for apps to adopt it

This is the flaw with the Apple back gesture, sadly, as although it's generally really easy to support this in native app — essentially it comes for free and you just don't break it — plenty of developers just don't care about invisible quality of life things.

The gesture is properly called 'Interactive Pop'.

How is it different to android developers breaking shit? It’s not hard to break the “atomic” back gesture either, hell, websites are getting really good at breaking my back button!

Shitty apps/developers are everywhere, we should not limit ourselves over them.

I'm not sure I understand you. If an Android developer breaks the back gesture, surely they also break the back button, so they've completely broken the back function? An iOS app can have fully functional back buttons, but break the back gesture only.

It's not a perfect rule but most fully native (as in written with Obj-C or Swift) tend to leave this functionality intact. For React Native and other alternative UI stacks all bets are off.

Proton Mail's app broke the gesture and it annoys me at least 5 times per week.

Honestly I don't know how I live without the back button, either. The back button on Android 5+ stopped being "back", it's now some weird system I don't quite understand where it tracks, I think, "activities" and goes back from those, but the end result is the modern android back button is sometimes back, and sometimes close your app, which is really frustrating.

That's because what the back button on Android does is partially determined by the developers of the apps you use. If an app is written using Android Framework there's some things that will automatically add an entry to the back-stack, but many actions won't unless the developer explicitly adds them. So naturally, the back button ends up as something of a "I'm feeling lucky" button.

I don't understand how anyone is satisfied with ANY "gesture" based navigation, I still have the classic android 3 button setup from the good old days. I have a dedicated back button that is ONLY a back button, so no issue with it changing the "activity" you are working in like the modern android back gesture, a dedicated home button that always goes home, and a dedicated "bring up all alive activities" button that functions exactly like alt-tab does.

Why did any of this ever need to change? Why did dedicated buttons with defined roles and useful, predictable functionality that are always available, always work, are never misinterpreted as a drag instead of a "gesture", that you don't have to know ahead of time how to interact with the OS to discover how to interact with the OS.

Why the fuck are phone OS's navigated completely by a scheme that is impossible to discover without someone teaching you?

Last time I installed LineageOS I tried the gesture navigation and it did provide a hands-on tutorial as part of enabling it.

- Swipe up (from anywhere) to access the app tray

- Swipe up and hold to see the app history / currently in-memory apps

- Swipe from the side of the screen to go back (can be configured to just be the bottom half of the screen and a "thinner" sensitivity area - which I needed because the defaults were stupid and made 'back' such a frequent accidental action).

They're the only gestures I've bothered to learn, and I get by. Still not sure it's better or worse than have the 10 pixel space at the bottom for the navigation buttons.

Gestures that can start from nearly the entire left edge are more natural-feeling to me than aiming for a fixed button.