I really wish this had been built in to iOS in the same way.
The activity stack works across applications, which means a back gesture always brings you back to the screen before it, even when several applications work together on a task.
I wasn't even aware it was supposed to be a button
But it will not appear if the app opens the webpage as its own View (instead of opening Safari). In that case, there is no button and the user has to hunt for how to go back. And the user has no way of knowing whether an app will open Safari or will open the webpage itself.
iOS requires users to build muscle memory in learning how to use each app. Android requires users to maintain a back stack in their head to remember what came before. Switching between the two is very jarring.
If it's a card webview, just swipe it down from the top edge.
> Switching between the two is very jarring.
I think that's the crux of the problem. Someone who's used to one style and has built muscle memory and some kind of hierarchy and ontology of the interaction with the system will have trouble with a different paradigm. That doesn't necessarily mean there's something wrong with either - they're just different, and some people will prefer one over the other.
Switching between GNOME and KDE, or vice-versa, has a similar effect.
Would be consistent.
> It appears every time [long list of qualifications]
Is inconsistent.
OTOH if the current app was opened manually by the user, it won't be there.
It just feels so “out of space” and tacked on.
An example of an intent is "can anyone open this PDF file" or "the user wants to pick a file, can any app do that and let me know what they picked?"-- those file pickers could also be from your network browser app, or Dropbox, etc.
And since activities are serializable (well, technically the intents that led to those activities being started), Android can do this without requiring the apps deep in the app stack to be running. It can freeze those apps to reserve resources and restart them at the specific activity when the user returns, if necessary.
iOS does have limited inter-app linking (it's the tiny little back arrow and the previous app name that you'll sometimes see at the very top of the screen), but since back gestures aren't universal, the only reliable way to activate that feature is to tap it, since the app may not even understand back gestures, let alone do the extra work of relinquishing control when their own local back stack is empty.
Sometimes it’s on the top left, sometime bottom left, sometimes bottom right, and im sure some apps even place it somewhere else.
On Android there is a dedicated OS back button that is always in reach, when using the phone with one hand.
This is the far superior way of doing this.
With apps which follow the convention, I don't miss a hardware back button (or, as is more common in Android these days, a software back button in an OS-provided bar at the bottom of the screen). Swiping from the left edge of the screen feels pretty good. But Android's approach is probably better at providing a decent UX with terrible apps.
Then I don't really see what differentiates iOS and Android at all, other than that iOS still usually has the button in the top left.
Several brands have removed button navigation by default. I think you can still enable it in the settings, but the button bar at the bottom of the screen seems to be the exception these days.
Safari is bottom left.
What is surprising to me is that using a Back button that's at the top of the phone would be acceptable to you. That's definitely the hardest part of the UI to reach one handed, and yet going back in an app is definitely something you should be able to do quickly without having to stretch your fingers to reach it. Perhaps you prefer smaller phones, but those are becoming pretty rare these days.
> The convention is that it's in the top left and that the "swipe rightward from the left edge of the screen" gesture also goes back
So what's fun about that is from an iOS developer perspective, this is not always free, and the back gesture itself only works within your own app unless you do additional work. This is probably why you mention
> But Android's approach is probably better at providing a decent UX with terrible apps.
As I could imagine the app's back navigation is a factor you must consider when the OS doesn't handle it. It's not a dimension that matters on Android- as all apps are going to play nice within the back gesture system automatically unless they block it intentionally, even if the app isn't particularly good. I cannot recall any app I've come across that actually blocks the back gesture (not even games, remote desktop, Steam Link).
I don't know what you mean by "the back gesture itself only works within your app". I assume there are cases in Android where one app took you to another app and you can do the back gesture to go back to the app you came from? Anyway, the iOS model is that the back gesture just navigates within the app, and there are other features for navigating between apps. I won't make an argument about which is better, but I don't think iOS's model is obviously much worse.
This is why iOS added the back gesture, over ten years ago now, when phones started getting taller.
> from an iOS developer perspective, this is not always free
As an iOS developer since years before that gesture was added, I must disagree. The gesture comes for free unless you break it. Apps without back gestures smell like bad orgs.
If you build some custom navigation you won't magically get it, because it's interactive and you need to make your navigation interact, but people are generally discouraged from building custom navigation. If you do go down that route it involves an astonishing amount of code to reproduce interactive pop.
> and the back gesture itself only works within your own app unless you do additional work
I'm afraid I also have no idea what you're trying to say here.
I guess Discord is an example of an app where swiping from the left opens a hidden menu, but that "opening the hidden menu" thing can be thought of navigating "back" from the channel view to the server/channel list view. In any case, it's not an example of a situation where there is a "navigate back" option on the screen but swiping from the left edge doesn't trigger it.
So, like in the past, I will dismiss these swipe gestures after a while and revert to hunting for the back button in the end.
Also, lots of apps have their “Done” or “Close” buttons on top, which are equivalent to “back”.
Apple should really enforce some consistency here.
Are they though? The former are for a modal, back is for a stack.
Apple likes to have a strong model of where things came from. Animations, verbs and gestures follow from that. In my experience of Android, things just appear/disappear with often arbitrary animations, which add nothing, it's like a cargo cult says an animation must go here but it doesn't matter which one. I prefer iOS's consistency here.
- Swipe LTR (on a LTR locale) does not go back
- The back button's size is exactly as big as it looks, instead of extending quite a bit below it's visible box in the navigation bar
Do you mean on iOS? Because on Android, both swipe from edge rightward and swipe from edge leftward both mean back when using the default gesture navigation settings, regardless of the RTL/LTR direction of the content or device locale. This is a side effect of the fact that Android does not have a notion of forward. I'm not convinced they should have done this, but eh.
iOS UINavigationController and the SwiftUI equivalent support it by default and it takes effort (or a crappy hybrid implementation) to stop it from working.
A lot of apps deviate constantly from the "blessed" patterns. The result is that as a user new to an app (or update), you have to click and gesture around to see what happens, and probably miss a lot of UI features because of that.
Most of the alternatives would be worse for either usability or maintenance, or both:
- don't track sleep in the Health app
- track sleep, don't provide alarms/notifications for the sleep/wake along with the schedule in the health app
- put almost all the UI for Health's sleep/wake in the Clock app instead
- provide almost identical UI in both the clock and health apps
I'm sure there are better implementations of the current UI tho'. E.G still link to the 2nd app, but have it _after_ the normal alarm clock in the vertical/reading order, and use better wording to explain the function and behaviour.
I wonder if they're trying to avoid having Clock ask for permission to read the HealthKit data, which presumably they would have to do in most other possible implementations.
The < Back_to_previous_app is too small. It was clearly shoved into the OS long after the overall design was set. I feel it's correct that it doesn't take over the regular swipe-right-to-go-back navigation. Doing this better would have forced a significant redesign of the fundamental UI paradigms, IMO. That could have been very interesting.
I have not tried Android's event history thing. Whenever anyone hands me an Android to show me something, as soon as I hold it I manage to activate some "home" or "back" or "change app" feature that takes me away from the thing the other person was trying to show me. I've no idea what control I'm accidentally tapping, just by holding the device, but it's pretty consistent. So I'm not yet convinced of Android's improvements over iOS.
UI has no 'correct' approach, the only thing that matters is if people can happily use it.
Then I suppose it's the fault of the App Store reviewers. The point is that Android handles the activity stack on the OS level and has much stronger control over what a back button does.
It had 4 hardware buttons: back, menu, home and search. They lost menu and search along the way. Sure, they weren't always needed, but they were common enough functions that could warrant dedicated buttons. Now, everything is different and you never know how to popup a menu (hamburger menu? where? or is it a swipe?), even though it is always the same functionally.
> Now, everything is different and you never know how to popup a menu (hamburger menu? where? or is it a swipe?), even though it is always the same functionally.
Well if it's a hamburger menu than you can see it, and drag out sidebars can be checked with a drag in the middle of the screen (but not from the left edge lest you activate the back gesture), so it's pretty quick to figure out.
However I will nominate the Soundcloud app as the single worst app design I have seen when it comes to menuing. It is absolutely atrocious, and actually uses none of the above options. I'll leave it as an exercise to go try it out if anyone wants to laugh at bad app design (sorry if anyone who worked on it is reading this).
On Android, you have 5 tabs at the bottom: Home, Feed, Search, Library and Upgrade. Having Upgrade in the same place that nearly all other apps have a Profile/Settings tab constantly trips me up. I'm actually a Next Pro subscriber too, so it feels a bit shitty to devote so much of the experience to extracting more money from me.
And... well let's look at some user tasks:
Task 1: Go to the app's settings
Settings is only found on one of these tabs! Which one would you guess?
That's right! It's Library!
Task 2: View your SoundCloud notifications
Notifications is also only found on one of these tabs. Which one? That's right! It's Home.
Task 3: Start casting
Casting, perplexingly, is offered on the Home, Search, and Library tabs, but in different locations.
--
This is exacerbated because each tab remembers your drill down independently, because after you leave a tab on a particular drill down, and you return attempting to access one of the top options, they won't be there any more.
That upper right corner is the second most likely place to have a profile/settings menu, and they technically do have it there, but it's split up bizarrely and completely inconsistent throughout the app :*-(
I constantly have to retrain my brain to deal with these things, and it's really only a challenge in this app.
There are some other smaller things that annoy me, like how the "Showing last 7 days" time range selector in Insights (for artists) opens a full screen picker, but if you use the Back button in the upper left or you use the back gesture, it skips back to the previous page instead of closing the full page selector.
I'm sure there are more but honestly just these are enough to irritate me whenever I use it.
All this said, there are a lot of cool parts of the app-- the scrubbable waveform in the playback drawer is really slick, and though tapping on the large background to pause isn't the most discoverable, it's also very cool that they managed to have zero buttons on this view and for it still to be quite capable. It's also really responsive and not very error prone to open and close the drawer by gesture, even though swipe left/right are track skip gestures as well.
And Soundcloud's "Playback History" is something I wish literally any other audio/video app would add. But I just lost how to access it while I was navigating around. It's in there somewhere.
It's a shame it's not available though. It'd be useful for navigating tab history in firefox. (currently, hold down back button and select from menu)
Can you achieve this in Android Firefox when you don't have the UI back button enabled (because gestures are the default)?
Try starting the gesture and holding it down before completing it.
I'm also not so sure about the ergonomics of thst approach, I'm sure left-handed people would get annoyed that either their back gesture is now harder to pull off, or their forward gesture is pointing backwards (and doesn't work on right-handed phones).
I think Apple hasn't done this because it's not practically possible.
For example, if it's possible to change the content of a view (which it obviously should be), then it's possible to remove all content and and replace it with all new content. If triggered by some user action, this effectively is "going to a new screen". But the OS-level gesture won't work since the developer in question didn't use your proposed OS API call "createNewView", but instead just replaced the content of the current view.
However, Apple could make use of this OS API mandatory in order to pass review. Although I still think there's some subjectivity around what is "a new view" (that I can "go back" from) versus "an existing view with stuff changed" (that I can't "go back" from).
* There is a dedicated control for going back to a previous view / state, that control is always positioned by the OS in a predefined location, and cannot be removed or disabled.
* The OS automatically does the right thing, that is, navigates to the previous view, unless the developer has jumped through hoops to override this behavior (e.g. to warn about unsaved data).
Android does this, and it's very helpful and natural.
On Android back gestures usually aren't 1:1 because they behave like a back button. Swipe and let go, then the back action is executed.
Firefox on desktop Linux has better gestures than Android, namely swiping to the right goes back and swiping to the left goes forward. Firefox on Android doesn't, because the OS treats swiping in either direction as a back-button action.
iOS has many faults, but not being able to go back is not one of them.
If offers:
* Contacts
* Applications
* Vertically
* Horizontally
* Other items below.
* But only after you’ve figured out, that it needs pulled up.
* It is always placed in a different locations of an app and the icon has nothing to do with “Share” or “Copy/Paste”.
Could they also introduce some kind of page action menu? Maybe.
For me, this is one of the worst things about Android. There is zero consistency in what the 'back' button does. Even as a developer this is something I struggle with, what should the back button do in a specific case? Does it go back to the previous screen or does it go back one level in a drill-down navigation (which can sometimes, but not necessarily always, be the same thing).
Sometimes it's up one level in the navigation structure, sometimes it's go to the previous screen. Sometimes it's close a dialog. Sometimes it's even close the application. Depending on the context it could any of these, and it can be unclear which one if multiple could apply. The only way to find out is press the back button and see what happens.
I hate ambiguous user interface elements. When I click on something I'd like to know what action it will trigger.
Seems consistent to me?
Apps get to decide what metaphor makes sense for an "action" (maybe it's a page, a screen, a dialog, etc). But users can be confident that the "back" button always takes them "backwards", even if the metaphor various apps use may differ.
Users can feel reasonably safe that the "back" button will take them "back" one 'step' or one 'action' worth, even if the app is using panels instead of pages, or modal dialogs instead of inline alerts
Thoughtfully designed apps tend to set up clear expectations and deliver on them. Thoughtless or malicious apps can be confusing or intentionally mislead.
Also this has always bothered me before switching whenever I used a friend's iPhone for a moment.
The trouble alread begins when some link in Safari opens a 3rd party app.
Sounds weird, but Apple could really learn a lot about UX from Google regarding this "go back" interaction.
It really was a joy how reliable it works even for inception-level nested app interactions.
On iPhone, half of app switches (at least) require me to swipe up or go to the home screen.
And positioning the unreliable sometimes-available back button at the top left has made me drop my phone at least once.
For all that's to like about iOS, "navigation patterns" are not one of them for me.
The swipe area is very small on the vertical axis and there's also some risk of hitting in-app buttons, especially if apps place buttons at the bottom — although I guess this is discouraged. It's especially annoying when using a phone cover. And I like mine - iPhone would be unusable for me without it because it's also much more fragile than all my previous budget Android phones.
Will try getting used to it though.
Re your "It's a mess" comment: I've never had a problem with the android back button, it always did exactly what I expected and it was easy to build an intuition for it.
The context-dependand behavior always seemed very well thought-out to me, because I never ever had to think about it.
> the buggy text selection (editing URLs is a chore, holding the spacebar to move the cursor is broken when you move too far...)
I'm right there with you on these.
> positioning the unreliable sometimes-available back button at the top left has made me drop my phone at least once.
As a person with small hands, I hear you. I miss the days of the original iPhone which was probably >90% usable with a single hand.
Even the discontinued iPhone Mini was too large - which I suspect has been most of the reason of its "failure". Comparing with larger phones, the smaller screen is a downside, and it came without the upside of actually being a single-hand device so it's more or less lose-lose.
The lack of a uniform UI pattern for what is right-click on the desktop already surprised me way back in iPhone OS 3. Long press would have been the obvious choice, and you could have had a uniform context-menu function everywhere. Users would just learn “when in doubt, long-press for any and all additional actions” and wouldn’t have to try different gestures, look into the share menu or other random menu buttons.
I think apple gave up a lot of decent design interactions with ios 7. Baby with the bathwater.
is that text or a control? The auto-hiding menus that take away important controls, and require non-muscle-memory actions to resurrect.
I wish the lost certainty could all the themed back on.
Don't let developers use patterns, fix it on OS level. Developers don't want you to leave parts of their app - try doing back action on Instagram reels for example.