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. Most apps work like this, and it's not actually a problem in my experience. I can't actually remember seeing an app which puts the back button in the bottom right...

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.

Gesture navigation is the standard in android these days. The OS-provided bar isn't even default on budget oppo or Xiaomi devices.

Ah, I see. I haven't used Android in a while.

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.

The difference is iOS has non-standard gestures that is determined by the app, and Android it is enforced by the OS. It is infuriating on iOS trying to locate where someone stuffed the back button (is it a hidden pulldown? bottom left? top left? hamburger? breadcrumb trail? does gesture swipe even work here? ...) Much worse than when apps like reddit/tiktok override the back-to-exit behavior in android.

In which apps is this the default? I can't think of a single one where a swipe were used to navigate "back" and "forth". Gestures are everywhere, but never in the capacity of the back button.

What do you mean? Flagship Android phones haven't shipped with a physical back button in years. Gesture navigation has been the norm for quite a while. And it works when apps use that system for its navigation patterns, which in my experience is every app on Android, including 3rd party.

Do you use Android with gesture based navigation or with the old style 3 buttons? With gesture based navigation, swiping back is the same as the old back button in any app.

If you enable gesture navigation, swiping from the side of the screen emits a virtual back button press. It's an OS level gesture (that apps can attempt to disable, but that can be overridden by the user). This doesn't require apps to implement anything it they implement normal back button behaviour already.

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.

It's indeed very rare to have this large navigation bar on Android nowadays, I suspect the latest Android doesn't even support it.

Android (14) still supports it, it's in Settings > System > Navigation mode (on Pixel devices, different manufacturers might put it in other menus). I still use it and will keep using it.

Same here; I found the swiping very difficult. I have also had a small number of people ask me how to switch to buttons.

Interesting, I had no idea they kept it! That's going to make my life much easier when testing if my apps work with it

> The convention is that it's in the top left [...]

Safari is bottom left.

In the logic of Apple's design patterns, the button on the bottom left doesn't take you back a view. It manipulates the browser view and asks it to go one step back. I'm not saying that this is really the best way to reason about it, but at least it's internally consistent.

As sibling commentor pointed out, the default (and standard) way to go back is a back gesture, there is no button to press anymore. The OS teaches you how to do this with an overlay tutorial. My mom, who is 68, was able to figure this out without any help when she upgraded to a Pixel 4A several years ago.

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 think that a back button at the top of the screen is very usable. I think it kinda makes sense to have it there, but it's not something you should be using as the primary back input.

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.

> What is surprising to me is that using a Back button that's at the top of the phone would be acceptable

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 thought "swipe rightward from left edge" was usually "open the hidden menu" except in browsers.

No, swiping right from the left edge is pretty much universally "go back". Trying it now, it's true in pretty much every app with a navigation model where "back" makes sense; Mail, Settings, Notes, Bitwarden, Messages, Ivory, Nextcloud, a bunch of banking apps, Files, Signal, Slack, etc etc. If an app has a navigation model where "back" makes sense but swiping rightward from the left edge doesn't go back, I get very surprised; it pretty much never happens. I think Google Maps is the only example I can think of at the moment (and Google is generally impressively bad at following iOS platform conventions in my experience).

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.

Im trying the edge swipe thing now again on my iPhone and it’s pretty finicky and i sometimes need 2-3 times to get it right.

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.

Huh, I don't think I've had to retry the back gesture once, it's always just worked. Are you using a case which makes it hard to access the screen edge or something?

Youre right, it must be the case. However it’s the official Apple leather one, so they probably should have tested this more?

> their “Done” or “Close” buttons on top, which are equivalent to “back”

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.

Sorry, I was talking about the positioning of the buttons, they are similarly “unreachable” like some “Back” buttons are on iOS. “Done” or “Close” should be reachable with one hand.

What’s worse is that the same apps have the same buttons in different places depending on if you’re on iPhone or iPad. While different form factors have different affordances, this is just bad for muscle memory.