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Comment by dpark | Hacker News Reader

If it's not complicated, why do some Android users complain about it? If it's as intuitive as you say, shouldn't everyone be happy with it?

As for poorly-written apps dragging down the experience, I don't think that's necessarily a given. Obviously if you have a crappy app, then using that app sucks, but that crappy app shouldn't also make the experience of using other apps crappy.

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>If it's not complicated, why do some Android users complain about it? If it's as intuitive as you say, shouldn't everyone be happy with it?

Don't you think this is a silly argument to use against Android's back button when the post we are commenting on is a complaint about iOS's home button? By your logic, that should indicate that the home button's behavior is not intuitive and complicated... you know, because somebody complained about it.

Except I never said that iOS's home button behavior is "extremely intuitive" or assert that only people who've never used it find it complicated. Of course, I also didn't give a long description of the iPhone's home button behavior, say that it's really complicated to explain, and then say it's intuitive....

Obviously some people disagree with the iPhone's home button behavior. Then again, they're not complaining that it's too complicated to understand, merely that it's not the ideal (or perhaps "correct") behavior.

I've found that those that switch from iOS complain about it the most, as they are used to the one button approach. Just like swapping between any OS I guess, you have the things you are used to and initially, the new idioms don't sit well with you.

Average internet users don't understand why Twitter hijacks their back button on the browser, but I'm sure if given the choice between no back button and one that works almost the entire time, I'm sure you can tell which they'd go for.

I'm not sure that's a very meaningful point. Your Android device is not a browser. Your desktop/laptop OS functions just fine without a global back button. So does iOS. If I'm given the choice between no global back button or one that annoys me 5% of the time, I'll take no global back button. My browser can still have its own.

On my desktop if I'm in a stack of dialogs I often use the ESC key as a back button. iOS has zero meaningful inter-process communication (which is why every app has to have a piss-poor re-implementation of Safari and Twitter) so it doesn't even have a concept of "global".

I've got apps that happily send me into Safari, iBooks, and any number of other apps when it's appropriate. IPC might be minimal, but apps definitely don't have to provide their own browser. (I've never used an app that reimplemented Twitter functionality except Twitter-specific apps.)

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