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Comment by the_pwner224 | Hacker News Reader

> my favorite shitty example of this is when Android expected everyone to know what a flat square, circle and triangle are supposed to mean

What is this referring to?

Edit: I'm so used to these buttons that I didn't even realize they were just simple flat shapes. It definitely would be confusing for someone new to Android or for someone who's not good with tech.

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In Android[0], the "back" button on the bottom is a triangle pointing left. The "home" button is a circle. The "show recent apps" button is a square. All are just flat shapes.

Completely unintuitive to anybody that's never used Android before.

Contrast that to the early days of Android where the Back button was a curved arrow, the Home button was an icon of a house, and the Menu button was the hamburger menu people are familiar with, except the lines were thinner.

[0] This may actually vary depending on what phone you have and if the maker changes these, but on my Pixel 6, this is the description.

Back symbol pointing left is probably less intuitive if your language isn't left to right oriented. Wonder if back symbols or back animations have ever been "localized" to orient based on the language used.

It was a making-a-U-turn-and-going-left arrow, not just a left arrow.

Android sort of gets a pass in that it's something that's constantly used by the user, so there's some ability to train people into arbitrary and unclear UXes, especially if they're only a few buttons (a good example is game controllers where what buttons do is completely disconnected from the letter or symbol they're assigned).

iOS is pretty similar in that a good number of the navigation gestures aren't super intuitive and not really discoverable until you build some muscle memory.

I believe the navigation buttons on the bottom. I see no issue with them, since it's easy to associate the left triangle with back, the circle with something that affects everything and the square with something else which does something which is obvious once you tap it.

The soft buttons on Android: https://i.stack.imgur.com/YKCPp.png

Where is this from? Some sort of skin? I don't have a square at all on my Android phone, a Google Pixel (which I assume is "base" Android). You see recent apps by sliding up.

Also the triangle is only an arrow on my phone and the circle is an oval.

It's configurable in Android settings. I think you must have "2 button navigation" option selected? The default is (or used to be) 3 button and looks like the screenshot above, as far as I'm aware

https://icdn.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/android-1...

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