I swipe right all the time from the left edge of the screen, in most apps that goes back.
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?
- 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.
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?
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.
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'.
Shitty apps/developers are everywhere, we should not limit ourselves over them.
> 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.
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.
The _real_ pain is how bad ios autocompletion is, compared to Android's