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.
> 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.
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.