Sometimes it’s on the top left, sometime bottom left, sometimes bottom right, and im sure some apps even place it somewhere else.
On Android there is a dedicated OS back button that is always in reach, when using the phone with one hand.
This is the far superior way of doing this.
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.
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.
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.
Safari is bottom left.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.