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Comment by ipv6ipv4 | Hacker News Reader

Overshoot is important for scroll views. Without the bounce, there is no feedback if you have scrolled to the edge or not. Early Android lacked the bounce, and it would invariably lead to users scrolling again to be sure they had indeed scrolled to the edge of the view.

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> Early Android lacked the bounce

Early android had some visual feedback (a gradient that faded out) instead of the bounce, possibly because Apple owns a patent ( https://patents.google.com/patent/US7469381B2/en ).

Current Android still does not use the bounce, and instead stretches the content, which works well enough on the high resolution screens that we have now.

Initial Android had scroll bars with no overshoot specific indication.

Desktop doesn't have bounce and I prefer it that way. For mobile maybe bounce is more important since its less precise than a mouse, but point is that bounce is not obviously superior since on desktop the bounce just feels buggy rather than what you want.

Desktop on Mac does if you swipe to scroll. It doesn't if you drag the scroll bar to scroll. On Windows, a scroll wheel doesn't bounce either. It doesn't need to when the scroll wheel itself provides physical feedback that you actually did something.

Touch interfaces tend to need some visual (or artificial haptic) feedback because touch itself is not enough.

You can add the bounce as a second layer of dynamics on top of the exponential deceleration (this is how iOS scroll views do it).

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