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Comment by daleharvey | Hacker News Reader

The back button gets picked on a lot, and it is confusing.

However I am much happier having a consistently placed back button that works 90% of the time than not have one at all.

When using iOS I constantly run into very common and simple workflows like read email, check a link in email, press back to get back to email which quickly become fustrating especially when apps have incredibly wierd workarounds (like twitter embedding a terrible web browser to check links), even simple things like deactivating the keyboard / going back from dialogs and activities.

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I have never found the back button to be confusing. The problem is that we call it a "back button". To me it's the "anywhere but here" button. When I don't want to be where I'm at I just start pounding on it until I arrive at something I do want. Either something in my history or the home screen.

I actually really like the implementation of it.

It's a nightmare for usability, now that I think about it, but I also do this.

It's a nightmare for usability when done wrong, though it's amazing for usability when done right. For instance, a wrong way to do it is when I use the task switcher to go back to Google Voice which opens up the last conversation and when I hit the back button it dumps me to the home screen, when what I really wanted was to be dumped back into the inbox. This could be solved by pushing an explicit intent or whatever onto the stack for the inbox above the conversation so that the back button works as expected.

Where the back button works awesome is where I open a link from Tweetdeck and when I hit the back button it puts me back into Tweetdeck.

But, what the button is supposed to (as given in the article), is to take you back to your previous screen - the home screen. The button on the top left is supposed to take you back to your inbox.

Perhaps, but if you are taken to a conversation regardless of how you launch the app (ie, the previous state, which is standard behavior), then I would say, no. Which is what is happening in the Google Voice application.

I should state that what actually happens in this scenario is this.

1. View conversation, leave Google Voice. 2. Re-enter Google Voice somehow, currently viewing conversation. 3. Hit back button, taken to wherever you came from (previous app, home screen, etc) 4. Re-launch Google Voice, now the starting screen is the inbox.

That's a nice definition. I thought of a name for it: Monte Carlo UI.

Google seems to like that so much with their 'I'm feeling lucky' button that they had to integrate it system level into their mobile OS.

I agree completely.

Navigating back/around in apps is the single biggest thing that makes me feel like an idiot whenever I use an iOS device. I feel like the dedicated buttons kept me from ever feeling quite as dumb when I was first getting used to Android or, later, Windows Phone.

Otherwise stuff just feels like I'm used to one way and Apple does things a bit differently, which is fine, but I really don't get the lack of a back button. A lot of stuff seems to turn into two-step "tap to make the button bars show up, then tap the button" procedures instead of just hitting "back."

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, after learning touch-screen interfaces on non-iOS devices, iOS doesn't feel any more naturally intuitive, like as if Android or WP7 was missing something. It just has different customs.

Don't worry, Jelly Bean is steadily removing those buttons.

They are removing physical buttons, not buttons per se. They are still on the bottom of the display, always in the same place, with the same functionality.

I use the 4 finger up-swipe for switching apps on the ipad, not sure if that exists on the iphone. My phone is an android and I've found it consistently faster to just go home than using the damned back button.

The 4 finger gesture doesn't work, but you can double tap the home button to do the same thing (on iPad too; that's how I do it because I don't like the 4 finger gestures).

The double-tap home menu always brings up the weirdest menu. There doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to how the apps are arranged (or if you even get apps - sometimes you get iPod controls). One of the more irritating features of iOS.

They're arranged in order of last used; swipe left to bring up another screen's worth. Swiping right brings up music controls. It's pretty straightforward, and in my opinion incredibly useful.

Your device may be broken or something, because the functionality of the multi-tasking bar is pretty well defined. Double click the home button, the bar appears with a list of your most recently used apps, sorted in that order. the only way you would get ipod controls is if you swipe to the left on that bar, which reveals the media controls (works with apps besides ipod, like pandora etc).

How do you fit four fingers at once on a phone screen? My four fingers right next to each other are wider than my phone by a bit more than half a finger on each side.

To be fair, iOS does not have a back button.

It actually does, and it's part of UINavigationController, it's on screen and it clearly goes to the previous view.

But only within the application. You cannot go back to the previous application.

Maybe because that's a terrible idea that doesn't work in the real world.

Android has proven it.

But it does work for most applications, and it's quite slick. It's also very comparable to either a Browser 'back' or Windows Explorer 'back' functionality. Both can take you to places nowhere near where you are now, or they can take you just a bit further up in the current stack. Problems exist in both browser world and in Android world though, notably when developers (web devs and app devs) do things outside of spec - like constant redirects in browsers where you can't back out of reliably, or not closing out activities before adding more onto the stack.

Unfortunately this problem is really hard to solve.

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