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I know lots of Apple fanatics are extreme minimalists but I really think iOS should also steal the back button from the Android. I very much dislike when one ap

I know lots of Apple fanatics are extreme minimalists but I really think iOS should also steal the back button from the Android. I very much dislike when one app causes another app to open, and then I have to press the home button and find the original app to go back to it. And if I'm lucky, it's still in the same state as before.

htilford 15y ago
My favorite is actually the back swipe on the Veer (WebOS). It's a left moving swipe on the bottom bevel. It took me a little while to realize it existed, but now that I've learned it it's a joy to use.
yardie 15y ago
double-click the home button brings up the task switcher. The leftmost app is the last opened and reopening it usually resumes the app.
- lbotos 15y ago
  I've learned this myself from someone else like you who has passed this on. When I bought my iPhone the manual was extremely vague on features like task switcher. Where did you learn this? (Sorry for going OT, I just wonder if there is a "Secret Guide" somewhere that I've missed.)
  - masklinn 15y ago
    Safari has a bookmark to a pretty extensive "iPhone User Guide". It's been there from the start, but I'm sure almost no user knows it. I don't get why they didn't just pin it on the springboard or something (well I do, it'd look kind-of ugly and you should be able to use the phone without a manual, still...)
  - yardie 15y ago
    I learned it the same as you from someone else. Now I use it so often, double-click to switch apps, that I can't remember life before it.
- bgarbiak 15y ago
  Speaking of which: double-click is (IMHO) the worst possible solution for this. I keep accidentally getting to the search screen. "Home" button design is partially at fault here (why it's concave?) but the whole thing is clearly an after-thought addition to the system. Long-touch or some kind of a gesture would be way more convenient.
  - hollerith 15y ago
    >double-click is (IMHO) the worst possible solution for this. swiping up with 4 fingers works, too, at least on iPad.
    - phillco 15y ago
      I can barely fit all four fingers on my iPhone's screen.
      - masklinn 15y ago
        The gesture is not enabled there anyway, it's just for the ipad.
  - harlanlewis 15y ago
    Re "why it's concave?": Concave buttons are less likely to be pressed while sitting in your pocket - waking the screen, waking some background processes, draining the battery unnecessarily throughout the day. To solve this problem, non-concave buttons (flat or convex) live in wells. These buttons in wells carry unnecessary aesthetic weight - lots of angles and short surfaces in a small space. Apple's hardware rarely carries such adornment - they do smooth, "authentic" surfaces. As such, the Home button simply _is_ the well - and it's rarely pushed by accident.
  - lloeki 15y ago
    > Long-touch or some kind of a gesture would be way more convenient. Precisely. And we already have the solution at hand, it just lacks implementation: swipe up from the bottom of the screen This would reveal the task switcher the same way it reveals the Notification Center, smoothly and progressively. It would thus give both instantaneous feedback and trivial cancellability. What's more, once the move is complete your finger will end up being very close to the switcher's row, so going back one step (or up to four steps, really) would be a swift swipe-tap.
- wvenable 15y ago
  I agree with fragsworth -- the back button is almost a necessity and double-clicking the home button and clicking the first task switcher icon is a poor substitute. It's missing so much that I find myself expecting the in-app back button to go back to the previous app if I click it enough. BTW, I've never owned an Android phone so my expectations aren't carried over from another OS -- it just seems natural and it's jarring when it's missing.
  - yardie 15y ago
    The back button isn't that great in Android. I'm never sure if back is going to take me back to another screen or out of the app completely. Sometimes if the app is launched from another app pressing back doesn't take you back to the originating app. As an iOS and Android user the Home button is still my favorite. It's what I'm used to and for the most part they work the same on both platforms.
    - wvenable 15y ago
      The back button should follow the users path; if I'm in an email, then a click a link, and then get an SMS then the back button should take me from the SMS message, back to the browser, and then back the email. However, applications need an additional bit of UI so that from the SMS message you could go "back" to the list of all messages, etc within the app. It sounds like, on Android, there is some confusion between these two use cases and other issues that make it unreliable. It's a shame because the concept is sound.
- xbryanx 15y ago
  As my iPhone ages, the double click on the home button is becoming harder and harder to do. The physical button itself just isn't very responsive anymore. Devoting this essential function to something that can degrade over time seems like a big oversight for a company that puts such stock into industrial engineering.
  - waitwhat 15y ago
    Have you tried recalibrating it? http://www.iphonehacks.com/2011/12/how-to-fix-you-iphones-unresponsive-home-button.html http://www.iphonehacks.com/2011/12/how-to-fix-you-iphones-un...
    - Xuzz 15y ago
      (I reversed engineered that procedure: it does nothing. Just a placebo.)
  - kstenerud 15y ago
    Actually it isn't. When your button wears out you can just buy a new iPhone. Same goes for fraying wires in Apple power supplies and USB cables. They have no economic incentive to provide longevity beyond the warranty period as they are primarily a hardware company.
    - oflannabhra 15y ago
      Actually, due to a class-action lawsuit[1], Apple has to replace frayed MagSafe power adapters with the newer L-shape ones for free. I just got mine replaced a few weeks ago. I agree that Apple should have done a recall, or even notified users. 1. http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/class-action-lawsuit-forces-apple-to-replace-frayed-magsafe-power-cords/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/class-action-lawsuit-forces...
      - kstenerud 15y ago
        That's a step in the right direction, but the cord still frays at the brick end unless you leave a big loop before wrapping the cord around it. And the USB iPhone connector still frays. It would be nice if they'd adopt the standard flexible nubs designed specifically to avoid this fraying problem, but when aesthetics and practicality come into conflict at Apple, aesthetics usually wins.
masklinn 15y ago
> I really think iOS should also steal the back button from the Android. There are many potentially interesting things in Android (although I think WebOS would be a far better source of ideas to steal, it's always been). But not the back button. The back button is probably the worst part of Android's UI, it's the embodiment of "mystery meat" navigation and interface: a hardware button which behaves in a completely arbitrary and essentially random manner without providing any clue as to what will happen when it's tapped.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- jbellis 15y ago
  And yet, many iOS apps end up using screen space on a Back button. And I find myself missing it on those that don't.
  - masklinn 15y ago
    > And yet, many iOS apps end up using screen space on a Back button. I did not say "back" is a bad idea (seriously, read what's written, not what you think would be the easiest to pithily reply to). "Back" is a good idea when it is coherent and/or explorable. Which the android "Back" button is not, because it's mystery meat navigation. iOS apps use screen space with a "Back" button, and that back button generally tells you where you're going to go back to[0]. Android's back button does not, you might go up in the application's hierarchy, you could go sideways into an other object of some sort from which you originally came, you could go to an other application, and you have no way to know without learning how each and every application hooks into that button. [0] that's Apple UI guidelines, although even when applications don't implement it they won't just drop you into an other application "at random".
    - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
      On Android you always go to the last Activity, whether that activity is from the same application or a different application. When you get something other than the last activity, that's because the developer is overriding the button's purpose.
richbradshaw 15y ago
Having used an Android phone for a while, the back button was definitely a "feature" that I'm glad isn't on iOS - it very rarely does what you expect, and has a very odd feeling to it. It's probably the only button I've ever used where you never know quite what it will do. Perhaps with the ICS interface guidelines being more heavily read this has improved, but on the phone I have it's a very bad interface.
whatusername 15y ago
Double-Click app switching helps with this problem.
edoloughlin 15y ago
> I very much dislike when one app causes another app to open, and then I have to press the home button and find the original app to go back to it. While a bit more cumbersome than a back button, you can double-press the home button and the previous app will be on the left of the list of apps that appears on the bottom of the screen. No guarantees it'll remember its state, though :(
d5tryr 15y ago
The back button doesn't make sense in Angry Birds. If an interface element is superfluous or unpredictable in Angry Birds then it makes no sense to bog down a touch interface with it. Angry Birds may seem to be a silly little game, but it is not an edge case. It's an exemplar of interaction paradigms going forward.
charlieok 15y ago
You can double-click the home button, or use a four-finger swipe gesture, to pull up the list of “recent” applications along the bottom of the screen, and then tap one. Also, you can four-finger swipe right and left between applications.
- baddox 15y ago
  The four-finger swipe only works on the iPad. That said, I love those gestures. I feel nearly as fast and as comfortable multitasking on my iPad as I do when doing similar light tasks (web browsing, music listening, IMing, etc.) on either of my desktop operating systems (Windows and Ubuntu).
feefie 15y ago
If you turn on Multitasking Gestures (Settings -> General -> Multitasking Gestures -> ON) you can go "back" one app by four-finger swiping the current app off the screen to the left (i.e. swipe your fingers from right to left). iOS automatically puts the apps "beside" each other so the swipe works even if the apps were previously not launched consecutively. I do this when reading www.jimmyr.com to return to Safari if it launches the YouTube app. I also use this if I forget I'm in Airplane Mode and I get the 'Turn Off Airplane Mode or Use Wi-Fi to Access Data' error message that gives me the option to jump directly to 'Settings'; once I turn Wi-Fi back on I four-finger swipe to get back to the app. It's on iOS 5 on my iPad-1 but I think you might need a iPhone 4 or 4S to get Multitasking Gestures on an iPhone (I can't find how to turn it on in the settings for my iPhone 3GS). Edit: thanks to baddox for pointing out this is an iPad-only feature (confirmed here: http://www.apple.com/ios/features.html http://www.apple.com/ios/features.html), or on iPhones that have been jailbroken.
- baddox 15y ago
  You cannot get those multitask gestures on any iPhone unless you jailbreak it.
zerostar07 15y ago
... especially when you are typing in a form on safari, switch to something and then try to go back only to have safari reload your page (because of memory limitations). boom goes the form.

htilford 15y ago

My favorite is actually the back swipe on the Veer (WebOS). It's a left moving swipe on the bottom bevel. It took me a little while to realize it existed, but now that I've learned it it's a joy to use.

yardie 15y ago

double-click the home button brings up the task switcher. The leftmost app is the last opened and reopening it usually resumes the app.

lbotos 15y ago
I've learned this myself from someone else like you who has passed this on. When I bought my iPhone the manual was extremely vague on features like task switcher. Where did you learn this? (Sorry for going OT, I just wonder if there is a "Secret Guide" somewhere that I've missed.)
- masklinn 15y ago
  Safari has a bookmark to a pretty extensive "iPhone User Guide". It's been there from the start, but I'm sure almost no user knows it. I don't get why they didn't just pin it on the springboard or something (well I do, it'd look kind-of ugly and you should be able to use the phone without a manual, still...)
- yardie 15y ago
  I learned it the same as you from someone else. Now I use it so often, double-click to switch apps, that I can't remember life before it.
bgarbiak 15y ago
Speaking of which: double-click is (IMHO) the worst possible solution for this. I keep accidentally getting to the search screen. "Home" button design is partially at fault here (why it's concave?) but the whole thing is clearly an after-thought addition to the system. Long-touch or some kind of a gesture would be way more convenient.
- hollerith 15y ago
  >double-click is (IMHO) the worst possible solution for this. swiping up with 4 fingers works, too, at least on iPad.
  - phillco 15y ago
    I can barely fit all four fingers on my iPhone's screen.
    - masklinn 15y ago
      The gesture is not enabled there anyway, it's just for the ipad.
- harlanlewis 15y ago
  Re "why it's concave?": Concave buttons are less likely to be pressed while sitting in your pocket - waking the screen, waking some background processes, draining the battery unnecessarily throughout the day. To solve this problem, non-concave buttons (flat or convex) live in wells. These buttons in wells carry unnecessary aesthetic weight - lots of angles and short surfaces in a small space. Apple's hardware rarely carries such adornment - they do smooth, "authentic" surfaces. As such, the Home button simply _is_ the well - and it's rarely pushed by accident.
- lloeki 15y ago
  > Long-touch or some kind of a gesture would be way more convenient. Precisely. And we already have the solution at hand, it just lacks implementation: swipe up from the bottom of the screen This would reveal the task switcher the same way it reveals the Notification Center, smoothly and progressively. It would thus give both instantaneous feedback and trivial cancellability. What's more, once the move is complete your finger will end up being very close to the switcher's row, so going back one step (or up to four steps, really) would be a swift swipe-tap.
wvenable 15y ago
I agree with fragsworth -- the back button is almost a necessity and double-clicking the home button and clicking the first task switcher icon is a poor substitute. It's missing so much that I find myself expecting the in-app back button to go back to the previous app if I click it enough. BTW, I've never owned an Android phone so my expectations aren't carried over from another OS -- it just seems natural and it's jarring when it's missing.
- yardie 15y ago
  The back button isn't that great in Android. I'm never sure if back is going to take me back to another screen or out of the app completely. Sometimes if the app is launched from another app pressing back doesn't take you back to the originating app. As an iOS and Android user the Home button is still my favorite. It's what I'm used to and for the most part they work the same on both platforms.
  - wvenable 15y ago
    The back button should follow the users path; if I'm in an email, then a click a link, and then get an SMS then the back button should take me from the SMS message, back to the browser, and then back the email. However, applications need an additional bit of UI so that from the SMS message you could go "back" to the list of all messages, etc within the app. It sounds like, on Android, there is some confusion between these two use cases and other issues that make it unreliable. It's a shame because the concept is sound.
xbryanx 15y ago
As my iPhone ages, the double click on the home button is becoming harder and harder to do. The physical button itself just isn't very responsive anymore. Devoting this essential function to something that can degrade over time seems like a big oversight for a company that puts such stock into industrial engineering.
- waitwhat 15y ago
  Have you tried recalibrating it? http://www.iphonehacks.com/2011/12/how-to-fix-you-iphones-unresponsive-home-button.html http://www.iphonehacks.com/2011/12/how-to-fix-you-iphones-un...
  - Xuzz 15y ago
    (I reversed engineered that procedure: it does nothing. Just a placebo.)
- kstenerud 15y ago
  Actually it isn't. When your button wears out you can just buy a new iPhone. Same goes for fraying wires in Apple power supplies and USB cables. They have no economic incentive to provide longevity beyond the warranty period as they are primarily a hardware company.
  - oflannabhra 15y ago
    Actually, due to a class-action lawsuit[1], Apple has to replace frayed MagSafe power adapters with the newer L-shape ones for free. I just got mine replaced a few weeks ago. I agree that Apple should have done a recall, or even notified users. 1. http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/class-action-lawsuit-forces-apple-to-replace-frayed-magsafe-power-cords/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/class-action-lawsuit-forces...
    - kstenerud 15y ago
      That's a step in the right direction, but the cord still frays at the brick end unless you leave a big loop before wrapping the cord around it. And the USB iPhone connector still frays. It would be nice if they'd adopt the standard flexible nubs designed specifically to avoid this fraying problem, but when aesthetics and practicality come into conflict at Apple, aesthetics usually wins.

masklinn 15y ago

> I really think iOS should also steal the back button from the Android. There are many potentially interesting things in Android (although I think WebOS would be a far better source of ideas to steal, it's always been). But not the back button. The back button is probably the worst part of Android's UI, it's the embodiment of "mystery meat" navigation and interface: a hardware button which behaves in a completely arbitrary and essentially random manner without providing any clue as to what will happen when it's tapped.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
jbellis 15y ago
And yet, many iOS apps end up using screen space on a Back button. And I find myself missing it on those that don't.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > And yet, many iOS apps end up using screen space on a Back button. I did not say "back" is a bad idea (seriously, read what's written, not what you think would be the easiest to pithily reply to). "Back" is a good idea when it is coherent and/or explorable. Which the android "Back" button is not, because it's mystery meat navigation. iOS apps use screen space with a "Back" button, and that back button generally tells you where you're going to go back to[0]. Android's back button does not, you might go up in the application's hierarchy, you could go sideways into an other object of some sort from which you originally came, you could go to an other application, and you have no way to know without learning how each and every application hooks into that button. [0] that's Apple UI guidelines, although even when applications don't implement it they won't just drop you into an other application "at random".
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    On Android you always go to the last Activity, whether that activity is from the same application or a different application. When you get something other than the last activity, that's because the developer is overriding the button's purpose.

richbradshaw 15y ago

Having used an Android phone for a while, the back button was definitely a "feature" that I'm glad isn't on iOS - it very rarely does what you expect, and has a very odd feeling to it. It's probably the only button I've ever used where you never know quite what it will do. Perhaps with the ICS interface guidelines being more heavily read this has improved, but on the phone I have it's a very bad interface.

whatusername 15y ago

Double-Click app switching helps with this problem.

edoloughlin 15y ago

> I very much dislike when one app causes another app to open, and then I have to press the home button and find the original app to go back to it. While a bit more cumbersome than a back button, you can double-press the home button and the previous app will be on the left of the list of apps that appears on the bottom of the screen. No guarantees it'll remember its state, though :(

d5tryr 15y ago

The back button doesn't make sense in Angry Birds. If an interface element is superfluous or unpredictable in Angry Birds then it makes no sense to bog down a touch interface with it. Angry Birds may seem to be a silly little game, but it is not an edge case. It's an exemplar of interaction paradigms going forward.

charlieok 15y ago

You can double-click the home button, or use a four-finger swipe gesture, to pull up the list of “recent” applications along the bottom of the screen, and then tap one. Also, you can four-finger swipe right and left between applications.

baddox 15y ago
The four-finger swipe only works on the iPad. That said, I love those gestures. I feel nearly as fast and as comfortable multitasking on my iPad as I do when doing similar light tasks (web browsing, music listening, IMing, etc.) on either of my desktop operating systems (Windows and Ubuntu).

feefie 15y ago

If you turn on Multitasking Gestures (Settings -> General -> Multitasking Gestures -> ON) you can go "back" one app by four-finger swiping the current app off the screen to the left (i.e. swipe your fingers from right to left). iOS automatically puts the apps "beside" each other so the swipe works even if the apps were previously not launched consecutively. I do this when reading www.jimmyr.com to return to Safari if it launches the YouTube app. I also use this if I forget I'm in Airplane Mode and I get the 'Turn Off Airplane Mode or Use Wi-Fi to Access Data' error message that gives me the option to jump directly to 'Settings'; once I turn Wi-Fi back on I four-finger swipe to get back to the app. It's on iOS 5 on my iPad-1 but I think you might need a iPhone 4 or 4S to get Multitasking Gestures on an iPhone (I can't find how to turn it on in the settings for my iPhone 3GS). Edit: thanks to baddox for pointing out this is an iPad-only feature (confirmed here: http://www.apple.com/ios/features.html http://www.apple.com/ios/features.html), or on iPhones that have been jailbroken.

baddox 15y ago
You cannot get those multitask gestures on any iPhone unless you jailbreak it.

zerostar07 15y ago

... especially when you are typing in a form on safari, switch to something and then try to go back only to have safari reload your page (because of memory limitations). boom goes the form.