I am so continually BAFFLED by people who like the Android back button Stop kicking me to random ass app pages or, worse, all the way out to the heckin' home screen IT'S SO INFURIATING Having a "pop the view off the stack" button is NOT GOOD UX

Who's still using buttons on Android? I thought we all moved to gestures in like...2017?

@lileuly.bsky.social THE GESTURE IS EVEN WORSE ASDFGOCWJCH D:< "Wanna open a hamburger menu with a swipe gesture? HAHA suck it LOSER you went back instead you're on your homescreen now! GET REKT"

@Rusty GOD, YES, THAT THING IS SO INFURIATINGLY UNINTUITIVE

@dragonarchitect And developers keep relying on it!!! If you build an app for Android you don't need to have any kind of coherent navigational hierarchy cuz "hey, the back button's always there "

@Rusty as a long time Android user who switched to ios for the first time 3 months back, I still miss the back button/gesture a lot.

IOS offers a side/center swipe that works on 80% of the apps, but any app that wants me to touch a bubble in the top corner should die in a fire.

Also sometimes I just want to get the heck out of where I am at, and ios doesn't have that. In my mind the imperfections of the back button are less bad than its absence.

Granted, I still think that touchscreens are a miserably unpleasant user interface in general, so there's that. Maybe I just hate smartphones xD

@zoepants iOS does a good job with its native widget toolkit where the navigation controller lets you swipe from the left edge to go back, while modals can be dismissed just by swiping them back down. I really really wish that was the default behavior with Android's widget toolkit. That said, when something isn't using the native widget toolkit... yeah it kinda sucks. When you're using some ReactNative-style web app garbage and they aren't using any sort of gesture navigation, it's really nice to have the back button.

I just think Android putting the back button so front and center gives app developers (and their own SDK design team) an easy out to make crappier, harder to navigate apps that don't have a well thought out navigational hierarchy. I'd rather have an app that has thoughtful gestures than Android's terrible back gesture abomination that triggers when you don't want it to and sometimes randomly closes out of the entire app. It's not even a back button, it's a "pop" button, and to give that to users who don't understand how view stacks work and then make it 100% core to navigating on Android is wild to me.

@Rusty @lileuly.bsky.social for about a day a random feature enabled itself that allowed previewing what the back gesture Is about to do before you commit to it, giving you a split second to abort, but like everything else useful in Android, it randomly disappeared shortly after and I can't figure out how to re-enable it

@Startide @lileuly.bsky.social Google has been teasing their "smart back" gesture for a while now and it just seems like a terrible band-aid on an issue that shouldn't have been a problem to begin with I haven't gotten to try it though since I disable the Android back gesture and use FNG to just stick a smaller back gesture in the bottom left corner.

@Rusty there’s either gonna be a back button or janky ass partial alternatives like “going up the nav hierarchy” that misses shit like “i was sent here from another app and wish do go back” or “my fingers are not 20cm long”

@Rusty i guess the only thing that i agree with is that it shouldn’t kick you out to the home screen

otherwise it is intuitive from how the web works

@charlotte It depends on the flow, but I feel like if one app just links you to another then the app switcher should serve as the way to get back, but if you're doing something like authorizing a payment or finding a file, it should create a portal to your chosen app with a pop-up window or even something akin to an iframe so you can complete whatever task you need without leaving the original app.

@Rusty if a website sends you to another website, do you go back by looking at your browser history?

@charlotte I get why it kicks you to the homescreen on a technical level. If you're trying to back out of an app but you can't find the page you want, it makes sense to just have the user clear the entire view stack and, if they couldn't find what they were looking for, close out the app so they can enter the app the normal way. It works with Android's weird "apps composed of apps" mentality, but it's really confusing for the user. If Android tried to throw a wrench into the unexpected "return to homescreen" behavior though, there's a chance you could lock the user into one of those sub-apps and they'd have to kill and restart the app process to get to the top, so that behavior is likely never going away.

@charlotte I don't think websites and native applications should behave the same way at all. When you're surfing the web you're looking through a giant trove of indices that spider you into different directions. Websites got a lot more powerful with richer content, yeah, but it's still just a bunch of fancy documents your computer is giving you, as opposed to native apps which should be more purpose built for your machine and behave predictably. I hate how modern tech blurs the lines between web and native so much now.

@Rusty i think however since so much is on the web users are familiar with how the web works, and also the back button there

since phones behave more like a single tab of a web browser i don’t thins it’s unreasonable to apply the paradigm there too

@charlotte I do think it's unreasonable though It takes a lot of mental load to keep track of where you've been and what's going to happen when you go back there. I think it's a necessary evil for the web just by the nature of how the web functions, but for native SDKs and widgets the bar should be a lot higher. I think the option of having a back button is fine (Adwaita and Kirigami do this well) but it shouldn't be the primary mechanism for navigation.