thinking a lot about how the guy who convinced Steve Jobs not to put a back button on the iPhone because it'd be inconsistent and confusing is also the same guy who scammed millions of dollars from people with his Humane AI pin that never worked and that they're just going to straight up brick brick soon
talk about a hero to villain arc 
and YES, my fellow Android peeps, the back button is, in fact, inconsistent and terrible. 
#Humane #HumaneAI #ImranChaudhri #Apple #iOS #iPhone #Android
@dragonarchitect I have the back gesture bound to a small region on my phone actually. I got so fed up with not being able to crop photos or pull out a hamburger menu without it triggering back instead and undoing everything I was just working on. And I can't just disable the back button since the app design is so bad there are a ton of apps that rely on it to close out of the screen you're on. I can't deal with the button navigation though, so the small gesture area is preferable, but I'd rather it just not be necessary. 
It baffles me that this is 50% of our mobile operating system market. I miss you WebOS 
@Rusty @dragonarchitect well, it's because @mozillaofficial fucked up #FirefoxOS, #SailfishOS was run into the ground, #webOS got neglected, #Microsoft halfassed #WindowsMobile and #Apple refuses to license #iOS to 3rd parties.
@Rusty @dragonarchitect I disagree re: webOS and FirefoxOS.
#webOS failed due to lack of market penetration (there was only like 1 Tablet from #hp) and #FirefoxOS failed because @mozillaofficial didn't even offer to sell devices to folks like me and @fuchsiii that wanted one.
Add to that the absurdity that #Mozilla basically expected carriers (!!) to maintain and provide the #AppStore|s themselves and you get market fracturing worse than the "P.R." #China (!!!)…
It was mismanaged and self-sabotaged in the worst possible way.
The #Duopoly of #Android & #iOS wasn't unavoidable, but an outcome of #SelfSabotage and halfassed non-commitment by competitors!
@bel @odoben I don't really see how the back button is a good idea though. The iOS SDK lets you navigate the UI in an intuitive way where swiping from the left on a navigation controller takes you up a level, or swiping down a bottom sheet dismisses it. If your SDK is intuitive there's never a need for a back button. The only time iOS fumbles perhaps a bit is when one app opens another and they staple a back button to the top left to return to your previous app, but even then I'd still rather have a single stapled on button to return to the app I was in rather than having to spam the back gesture until I get there and then end up closing the app I was trying to get back to anyway because I swiped too many times.
I can't think of any use case where a back button is a necessary feature for an OS to have if the widget toolkit itself is well designed. I think Android uses it as a crutch to plaster over some deeper poorly thought-out ideas of the OS. It's not about iOS having better guidelines, it's about it having a better, more thoughtful widget toolkit so developers don't have to think about it at all.
@Rusty exactly.
You have 2, sometimes 3 different ways to navigate backwards (the swipe from the left), and there's no guarantee as to which you will need on a universal basis.
The previous app indicator is a nice design, I will admit. But it doesn't cover every use case.
And what I hate most, is that those controls are all towards the top of the device, especially on the giant iPhones Apple makes now.
On Android, the situation is improving (14 through 16 are finalizing the predictive back button which will show you where a back action goes), yet imperfect. But I do know one thing: the button is going to be in the same place no matter what, and I'll end up back where I started, or at least at Home if I keep pressing it.
@LiquidParasyte You don't usually have to tap on the top of the screen to go back in iOS. Whenever there's a back button on iOS, provided they're using the SDK and not some awful web wrapper (heck you React Native 
) or provided they haven't switched off the gesture recognizer, then there's a swipe from the left edge of the screen to go back a level. Plus it's a 1-to-1 gesture so it feels a lot more satisfying than the button trigger that the Android gesture does.
The UINavigationController is a stack, so every view you tap into adds a view to the stack and swiping back on it slides it off of the stack. Instead of obfuscating that stack like Android does, it literally makes it a part of the navigational structure. It's intuitive to swipe things off to go back to views you were already on. Plus, breaking it out so going up a level within an app and going back to your previous app are two entirely different buttons/gestures fixes the ambiguity that makes Android so insufferable.
The predictive back button feels like a Band-Aid on something that never should have been a problem in the first place, although I'll admit I don't use it because I don't use the system back gesture. The system back gesture interferes with any application that swipes from the edges of the screen (ie apps that have a hamburger menu or apps that have crop handles like the Photos app), so I have the system back gesture disabled and instead use FNG to cram one down into the bottom third of my phone so it doesn't interfere with apps.
Rusty Corgi
Queen Calyo Delphi
Kevin Karhan 
Kancept
Denzil Ferreira 
Odoben
Bel Polaris
LiquidParasyte