[kemayo]

Not really! There's not an iOS equivalent to the Android "back" concept.

On Android pressing "back" will take you to the last screen you were on; importantly this might be in the same app or a different one. It'll also do things like dismiss popups and hide the keyboard, since that's also moving back to a previous state.

The back-swipe on iOS is the equivalent of the Android "up" button, in that it's specific to the current app. It's also only going to work if the current app is deliberately supporting it, of course -- they might have their own UI chrome that doesn't respond to a swipe.

The other half of the "back" button behavior on iOS is that you can swipe left/right across the bottom of the screen to cycle between apps. (Or there's a special back-button in the toolbar if you've just followed a link that took you between apps.) So it does need more intentional-knowledge about what you mean to achieve.

[rootusrootus]

Agreed, it's not a perfect analog, but for me it did work out as a roughly equivalent replacement for what I used the back button for in Android. I've also had really good luck with most apps supporting the convention.

But YMMV of course, this is going to be largely dependent on your own usage patterns, app choices, etc.

[kemayo]

Yeah, that's fair. I felt it was worth calling out that it's not a perfect 1:1 map of behavior, since the Android-back does contain multitudes and it's hard to say what a given person expects it to do in their own usage.

Honestly, having used both, I prefer the iOS separation of concerns. I've seen a lot of non-technical people get confused about what Android's "back" is going to do, so a button that'll do something different based on the context of how your reached the current screen apparently doesn't map well to many people's mental models of their phones.

[iSnow]

Personally, I love that I can open a web site in the browser from say the Reddit app and back will bring me back to the Reddit app. Guess I'll miss this behavior.

[rootusrootus]

That functionality exists on iOS. When I open a site from Apollo, to use your Reddit example, I get a small "Done" button at the upper left corner of the screen. Touching that closes the browser window and leaves me right back in Apollo where I started.

Conventionally, most iOS apps seem to do it like Apple does with the native apps. E.g. when I click a link in an iMessage, it opens up the page in Safari and at the top left of the screen there is a little "< Messages" button that will take me back exactly where I was.

Honestly, it seems just like a Windows vs MacOS vs Linux thing. There are analogs for almost every behavior that is even a tiny bit popular, you just have to get comfortable with how to use it.