[generalk]

I agree, fewer buttons does not necessarily make a device simpler. There's a happy medium that I think Android hit with the four-button menu/home/back/search keys. Whenever I use an iPhone anymore I always cache-miss and try to find the hardware back button.

[primatology]

Not every screen needs a back button. You can't hide a hardware back button.

I'm with Apple on this one. The back-arrow button in the toolbar reminds me I'm in a hierarchal app, and the label reminds me what the prior screen was. It's just the opposite for me: every time I use an Android I hunt around the screen for the software back button.

[seabee]

As the hardware buttons are generally lit, you could de-emphasise it by removing the light. I had a Motorola java phone which did just this.

The failure of the Apple hierarchical model is it's app-centric, unlike Android which is activity-centric. In a perfect world we could have software back buttons which worked like Android, but I wouldn't trust developers to implement that consistently.

[yummyfajitas]

If there is no place to go back to (i.e., you just opened the app), back takes you to the home screen.

Besides, just as you can't hide a hardware back button, you can't hide the wasted space sitting to the left and right the iPhone's "go home or randomly open Siri" button.

[generalk]

No but you can hide an OS-level software back button, like in any Android 4 phone that doesn't have hardware buttons.