[mscottmcbee]

Good comparison, but I found the point about the back button being needless and confusing a bit weird. Using Android as my primary mobile OS, I feel like someone's cut off a thumb whenever I use iOS devices. The back button, to me, is fairly critical.

[XorNot]

The point about the back button was just weird. It's a button, which is for going "back". In literally every app with multiple screens this is a fairly obvious concept, but on Android you have the benefit of not having to allocate screen real estate to it, and having the button conveniently thumb-reachable.

[movingahead]

I have only used Android as my primary phone. But, I am still confounded by the back button. For example, I am using twitter and get a notification ( from say Facebook ) and jump in to the app from the notification drawer. I see the photo, like it and want to go back to the twitter app. I hit back expecting to go to Twitter but it takes me to the facebook feed. This is not "wrong" but seems messy.

I wish that Android makes it more clear to app makers what the back button should/can do, and then make them adopt a similar behaviour.

[nicoritschel]

Am I the only one who has used front and backward swipe in iOS7 to navigate between screens?

[com2kid]

The back button is very inconsistent on Android. For instance, within Facebook, anytime I hit back I go back to whatever I was doing in Facebook, no matter how long ago I did it! Facebook seems to keep a global history of everything I've every done in that app that persists for days and days.

In contrast, most apps after they are auto-closed by the system, lose their history. One could argue that Facebook is maybe "more correct" here, but for the most part, "back within this current session" is what I want, which leads into the next point.

If I tap a URL within some app that opens up the Android web browser, and I then hit the back button, I am brought back to my app. So I sort of expect this behavior, but again, different apps act very differently here. This is where Facebook's usage is really strange, I tap on a FB notification, go into the FB app, hit back, and rather than be brought back to whatever I was doing before, I am navigated to some conversation I last had a week ago. (I obviously don't use the FB app that often!)

There are plenty of other examples of inconsistent back button usage even throughout core OS experiences. What back is going to do when I am in the Text Messaging app is solely dependent upon how I entered the app.

(And then there is the entire thing about browser sessions from clicked on URLs within apps being entirely different than browser sessions from when I manually open the browser)