The elephant in the room is that unlike on android phones, there is no hardware 'back' button on iPhone. Where is it instead (by convention)? The top left corner of the screen, ie, the most unreachable place on the new iPhone. I'm still amazed this thing was produced by Apple given that oversight.
There is no more hardware back button on any recent android phone either and every time you rotate the screen it's in a different locations (and a different location if it's on landscape vs portrait on tablets vs phones.) It's widely inconstant on Android too. And what happens when you press also is not very consistant when what you are working isn't inherently stack based.
Also having different UI contentions doesn't mean someone else is doing something wrong. We port games from iOS to Android at Apportable (YC2011) so we deal with converting concepts every day. Neither is better or worse.
> There is no more hardware back button on any recent android phone either...
Any?
While the Galaxy Nexus has onscreen navigation controls now (and the Nexus7 followed suit), both the One X and the Samsung Galaxy SIII have dedicated capacitive back buttons "off screen". On the OneX the button is in the normal place (on the left) and is oddly (but in keeping with the SII) on the right on the SIII.
You can still support it sure, but the recommendation from google is to move away from them on phones. IIRC (don't quote me) on tablets, it's a requirement.
It might not be hardware anymore, but there is still a ubiquitous back button. And depending on how you look at it, the rotation change could be a good thing - the intention is to keep the ubiquitous button set closest to where your hands will be resting.
It's not though. The back button on phones stays on the top or bottom edge (the icons just rotate to face you). Which side it will be on is wild guess though depending on the phone and OEM.
Tablets will move it to the bottom in whatever orientation you are in which good but the issue with that though is that the screen dimensions change and I can't tell you how frustrating that is in games and changing their OpenGL projections on rotation. Not only do you have to handle rotating your content for the orientation, but then you have to adjust for the screen size virtually changing sizes. For some games and apps (like ZenBound) this breaks things by moving the virtual center point of the screen.
On my Galaxy Nexus the back button is always in the exact same physical position, which is nice because you can reflexively hit it like a hard button and you won't get caught out in cases where it's transitioning from portrait to landscape or vice versa.
Also, since Jelly Bean I can't say I've ever had an unexpected result by pressing the back button. As far as I can tell it always does The Right Thing since they got their guidelines formalized, at least with the couple dozen apps I regularly use. I have to say on balance I've been more annoyed with iPhone apps lacking necessary navigation buttons on some screens more than Android back button inconsistency.
My post had nothing to do with Android. I personally like iOS and am sad that I won't be buying iPhone 5. My point was just that iOS's back button convention is completely at odds with the new screen size.
Not every app needs a back button, though. It's really that simple. That and the behavior is unpredictable because the button can't be labeled, being hardware. If a modal dialog pops up, say in a game, it will be a gamble whether the back button dismisses the dialog or shoots me back to the task I was doing prior to firing up the game. It's not that well thought out an idea.
Now, placement is a different issue and we can argue why these designers chose to put them where they put them. But it has nothing to do with the button being hardware versus software.
By default in Android, back key pressed when dialogs are showing simply dismiss those dialogs. There are app authors who override back button behavior (wrongly) and break this paradigm. The persistent availability of the back button is great, for the most part, as I know I should be able to get back to where I was in most scenarios.
My post was entirely about placement and now the new iPhone's screen size goes against the convention of top left for back button on iOS. The fact that so many people are reading deeply into my mention of Android and jumping in to talk about hardware back buttons and/or defend Android is bizarre to me.
You can swipe right to get back in Music app and a few more apps. Apple also considered the use of the "Home" button for some "back" actions — back to home screen, back to a recent opened app.
People are reading way too into my mention of Android's hardware button here. My point is that before iPhone 5, iOS had a sane convention of back buttons being at the top left corner of the screen. (And Android had a relatively sane one in the form of a hardware button, for comparison.) Now, with the bigger screen, this sane convention has instantly turned into a regular pain point. It would be much better now, for example, if navigation in an app were exclusively in the bottom bar so it could be reached easily by the user, and the top bar is a "read-only" information bar with perhaps buttons for destructive or rarely-needed actions.
Two of the most common actions in apps on the iPhone are to tap the top left and bottom parts of the screen. To do this on iPhone 5 for many users will require continual readjustment of the phone in their hand. For me, this is a showstopper and actually makes the iPhone 4S I own now feel better designed since the hardware size is in tune with the layout of the software. The new iPhone is shoehorning a UX that works well on a smaller screen into a larger one and it fails.
I have long cited this one difference (the ubiquitous back button) as the tipping point that makes me consider Android feel more usable, on average, than iOS. I never considered that one reason I feel that way is because of the placement and reachability, but it makes sense. That's not the only reason, though; having "Back" handled by the OS allows a "back stack" and more seamless multitasking.
I think it's pretty clear that the iPhone screen was increased in size to help them compete against Android for "feature shoppers" (people who just look at numerical stats of phones, rather than try them and judge which they like better). This is probably the majority of smartphone shoppers, although Apple has traditionally primarily targeted the "experience shoppers" (people who actually know that they prefer Apple products rather than just chasing the newest/lightest/fastest/thinnest phone).
I don't personally think the top-left is hard to hit, but all apps I've seen that have a "back" button there (including third-party apps) also let you swipe right-to-left across the top bar to perform this action.
