I’m not trying to be dismissive of an obviously shitty practice but do people not understand how a back button works?
The swipe in is a system input for back action. It works on every app and between apps, and it works anywhere on the right side of the screen, instead of having to reach wherever your app back button is, if it’s not collapsed and has to be scrolled in to view as well.
If you look at the screenshot, it doesn’t even have a back button. Only a close button. Whether they navigated or not is not clear, but likely won’t change the header controls in this view.
Is this some kind of iOS thing? Screenehot looks like Android… My phone does not have a universal swipe action for backing out of apps (swiping left to right or right to left are app dependent on what they do), and you can also make the bottom control buttons never hide themselves.
Do you have android 10+? Than you should find something like “gesture control” in your options. This replaces the buttons at the bottom (back, home, apps) with gestures
- swipe from the left or right edge towards center -> back
- swipe from the bottom edge towards center
-> home - swipe from the bottom edge towards center and hold -> show open apps
- on homescreen, swipe upwards anywhere besides the bottom edge -> app drawer
I don’t use smart phones a lot, so feel free to disregard my opinion. But to me, swiping to the left means “next”, like turning a page in a book. If you wanted to leave the site, you’d go ‘back’ to where you came from, which means swiping from left to right to me.
That’s pretty much the standard.
- On iPhones and iPads, swipe from the left to go back. In a book on such a device, swipe from the right to go forward.
- On eReaders, particularly Kindles, tap on the right side to go forward; tap on the left side to go back.
- On Android with gestures enabled, swipe from the left side to go back. Or… swipe from the right side to go back. Counter intuitive but apparently at least one person uses that.
Assuming OP has standard gestures enabled, they could still swipe from the left side.
Right-handed android user. I shan’t be reaching across my screen with my right thumb to use my gestures “correctly”.
It is almost like this is why we had originally decided to put navigation buttons at the very bottom of the screen where they are easily accessible both by left- and right-handed users.
And then larger and larger “handheld” devices made that physically awkward as people tend to hold their phone near the middle to balance the weight and oh look my thumb doesn’t reach the top or bottom anymore!
Is this a tiny hands problem I’m too normal to have?
No.
