Some people are still surprised to hear that I’ve chosen a Pixel as my main phone – and that the reason is usability.
Using both iOS and Android daily, I find Android superior in some surprisingly fundamental areas: navigation within apps, notification handling, the keyboard, and clipboard management.
The iOS experience is generally more polished and its animations smoother. But the lack of a consistent back gesture still drives me nuts.
And now, possibly for the first time, Apple has publicly addressed the issue. Craig Federighi was interviewed on the YouTube channel Donald Decodes. The main topic was the iPhone Duo, but Donald also asked some insightful questions about the general usability of iOS and, surprisingly, Federighi answered them.
On Android, if you want to go back or dismiss something, you swipe from the edge of the screen. The spatially logical edge is the left one: the movement on screen follows the movement of your finger. But because the right edge is easier to reach for right-handed users, Android supports that too.
On iOS, the original way to go back was to reach for a button in the top-left corner. iOS 7 finally introduced swipe-to-go-back, but it only works within hierarchical navigation. In other words, you can use it to go back, but not to cancel or dismiss.
Then, in iOS 13, Apple introduced the swipe-down gesture for dismissing modal sheets. But now the two conceptually similar actions use different axes: going back is horizontal, while dismissing a modal sheet is vertical.
And many apps using custom navigation don’t support the back gesture at all. The result is that you can’t develop a simple muscle memory of “swipe here to go back.”
Apple clearly knows the current state isn’t ideal. In iOS 26, it expanded the back gesture so that in some views you can initiate it from farther inside the screen, as long as that doesn’t conflict with horizontal scrolling.
Donald asked Federighi the obvious question: why not simply allow swiping from the right edge to go back?
Federighi, professionally, responded as if this might be the first time anyone had ever suggested such a thing. His explanation was that Apple wants to preserve the spatial mapping between the gesture and the direction in which the interface moves.
That makes sense as a design principle. But design principles also have costs. In this case, the cost is reachability, consistency, and muscle memory.
Still, it was genuinely positive to hear the issue discussed. I hope Apple addresses it more comprehensively in future versions of iOS.
I recommend the short interview if you’re interested in mobile usability. I found it refreshing that Donald asked real questions – and didn’t pretend Android foldables hadn’t existed for years, as some other iPhone Duo coverage has managed to do. What is more, it’s always great to see how Apple executives are not just corporate spokespeople, but actually know their domain in detail.
