> Universal back function: It’s great having a global “affordance” for the super-common thing that people want to do. It works well, too: its meaning subtly changing in the right way, depending what you’re going back from.
Funny, I always hated this. I could never figure out just where the back button would take me.
Agreed -- I use an iPhone, but I have a couple of Android tablets at home, and I find this super annoying. It appears not just to be dependent on the app state, but also the path to get there; sometimes navigating into an app through the task switcher means that back will take you to the app you were just using, sometimes it means that you will tell the current app to go back.
There are too many contexts where "back" doesn't make sense or have a single meaning to make including it as a hard button rather than in the app chrome a good decision.
Funny, I always hated this. I could never figure out just where the back button would take me.