I installed iOS 9 beta a couple of days back and couldn’t be more surprised by the new “back” workflow while switching apps in iOS. Earlier if you opened a deep link or a push notification of an app, and wanted to return to the previous app/screen, you could do so using the multitask feature (double tapping the home button and finding the app!). This experience was not seamless at all. This is also one of the biggest reason for broken home buttons (See image).

Google Trends — Home button related searches. Interesting point is searches spiked near September every year.’

What is interesting is iOS 9 supports this natively and the app developers won’t have to do a thing to implement it, iOS 9 supports it out-of-the-box. This makes iOS stronger but at the same time is an example of yet another “me too” feature catching up with Android. Android has always supported their back workflow pretty nicely, thanks to their controversial Back and Up button. Let’s analyze this feature in terms of different aspects, shall we?

App Switching — Back Workflow in iOS 9

Usability

This feature is very usable. The button is on top left corner of the screen, which makes it very easy to tap. I have been using it for a couple of days and so far my thick thumbs have a 100 % accuracy in click rate. Some users might be concerned about touch space being small and some might accidentally click on Navigation Bar buttons on left.

Workflow Implementation

Apple certainly did a nice job implementing this feature. It is already integrated with all the deep links in apps so it works out of box for all the apps.

Discoverability

This button is very much visible to any user and they will not spend any time learning this feature. Kudos to Apple for that.

Action Placement

Apple did a smart thing while implementing this feature by not taking any new space. They might have acted stingy by temporarily replacing the Cellular Operator status bar which people don’t want to see all the time. While it looks like Apple is running out of space and didn’t want to introduce a new gesture just for this, a new gesture would have been more confusing and less discoverable.

Conclusion

For a change, Apple seems to be fixing user frustrations and listening to its users. But I feel like this workflow will bring the question back.

Was Google right in having a dedicated back button? Or was Apple right on being adamant about having just one button? Honestly after seeing this workflow in iOS 9, I am starting to feel that back button in Android was not a bad idea after all. I still feel that Apple needs to refine the placement of this button for larger phones like iPhone 6/6+ and 6S/6S+ where user will have trouble reaching this button with just one hand. May be place it somewhere else!