So i am busy working away building a cross platform, phone and tablet, android and iOS experience and need some input. I don’t have an iPhone so i don’t have alot of personal experience to draw from. I know i could read the apple human interface guides to tell me how the back button should work, but i want to hear for actual users of apps.
Here is my app with the default out of the box back navigation, to me that top bar looks ugly as, now on android i am able to just remove the bar and rely on users having been trained for years to use the hardware back button, on iOS if i remove the bar completely the default behaviour is to swipe in from the left side to navigate back.
Is this a commonly known/used interface pattern? If i keep the bar, match the colour and remove the back text it looks better to me, but is that something that people are familiar with? other ideas/suggestions are welcome.
(note i know that design wise everything looks terrible, most of the UI is placeholder at the moment)
Yes. I use several apps with this behavior.
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There may be some apps that do this, but I feel that they’re definitely in the territory of non-standard oddballs. Even in highly customised user interfaces, there’s at least some indication that back is to the left. In the absence of the back indicator arrow, I would expect some sort of slide-over menu. The only exception may be if you present no other information in that header area.
Whilst it may not look good to you, I think it’s generally better to provide at least a bit of hinting to the user. The only case where I’d say it’s safe to go wild is if you know your users will be highly-experienced and more accustomed to purely-gestural interfaces.
So it may be okay to unify the colour and even remove the ‘Back’ text, but I would leave the back arrow at least. Depending on the content, it may be safe to hide the extra bits as you scroll up the content.
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Yeah I was definitely going to keep the arrow indicator, I think I will keep it persistent at the top rather then remove the bar on scroll.
At the moment I have no other planned content for the header area other then back button indicaton, so I need to experiment with what feels right.
I am trying to experiment with just treating glass as glass, and developing a consistent experience while also feeling platform native, it’s surprisingly hard.
Good luck! I don’t envy you making the decisions; it’s much easier to sit here and spout off opinions 
Platform native would definitely mean having that top bar. Most apps use it for the same [Back – Title – Edit] set, but there’s some play. Looking through most of my apps, I can only find a couple that break with this in any extreme way though, Safari being the most notable.
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It’s standard, expected behavior. If you support swipe gestures, that’ll be even better.