Most iOS apps allow navigating back in a menu by swiping from anywhere on the left edge of the screen towards the right side of the screen. Without this it makes it especially difficult to navigate the app using one hand (not to mention the tiny back button tappable area)
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I don’t understand what is taking Apple so long to just make this a universal gesture like it is on Android. Once the majority of apps start supporting it themselves, then that should be a wake-up call to Apple to just make it universal.
I brought this up this issue with Wyze in a previous AMA:
“Since the Android and iOS apps always have some slight differences because of how they program and compile and have different API options and limitations, other slight differences, how do you decide which differences are okay and which are not? Where do you draw the line? Also, would you consider adding a feature specific to one and not the other if it helped make the overall user experience and usability more identical overall? For example, Navigating “Back” often feels different for Android and iOS users. Android users are able to universally easily swipe left or right from the side of the screen to go “back” in the Wyze app which is a really great experience, and while this is possible to do in iOS as well on lots of apps, we can’t do it on the Wyze app currently because iOS requires each app developer to allow/implement this on their specific app. How difficult would it be to program something like that so that both apps have similar navigation and user experience? Would you consider doing something like that so that the user experience is more similar for everyone? Why or Why not? And related to having to keep up with both iOS and Android, how do you do this? Do you program everything for one of them first and then port the updates to the other? Do you have a program that just compiles the same code one way for Android and then converts it the other way for iOS? How do you make sure both apps are kept up the same?”
It is a trade off between total unification and following UX guidelines of the OS. Navigation is a good example, iOS provides navigation only over UI where Android has hardware buttons. We are unifying most of the user experience but for some features it is not possible to totally unify due to system restrictions and limitations e.g. VoIP and PiP. - u/WyzeMaximK
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this gesture is patented by google it won’t be available ever on ios system wide.
on some individual apps it is available.
it would be more useful you fix back button tapping and landscape.
in landscape i press events, press event and app switches to portrait, to get back landscape i have to go to live view and select full screen but then it switches upside down landscape when power connector is on the left side.
when power connector is on right there is no upside down effect but i have ipad mounted on wall and power outlet is on the left of ipad.
not to mention very inconvenient to remove ipad from wall when screen orientation goes crazy, just to see app screen properly
If you have a source for this, please provide it (I’d be sincerely interested). I am extremely confident that this is not the case. If anyone has a patent for it, it is Apple. One of their swiping gesture patent groups (of which they’ve submitted several) included talking about a back gesture from the left of the screen. But that group of parents they submitted was determined by at least one international court to be unenforceable.
Honestly, people can patent almost anything, but a lot of patents are unenforceable junk. Overall, the back-swipe gesture (and most gestures) is considered to be a generic gesture that is not covered by any valid patents. This means that any company can use the back-swipe gesture in their products without fear of infringing on someone else’s patent rights.
If Google indeed had that patent (which they don’t as far as I can tell searching for it), then I guarantee that no company would be allowed to implement it on their app in iOS, so there would be no point asking Wyze to implement it. If Apple can’t do it, then Wyze wouldn’t be allowed to use it on iOS either anyway.
The biggest legal tell that Google does not own the patent and that Apple could implement it is that lots of other companies have been allowed to use it in their own app on iOS which Google wouldn’t allow if they actually had control over that feature.
So Wyze (and Apple) could implement it. It would just add another layer of coding differences between Wyze’s Android and iOS implementations that they indicated hesitancy to do in general. I think it is worth doing to improve the user experience though. It’s become a good standard.
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I’d also be surprised if Android has a patent on this to where Wyze couldn’t use it. Apple itself uses this behavior in its own system settings app navigation.
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Yep, almost all apple apps or apps using apple templates have that back swipe gesture.
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Make sure to vote on this wishlist request.
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