Why isnt their a universal Jump-Back type button/gesture? ↰ ↢ ↶ ↩ ⃪⃔
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A
would be nice 
However, for all I know there already is one but I don't know about it yet.I'm not sure what a functionally complete set for mobile devices is, but having that universal back button on car dashboards, remote controls for media boxes, Android and iOS phones makes me feel like it's part of any functionally complete set.
I'm getting by without it, so that may prove me wrong, but I have run into many instances where I had a desire to jump one screen back in an app and couldn't. Instead, I just close the app and start over.
I see the value in having more screen available for all the device's useful functions by not devoting the space to the typical Android 3-bottom soft-buttons. This is why I said something about a gesture instead of a button.
- A tight triangular 3-fingertip swipe from right to left
- A single finger swipe starting at the base outside the screen and curving to the left side off of the screen
- A touch onto an inactive part of the screen that then travels up to the top left corner off of the screen
- An angry shaking of the phone oscillating from right to left
- A side of hand swipe across the screen from right to left
I have no idea how computationally expensive it is for the OS to be waiting for a gesture, so I realize these ideas might be wishful thinking or just crap.
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There is no universal back button in the UI, because it is designed not to have one.
Apps that need back functionality in their apps should implement something to do so, and not rely on the OS or hardware to provide it externally. What app are talking about which does not provide a way to return to the previous view?
The main problem with system gestures which aren't locked to the edge of the screen, is that this takes away gesture opportunity for apps themselves, and creates conflict for gesture handling between the shell and apps. So we don't have global system gestures which work this way currently.
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It was the Dekko 2 that got me recently, but the others I can't remember at this moment. I'm guessing that in the future, I should ask each app's forum as the situation arises.
In Dekko I was floundering a bit at my first go during IMAP account setup because the account I was putting in is served from home and uses MailGun for SMTP and I was struggling with precise settings. The infinite loop was authentication failure settings screen. (hindsight was I needed to flip the switches for “Allow untrusted certificates”) I had no way to abort the attempt by going back one screen, just closing the app.
After I got my PEBKAC problems sorted out with setting up a couple of accounts, I was bugged by the same app when navigating into a specific accounts folder set. If I enter a subfolder in the set there is no way to go back one screen directly to the list of folders for that specific eMail account. Not a big issue, just that it was expected but not available.
My overall experience is wildly happy and borderline evangelical about UBports.
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@dobey I'm going to be giving the app maintainers the suggestions as they arise, but the uNav was another one I wanted that back button for.
https://github.com/costales/unav/issues/4
Thanks though for straightening out my thinking.
