So the back button on your browser sometimes takes you back and sometimes dumps you onto your desktop?
Also, sometimes the back button in my browser totally sucks, such as when I click a link to a Twitter message and it decides to totally break my back button so that I have to press 3 times rapidly to go back. I don't want this experience with apps on my phone.
I'd rather that Twitter didn't break my back button. But I see no value in having a global back button anyway. Who should my browser's back button sometimes take me to the previous page, sometimes take me to Microsoft Word, and sometimes drop me on the desktop? Why can't the back button do one thing right instead of a bunch of things kind-of right?
And I would much rather have no global back button on my phone than a sometimes-broken one.
It makes sense with the way Android works. Applications are often interconnected. I can browse to reddit in Browser, click on a YouTube link and open it in the YouTube app, hit share, and open up GMail to send it to a friend. I can then hit back to go back to YouTube, then again to go back to reddit. Believe me, it feels so natural to me now that I find iOS clunky to use without it.
But you can't just ignore the back button, because apps use it rather than providing their own back buttons. You have to use it, and there's no way so far as I know to force to behave in a way I would consider intuitive.
How it would that's intuitive to you? The back button should return you to whatever previous screen you were on -- that's pretty intuitive.
As for applications that get it wrong; that happens on all platforms for all kinds of different features -- it's unfortunate but it shouldn't reflex poorly on the feature itself unless it's particularly hard to implement correctly.
No, it's not the functional equivalent. My phone is not a web browser, and it's broken to try to treat them the same. My web browser's back button never drops me into Office, and it never dumps me onto my desktop. It moves through my web browser's history. It doesn't try to build some awkward linkage between what I've done in my web browser and what I've done outside my web browser.
The idea that you have a linear sequence of "actions" across all apps seems pretty weak in a multi-tasking environment.
If all your applications exist in the browser (say you're a lover all Google apps) then yes the back button in the browser might drop you into your spreadsheet, your email, etc.
Google has simply extended the concept from web apps to regular apps -- and that's hardly a big stretch -- especially when all your regular apps can link to each other.
Actually that's an interesting point, because Google Apps don't do that. If you're in Gmail and you open a spreadsheet, it opens in a new Window/Tab, so that it has an independent history. Ditto if you click on a link in an email. This approach gets you separate histories for your apps. You don't get an awkward single history that links across your mail and spreadsheets and random websites. You get separate histories. The exceptions are when you choose to manually enter a new URL, or if you hit back enough it will take you out of Gmail into whatever you were doing before.
