Timeline for Android back button - Global history back, or menu back?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 17, 2012 at 9:53 | comment | added | Lie Ryan | @marcintreder: The back button normally should never terminate the app, Android apps should never bother the user about starting or terminating the app, instead it should give the illusion that the app is never terminated. If an app still has activities that requires any user input, and the OS decides to terminate your app, the app should save its current state and automatically restore it when the user comes back to the application later. Android fans do not know about the function of back as a close app because that's not the normal, expected behavior of apps. | |
| Jan 11, 2012 at 7:19 | comment | added | marcintreder | @Pwepewarrows mind that if the app is going to be closed by hitting the back button I don't want to do it by accident. That's why alert can be saving. In my experience only hardcore Android fans know about strange function of back as a 'close app' (basing on qualitative tests). | |
| Jan 11, 2012 at 3:22 | comment | added | Stefan Kendall | Through my own lack of understanding, I didn't show an alert. I just immediately bound to do nothing. It's an HTML5 phonegap app, so everything is manual. This work is directly based off of requests to "Make the android back button work", so I understand the importance of getting this right. | |
| Jan 10, 2012 at 18:07 | comment | added | Pewpewarrows | If you display an alert to me when I'm trying to close your app, the very next thing I'm going to do is uninstall your app. The only possible reason I could see putting that in is if I'm on the very last step of a mission-critical action. Your app should gracefully handle being backgrounded. Not to mention that there is no such thing as traditionally "closing" an application on Android. Activities are either moved into the background or foreground based on user input. Sure, they can be killed through a task manager (or the recent apps menu in 4.0+), but that's not normal workflow behavior. | |
| Jan 10, 2012 at 16:07 | comment | added | Stefan Kendall | Err. I definitely overlooked this. As soon as the user enters the app, I turned off the back button. I haven't released an update yet, so this is a huge catch. | |
| Jan 10, 2012 at 8:12 | history | answered | marcintreder | CC BY-SA 3.0 |