So the first thing is going back. And there's a main differentiation between this navigation button because 1
on Android on the left it is a hardware button and on iOS it tends to be placed in the top left corner. 2
Now these two buttons even though they both essentially navigate back, 3
they actually work quite differently because on Android the nav back button is a time based navigation. 4
So it will take you to the previous screen that you saw. Just like when you're on a website when you 5
click the back button 6
it'll take you to the previous web page, on Android 7
the nav back button takes you to the previous screen historically in time. But on iOS the nav back button 8
is not navigating back in time but it's actually navigating up the hierarchy. 9
So the equivalent would be say if you went from the home page to a particular page then from that page 10
you navigated to another page on the same hierarchy. 11
When you click the back button when you're on this page instead taking you back over here, the back button on 12
iOS would take you up hierarchically i.e. it would take you back to the parent screen or the homescreen 13
in this case. 14
So it's really important to think about how you're going to design your app in terms of its navigation 15
taking into account these differences. Next is navigation. 16
Now we mentioned this briefly about tab bar controllers versus the hamburger menu. 17
Now the hamburger menu is so called because somebody thought that the three lines make it look like 18
a hamburger. 19
Now you may or may not disagree. 20
But essentially one of the most common ways that you'll see navigation occurring in Android apps is 21
through these hamburger menus 22
and when you tap on them, a menu slides out and you can pick and choose which screens you want to go 23
to. 24
And on iOS, 25
traditionally it's been done using a tab bar controller which resides at the bottom and it can only contain 26
a maximum of five items because otherwise it would be hard for the thumb to actually navigate it. 27
Now this brings up a point of contention because a lot of designers really hate this hamburger 28
menu style and with good reason. Because with that button they even though you know that the menu is 29
accessible with just a single tap, as with all things human, when it's out of sight it's out of mind. And 30
users don't tend to think to look into it when they need a certain functionality. 31
And so a lot of designers have gravitated to a slightly different design pattern for Android navigation. 32
And, instead you see a lot of designers implementing something a bit like this where you've got a tab 33
bar by swiping left all right you can navigate between the different screens. 34
An example of that is the Twitter app on Android. 35
So have a look at that 36
if you're interested in implementing this in your app.