Comment by MBCook
4 years ago
Unfortunately I think they’re very popular with unsophisticated users. I’ve heard stories about companies getting a ton of support emails because someone clicked on an article link shown in $someApp, the user was booted to Safari, and didn’t know how to get back to where they were before.
I’ve heard of developers adding the in-app thing despite hating it personally just to reduce the support burden.
I’m more of GP’s mindset, but I’ve often wondered how many people would become lost the way you describe if my preference was the default. I have the benefit of knowing distinctly when I’m navigating from app to web, but I can relate to being disoriented navigating between different types of views within a given app.
There’s the tiny “back button” in iOS that takes you back to an app which triggered an app context switch, but it’s barely noticeable and barely reachable on most current iPhones. I swipe between apps even when I do notice that. But I’m not sure how widely it’s even known you can swipe between apps.
(For anyone reading who doesn’t know, if you have an iPhone without a home button, you can swipe left/right on the space right at the bottom of your screen, where you normally would swipe up, and it’s like the cmd/alt+tab default. You can also do this on the URL bar in Safari to switch tabs, if you stick with the default bottom URL bar.)
I’m with both of you, but it is a real problem.
I know someone who has no problem getting back to the app they were in, but doesn’t seem to know about/use tabs on their phone. Since tabs don’t auto-close by default they often have hundreds of them by accident that opened one by one when they followed a link in another app like Messages or Mail.
I’m pretty sure they know about tabs on the desktop, though I’m not sure they use them. On the phone it seems to be just a little too “out of sight out of mind”.
The solution here is for the company to make a proper help page explaining that, then respond to all the support emails with a link to the help page.
No need to poison the well for everybody else due to wanting to avoid a "support burden."
My own product/company has a few common issues like this, and the help page strategy works fine. Answering emails for these types of things is not a big deal as long as you have stock answers/pages prepared.
No layperson such as a TikTok user is ever going to read a help article. Much less an error message popup.
If you navigate out of an app iOS adds a ‘back’ link on the top left of the screen automatically. This is not going to cause ‘a ton of support emails’; your stories probably are from versions of iOS when they didn’t do that, which is so long ago I couldn’t even find how long.
iOS makes this very easy where every app launching another provides a link in the top left. I find it hard to believe users of tiktok and snapchat with their weird hidden/discoverable functionality of swiping from different places would have issue with the button that says "< snapchat" at the top.
But ok, let's say I am giving too much credit to people. Just put a setting in to use the default browser for those of us that want it?