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[4.7] Fix PWA navigation on iOS?


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Before you release 4.7, please consider fixing the PWA navigation on iOS.

If you use the PWA on this site right now, the iOS limitation of no BACK button in the PWA is a major usability issue. The default theme has a navigation button in the top left menu bar, but it always seems to go to the forum listing and not BACK to the topic listing (or the page that you navigated from). 

For example, I like to browse content from the "All Activity" page. But once I view a content item in this listing, there is no way to get back to the "All Activity" page directly. You need to navigate to the page again using some other means (which means multiple taps/scrolling). The button in the top left goes to the forum that contains the topic which is only okay if I came from that forum index page, which is not always the case. This button is not that convenient if you have scrolled to the end of the topic and have to scroll all the way back to the top to see/tap and then it becomes very frustrating to have it always go to the index page (and not the page you navigated from).

I don't want to enable the PWA if the UX is poor, and the missing BACK button is just about the only thing that makes the PWA's UX poor (at least on invisioncommunity.com).

You might be able to force the PWA to open content pages in Safari. If that was done, you could simply tap the "Done" button to exit the iOS built-in browser (Safari) and return to the page in the PWA that opened the content page in the built-in browser. But, maybe simply adding a proper BACK button to the default theme is easiest (especially on content pages or when using the PWA and not the browser). Supporting swipe left/right (as back/forward) on iOS in the default theme might also be another way to "fix" this problem.

See the Discourse PWA for how they chose to handle the missing BACK / FORWARD buttons (only in the PWA). The Discourse app is open source, so you might be able to peek at the Javascript they use to work-around this problem on iOS.

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