[android-developers] Re: Is the 'back' button still kosher?

I can understand the frustration with system changes regarding the options menu, but it really isn't that much work if you are OK with sporting an ActionBar in your app (which most apps should). The menu API works the same, its just that the menu popup behavior now is placed in the ActionBar when using the options menu APIs. This is NOT a reason to make a lot of work for yourself to avoid dependency on the Android APIs. If you used menu XML files and the standard callbacks, you should have almost no work to do in supporting ActionBars, you can even bring the ActionBar to older devices with ActionBarSherlock if you desire consistency across all Android versions.

--kj

On Friday, November 2, 2012 1:11:27 AM UTC-4, Keith Wiley wrote:

My understanding is that modern Android "best practice" is to not use the system-level menu button or system-level options menu anymore since such buttons are frequently difficult to access or even absent on some devices.  I have gutted all menu access from my app as a result (I admit, it is quite tedious to get access to the menus on some devices since you have to tap at least once just to get a menu bar to appear and then again on a menu icon to get the menu...and I'm not sure even that approach works on all of the most modern devices).

What I'm not sure about is whether I can still rely on the standard 'back' button or whether I need to add such functionality to my UI (add a soft button on my screen) on the concern that some devices may not present a usable back button to the user.

Any thoughts on this subject?

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