iOS 26 Solves One-Hand Woes with a Tweaked Back Gesture

At the WWDC 2025 event, Apple announced its latest mobile operating system – iOS 26. And since the Developer Beta is already out, users around the world have been giving the latest OS a try and discovering new things about it. One such thing is a nifty little upgrade for the iPhone's back gestures. 

With iOS 26 Developer Beta 1, users will no longer need to explicitly swipe from the left edge of their iPhones. They can invoke the back gesture from anywhere on the screen, be it the middle or the sides. The only thing to note is that to do so, users will need to place their thumb on a non-interactive UI element. Otherwise, they might accidentally tap on the element instead. 

We gave it a whirl on our iPhone 16e running on iOS 26, and it works as intended. Currently, first-party apps like the Settings app, Contacts, Apple Music, and the App Store all support the tweaked back gesture.

Additionally, the tweaked back gesture works with third-party apps like YouTube as well, although it didn't work with Spotify during our testing. One can expect to see more third-party apps get support for it, depending on how fast developers update their apps accordingly.

To recall, with iOS 18, to navigate to the previous screen, users had to reach the very left edge of their iPhone screen. This hindered one-handed usage, especially since Apple also went from a 6.7-inch to a 6.9-inch display on the iPhone 16 Pro Max. So, this move makes a whole lot of sense.