Love the mockup! Believe it or not we started with almost EXACTLY that. But we did find that the home bar steals some of the taps right below the bar, so we went with the semi-circle above it to avoid this issue. I do wish we were able to go with that simpler bar though.
And yeah I do think we will experiment layering on tap/hold alternate action and spring loaded item dragging into it.
One piece of friction and slight downside of the tap home bar to go back is it’s an extra step to go back from the text entry state, when I’m writing a todo I like to starting pulling down to go back in one fell swoop, without having to dismiss the keyboard. Can’t do that anymore.
Wow uh… I had no idea that was even possible. I mean I swear I am like designing lots of this app and the original and I had no idea! (Am aware you can slide the keyboard down and away to cancel out of a new item, but not that you could keep dragging to go back.) I guess when we’re designing a sandbox even as tiny as this there can be some emergent behaviors and interactions I didn’t anticipate 
The muscle memory is strong! I think I will get used to it eventually however I would prefer the choice
Here’s another emergent behavior I found recently, I can still pinch to go back. Not sure if this was intentionally left in or not with the switch to tap to go back, but I guess pinching to go back works as a secondary action too lol
One question that’s been on my mind is what the rationale for this change? Am I reading this right in that you are exploring a better interaction for going back in apps in general? if so, I think I see what you mean here, the home bar lets you switch between apps, and go home, but what if it could act as a back button within iOS apps? Kind of like Androids back button?
Yep pinch back has been left in for now.
We’re not trying to propose some universal back gesture for other apps to adopt or anything, it just keeps bothering me that I feel both pull down to go back and pinch shut are not perfect solutions… in the way that our 3D Touch to go back kind of felt perfect. I was totally ready to go all-in on that one until Apple phased it out.
That said this new gesture is certainly not perfect either. We’ll see what combination we ship. A new concept of personalizable gesture shortcuts may also come into play.
Initial impressions from a few days with it:
) to go back are all pretty “big” gestures to navigate back — just like swiping right to go back, they are hard to miss and easy to get right. I think the best example is imagine trying to go back while driving your car (not endorsing that) or holding a kid in your arms — it is super easy to go back with a “big” gesture and it’s quite difficult to get this option of tapping above the home button correct. A bigger hit spot would help but understandably that is tough when in a long list.Yep I basically agree with all of this. We will bring back pull back to go back in the next TestFlight build as well as continuing to test this gesture with you all.
Love this. It took me awhile to get used to but definitely faster.
It took me a while to get use of the function I was still pulling down to go back .
A 3D function would also be nice to use in clear ore frequently when you plan a todo
The semi circle tap for some reason looks androidy 
. But i love this gesture. maybe the animation can be changed to not look like android ripple effect.
I’ve tried to love this gesture but I’m afraid that I am not a fan 
I find I accidentally create a new list item more times than not. The downward swipe was great as you could do it anywhere on the screen and felt intuitive. Would be great if this could be an optional gesture
I have to say, this “tap above home bar to go back” feature is not for me. I just can’t break the muscle memory of swiping down to go back. Every time I try to go back I start by swiping down, and it does nothing, which makes the app feel broken to me. Aside from that, it’s an inherently difficult to discover UI interaction. It does also seem to interfere with creating a new task at the bottom of a list. Also, maybe this is just me, but the tap above home feels un-Clear like/out of place relative to the app’s other behaviors.
I will grant a couple things though. The swipe gesture takes time to use if you’re at the bottom of a long list, and this new tap above the home bar circumvents that issue, and it’s quite fast. Also, I don’t see any reason why the tap couldn’t be an optional setting. From an accessibility standpoint, extra options are always good.
I’m not saying that the swipe gesture couldn’t or shouldn’t be rethought. I’m just saying the tap to go back button feels like the wrong solution to me, despite its merits. I would be curious to see if anyone has other ideas for jumping out of lists.
I like the tap above their home button but occasionally I’ll use the pinch fingers together (top and bottom) to jump to the previous list. Does that gesture help any?
I forgot about pinching outward to go back! This is a good gesture, but only downside is it can’t be done one-handed (well, not comfortably anyway lol).
Although I previously posted early in the thread how much I find the new tap method easy and intuitive after using it for some time now I have to say….
I mentioned that using the tap to go back will free up the old swipe gesture for future uses but I’ve now realized that not only is that a plus but also, if you have a very long “page” full of notes and todo’s that require scrolling several times to reach the bottom this will save A TON of time over the old swipe to back out method. No more scrolling forever all the way back up to the top several times and then an extra swipe to back out to the previous screen.
I think the tap back makes those situations much easier and more efficient.
Hope all that bla bla made sense 
I hate to be that guy, but take it from me as someone who recently studied UX, like, literally and on a PhD setting, where we learn all sorts of important principles regarding the scientific method, biases and whatnot.
When it comes to such deep-level functionality, such as basic navigation, it shouldn’t be the case where people here, who already enrolled on a Beta, should dictate how your app should work, because there’s already a huge amount of self-selection bias going on. Beta testers who are going out of their way to test your app for free, and not random paid testers taken out from the street, will generally be more tolerant of non-standard UX behaviours that will leave the latter scratching their heads. Also, and ideally, your tutorial should feel more like an afterthought and explain some truly novel and unique concepts like pinch-to-add-items-in-between, but not essential navigation gestures (not tapping a tiny, unlabeled target), which even a child should be able to figure out on their own.
Back to numbers, and TL;DR: if you get 1% of power users – us – complaining, that may very well conflate to 30% or more of regular users hating it upon release and not even bothering to tell you why (most regular users hate questionnaires and can’t be bothered to give out reviews, especially if they’re offered a free trial activated through an in-app purchase). You won’t just be catering to those old Clear users relearning to use the new app and unlearning the muscle memory acquired from the old one, but also to iOS users at large, constantly fighting an ongoing and very much alive muscle memory from using all other apps on the platform daily.
And that includes… me! In my case, I’m a bit of a hybrid because I haven’t been using either of Clear’s versions much lately, but I had used the Beta some time ago (including this latest update), then I went back to old Clear, and today I saw the update to the latter and, since I had completely forgotten about how to do it on new Clear, went about trying everything other than the non-standard and non-discoverable method you came up with, thinking the app must’ve been broken, that the migration from the old app (which it offered to do again, and I accepted) had gone wrong and corrupted its database, etc. I felt like we were, together, a textbook case that should’ve been recorded and used in reference books as an example of what one should not do, and I consider myself an advanced and adept mobile and desktop OS user. If I, of all people (an advance Beta tester for much larger companies and professional apps, with signed NDAs and whatnot), could be made to feel stupid while using yours, or think it was outright broken, I can only imagine how some of my older family members would feel and what they would think if they picked it up after a few months of not using it and weren’t, thus, offered the intro tutorial again (by the way, the little mental exercise I just did can and should be fleshed out formally in the way of creating actual personas; it’s supposed to elicit more empathy on developers and help them figure out – yes, without necessarily even having any contact with said personas, by way of anticipation and simulation – shortcomings in their offerings)… 
Interestingly, even old Clear suffered from this problem, and it seems they’ve implemented a non-functional reaction to edge-swiping, as if to tell the users that “nope, that doesn’t work here” and nudge them towards the swipe-down-to-go-back one, but hey, at least those gestures were fun (aural feedback plays a huge part in that, but the gestures themselves are, too), and you did get constant visual feedback on what they did, kind of like a permanent tutorial.
You now have a prime opportunity to “fix” Clear, but you’re clearly choosing the worst possible path, and it makes me fear for the future of the app. It’s almost as if you were given the keys to an 18-wheeler and you just have a regular car driving license, i.e. that you were made custodians of an app that did make use of novel and risky UX without really understanding what going down that route entails and how miserably it can fail if not done properly. Please dust off the ol’ UX manuals and go back to ground principles, because it seems like you’re missing the forest from the trees and getting too cavalier here, by outsourcing responsibility to your testers instead of doing a proper analysis of what is going wrong and extrapolating from there… Data gathering can’t just be quantitative, but also qualitative, and if an issue is serious enough (and in this case, it is, and I guarantee you that I never write these passionate rants about, say, a misaligned input box or something – that’s what screenshots are for ), 20% of direct complaints on core functionality is waaaay too high of a number to gamble the future of your app on.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand: the home bar doesn’t serve any special purpose on any other iOS app that I can think of, and if it can indeed be made to do something other than its OS-wide home button replacement and app switcher functions (and also the off-by-default Reachability setting; that swipe-down gesture to move the top of the screen to the middle, while not as elegant as the tapping home behaviour you came up with may indeed be, is at at least universally useful), please make it optional and in addition to, not in replacement of whatever default method you’re using, precisely to prevent scenarios like the one I’ve just described, when a user may have dropped the app for a few months and completely forgotten that whiz-bang, custom method unique to it…
By the way, I can guarantee you there’s a HUGE swath of potential Clear users, the ADHD persona – of which I’m an example of, yep, diagnosed and all –, who will have bouts of productivity and use a list-making app for months, then drop it, then use it again, rinse and repeat, because making lists is an actual and vital coping mechanism and productivity tool for us – what I’m trying to say is, A LOT of search results for Clear will literally be served to ADHDers after their therapists and psychiatrists recommend that they make lists of some sort –, and forgetting about stuff and having radical fluctuations in productivity and commitment to certain tools and processes is sadly a common theme in our lives as well…
And do you know why I picked Clear, and potentially other ADHDers might, too? Because of its “gamification” and aural feedback, which copy the same dopamine-kick-giving processes typical of mobile games, and even social media apps, except used for doing good and helping people instead of for exploiting addiction, pay-to-win IAPs, their personal data and time, etc… It makes our coping mechanism fun instead of boring, which means it’s more likely we’ll check our lists than doomscroll or waste our time on some random app… That alone should be grounds for you to keep the non-standard swipe gestures (and restore the arpeggio notes!!) of old Clear instead of forcibly making it more standard (and boring) and use edge-swiping exclusively, or something. Maybe I’m dopamine-splaining you your own app, so please forgive me in advance if that’s the case, but it just comes down to these bad signs that make me think you’re not as experienced as, or didn’t communicate as much as you should with the old Clear team (I seem to recall reading somewhere that said gamification was a HUGE and deliberate part of the entire ethos behind Clear, down to the vibrant colour palettes), so please correct me if I’m wrong and prove me otherwise with future updates.
On that note, and before you think I somehow hate what you’ve come up with here (I don’t): your idea is indeed great for large screens, and can indeed be a boon for users with mobility issues who may be unable to tap and swipe (that’s the thing with neurodivergent people and institutional – and real – empathy: we also tend to become little ADA-compliance and Accessibility encyclopaedias, especially if we work in the Design field), so you might as well submit it to Apple as a suggestion for inclusion on iOS and iPadOS; as developers yourselves, especially if your app ever explodes in popularity (and it hopefully will), I’m positive you’ll get better access to the iOS dev team’s ears than the general public. But I guarantee you that should they implement it, there would be some sort of visual, UI affordances if it was to become kind of like Android’s old physical back button, such as half of it being arrow-shaped or something, or being part of an unskippable, system-wide tutorial during device/OS setup, and obviously be available on ALL apps and become part of a lot of users’ muscle memory (and, still, I doubt that it would completely replace visible back arrow buttons on title headers). Discoverability is key, and so is muscle memory and OS-wide UX compliance, so please be patient and don’t try to forcibly out-Apple Apple.
A post was split to a new topic: Get access to new Clear beta
Don’t worry. (I feel a lot of loving worry.) First of all I was the main designer on the original Clear, so you can consider me part of the original ‘old team’.
Let me sketch out our current thoughts and plan.
• Home bar tap, some unique positive tradeoffs and some negatives, rolled out as an experiment so very unpolished, especially in its onboarding to testers, and underdeveloped (e.g. no support for springloaded/moving items between lists via it)
• Pull down to go back, some unique positive tradeoffs and some negatives
• Pinch to go back, some unique positive tradeoffs and some negatives
• Edge swiping in 1.x, some positives but some obvious negatives, look, I wasn’t the one who pushed for this one lol
• 3D Touch to go back, all positive and no negatives, RIP with Apple giving up on it
The new feature that changes the game is personalizable gestures. We’re internally testing and it feels good and further extending a general theme with the new design of it being an even more personalizable blank canvas for you and your lists. We are reserving some side gestures for these actions and thinking about putting the home bar tap (and maybe tap and hold) as options here.
So for example for upgrading legacy users, we could default the back gesture to pinch and pull down, to ease them into the new update, and they could try assigning home bar tap to back or another gesture later. But maybe we further polish the home bar tap and onboard that + pinch to new users if we feel confident at that point about it. We’ll see there, it’s labeled an experiment for a reason!
On dopamine and gamification: there will be some more of this in the new Clear. I’ve always felt the loop of making plans and getting them done has a built in dopamine kick within the cycle, so our app leans into that. The worry with layering on extrinsic rewards tends to be it overpowering the intrinsic pleasure of using the app, but I don’t see that issue with Clear with it being such a useful and pleasant tool to use daily and longterm. It doesn’t get old or boring after enough time like even great video games do. So I feel safe about sprinkling some more of that in.