alt Hacker NewsAndroid used to have a dedicated menu key that would always bring up a menu. It was removed to chase Apple's 100% screen design.
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frantathefranta • yesterday at 8:31 PM
Just got nostalgic about the 4 hardware buttons on my Sony Xperia Play: back-home-context(option)-search.
Still the best navigable phone I had when coupled with the Nova Launcher gestures.
Long-press and the ••• menu in the overflow is a far superior UI paradigm than having a purpose built menu button.
90% of the time, even in Android that was pre-Honeycomb, the menu ended up just showing what would have been in the overflow anyways.
Android really did end up doing a lot better on the UX side that iOS with the contextual action bar and long-press to select. The idea of selection mode on iOS is still a weird process, and it's been mostly worked around since with higher PPI screens and touch sensors, instead doing a small area to "select" items on iOS