Safari broke tap to top for tabs (say it three times fast), and Bear added two-fingers gestures. Ivory – a Mastodon client for iOS – tries a different approach in a slightly different setting.

The normal tap to top gesture works as expected, but tapping the top again returns you back where you were before:

I believe this is meant to be a small gesture of help if you tap to top accidentally, yet I am not entirely sure it’s effective. Would you, in a moment of panic, decide to do the same thing again, after years where every other gesture like this in the entire system taught you those taps are idempotent?

It gets a little bit worse, too. There is another established standard of going to the top – tap the selected tab again. This works across the entire operating system, too. But Ivory changes it, requiring you to tap twice, not once:

I don’t have access to the combined feedback of Ivory’s users, but I am much less of a fan of this than of Bear’s approach, as it doesn’t feel like it comes together as a system.

At the bottom of the screen, the interface teaches you that you have to tap one more time than usual, likely putting in your fingers the idea that you just have to tap many times, especially if you never figure out it’s a double tap and not two taps that trigger the interaction.

But then, at the top, this is how the interface reacts like this when you do exactly the same thing:

It feels like a system that’s well-intentioned, but inconsistent not just with the rest of iOS, but also with itself.