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It's not that the behavior is unclear, it's that going back is not always what you want to happen.

Sometimes, you jump directly into an app, but then, you want to do other things inside that app; since the back button normally is used to move up inside an app, it's not always obvious how to do that (and it's sometimes not possible at all).

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It actually doesn't move up. It always moves back, just like the back button on the browser. If you want to move "up" that is handled by the developer's UI preferences.

Android doesn't know what the correct "up" activity would even be. Unless they've changed that in 3.0, I have only used the 2.2 and 2.3 sdks.

"Back" is normally used to move "up" because most of the time, "back" and "up" are the same thing.

Possibly true, but users don't expect the back button to move up, they expect it to move back. In the web browser if you click on a link from HN and then hit back you don't expect the browser to direct you to the parent domain, you expect it to return to HN.

The web browser is a different case than something like the Gmail app, or the Kindle app.

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