Brad Ellis, Medium:

The UINavigationBar, navbar for short, has been around since the original iPhone. Historically, navbars have been convenient and clear, easy to understand and easy to build.

The navbar is the strip at the top of your phone that lets you move in and back out of views. As an example, in the Messages app,the nav bar has an Edit button on the left side, the title Messages in the middle, and a create new message icon on the right. If you tap on a message thread, the nav bar will change to a “<” on the left. Tap that “<” and you’ll navigate back to the main view.

Back to Brad’s post:

Then phones ballooned, enough that the iPhone 7 Plus supplanted sales of the iPad mini. Now, if you own a modern iPhone, navbars can feel unwieldy — literally out of touch.

Burgeoning screens mean the distance between the navbar and our thumbs has grown. The screen on a 7 Plus is so tall it would take a thumb-length increase of 150 percent to reach those pesky buttons with one hand. Just another knuckle or two. Nothing weird.

He does have a point. I use a Plus, and when I need to work the navbar, I either have to use my other hand to reach the top of the screen, or do a weird slidey move to work the phone down so I can reach the navbar with my thumb.

iOS does feature that double-touch the home button gesture to bring the top of the phone halfway down, but I find that takes too long, given that I have to also do the double-touch to restore to full screen. The double-touch is my least favorite solution. [UPDATE: Yup, you can tap to dismiss this. Still don’t like it.]

Read the post for thoughts on how Apple is already addressing this issue and steering away from the venerable navbar. Terrific.