Make it possible to configure a permanent "back" function

The image you see is not how my app actually looks now but how I would like it to look.

In a nutshell, I wish that I could configure my app so that the back arrow was always available, not just in certain contexts.

In using my app today I accidentally touched one of the buttons on the bottom of the screen. The view I had been looking at was a so-called “ref view,” that is, one to which navigation can be somewhat complicated. That made me really want to have a back button. I my view, the AppSheet platform would be significantly strengthened if such a back button could be made more-or-less permanently available, as in (1) . When “back” doesn’t apply (say, on the opening menu) the back button could be greyed out or not appear.

Currently, “back” and “menu” appear interchangeably: When we can see the menu button, the back button is not available and vice versa. My proposal would make it necessary to give the app developer more control of where the menu button is placed as well. On my app, I’d like to put it permanently in the far left corner of my bottom row of icons, (2). Other developers might have other ideas about where it should go, but it sure would be nice to have control of this too. By the way, putting the menu button at the bottom of the screen would make it possible to label it. Currently, the menu button is unlabeled. That’s fine for those of us who are familiar with AppSheet but a label would be good for novice users.

Finally, it would be nice if the app developer had the option of having the old familiar (and properly labeled) sync button in the far right corner (3), even when changes in the default menu are made. Currently, once we get rid of the share button, we lose the option to have the sync button in this spot.

I have a feeling that what I’m proposing is already a long-term goal for AppSheet. In previous conversations, @praveen has indicated that developer control of all or almost all of the system views is a goal. Still, I thought I’d write this to say that, in actually using my app, I found myself really wanting that control again today.

P.S. I posted about a related issue (that is, how getting rid of the share icon makes other icons appear to be faded) here:

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