Recently, while using RedNote (小红书) on my iPhone 11 (iOS 18.7.8), I noticed a particular behavior: upon entering the app, the Home indicator at the bottom dims. When attempting to swipe up from the bottom to exit, the first swipe merely causes the indicator to reappear, while a second swipe is required to actually exit the app. I wondered whether this was a measure to prevent accidental touches or a tactic to boost user retention.
I then tested this gesture repeatedly across various pages, and the results followed a consistent pattern. The four top-level pages accessible via the bottom navigation bar (Home, Market, Messages, and Me) all required two swipes to exit. In contrast, other pages, such as post detail pages and video pages, could be exited with a single swipe. In other words, this behavior aligns perfectly with the presence of the bottom navigation bar and appears unrelated to whether the content is immersive.
Apple’s Developer Documentation describes properties for automatically hiding the Home indicator (prefersHomeIndicatorAutoHidden) and for deferring system gestures at the screen edges (preferredScreenEdgesDeferringSystemGestures). While the behavior I observed is consistent with the effects of these mechanisms, I cannot confirm exactly which API RedNote uses, and developers’ opinions on the specific roles of these APIs differ, so I will focus here on the behavior itself. Furthermore, such mechanisms are commonly found in full-screen games to prevent accidental touches, a use case that is entirely legitimate.
So, is the goal to prevent accidental touches? That argument holds some weight: in masonry layouts, users frequently swipe near the bottom of the screen, so deferring the gesture could reduce accidental exits. However, this explanation falls short because the video page, where accidental touches are most likely, does not implement this feature. Could it be a deliberate attempt to increase the “cost” of exiting? That explanation is also incomplete, as the Messages and “Me” pages, which are not part of the recommendation feed and offer no obvious retention benefit, also require two swipes. Since these four pages correspond to the four bottom tabs, this behavior could stem from a unified setting at the navigation container level that each tab inherits, or it could be a deliberate design choice for these top-level pages. Based on observation alone, it is impossible to tell these two possibilities apart.
At this point, it is helpful to view the issue through the lens of UX behavioral research frameworks. Gray et al. (2018) compiled 118 practitioner-identified cases of deceptive patterns and categorized them into five strategies; “obstruction,” defined as making a process more difficult than necessary, often with the intent of discouraging user action, is one of them. The same paper notes that many design issues are broadly labeled as “deceptive patterns” (or “dark patterns”), highlighting the need for more nuanced distinctions. Mathur et al. (2021) further discuss how to determine whether a design is truly “dark” based on design attributes and normative considerations. Meanwhile, experiments by Luguri and Strahilevitz (2021) demonstrate that design can indeed significantly alter user choices; although their study focused on different scenarios, I borrow that conclusion here.
Applying this framework, I would not characterize this phenomenon as “obstruction,” as the underlying intent cannot be proven. Regardless of the cause, however, the impact is real: these four top-level pages are often where users spend the most time and from which they most frequently need to exit. Nielsen’s (1994a) usability heuristics emphasize “user control and freedom,” the principle that users should be able to easily leave an unintended state. While an extra gesture does not eliminate the exit path, it does undermine this principle on the most frequently used pages. For users who rely on gesture-based controls, such as users with limited hand mobility, the cost may be even higher.
If I were to revise the design, I would first clarify exactly which page’s accidental-exit problem the delay is meant to solve. I would enable it only on the necessary pages, keep the default behavior elsewhere, and provide a toggle. When evaluating the design, one should not look solely at retention rates; monitoring user feedback about accidental exits is equally important to determine whether the feature genuinely helps users or merely boosts metrics.
It should be noted that this is an external observation based on a single user and a single primary device. I was unable to reproduce this behavior on another iPhone, a 15 Pro Max running iOS 27.0.1, though I have seen user reports of similar behavior on the new system. Consequently, I cannot determine whether the discrepancy stems from the OS version, the device model, or the app version. Nevertheless, this phenomenon warrants UX/UI improvement.
I cannot see what constraints may lie behind this setting. However, from a design decision perspective, the most important questions to understand are: What problem was this setting originally intended to solve? And what metrics is it evaluated against?
References
Apple Inc. (n.d.-a). Going full screen. Human Interface Guidelines. Apple Developer Documentation. https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/going-full-screen
Apple Inc. (n.d.-b). preferredScreenEdgesDeferringSystemGestures. UIKit, Apple Developer Documentation.
Gray, C. M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggatt, J., & Toombs, A. L. (2018). The dark (patterns) side of UX design. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Paper 534). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174108
Luguri, J., & Strahilevitz, L. J. (2021). Shining a light on dark patterns. Journal of Legal Analysis, 13(1), 43–109. https://doi.org/10.1093/jla/laaa006
Mathur, A., Mayer, J., & Kshirsagar, M. (2021). What makes a dark pattern… dark? Design attributes, normative considerations, and measurement methods. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21). ACM. https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.04843
Nielsen, J. (1994a). Enhancing the explanatory power of usability heuristics. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’94) (pp. 152–158). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/191666.191729
Nielsen, J. (1994b). 10 usability heuristics for user interface design. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/
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