In iOS, where/how to do a back button?

Question

Edit: To sum up my question, what is the established back gesture for iOS games (when no pause button exists)?

I have a block puzzle game, square grid, and some levels fill up the whole screen with them. In Android this is no problem because there's a hardware back button. iOS devices, however, have no such thing.

I need some kind of back button to get to the menu, where you can restart, undo, select other levels, go to options page, etc.

I looked at iOS game demos on youtube. All I found was many of them have a pause button in some corner, but this is not a great solution in my case. I could not find a demo illustrating some kind of back gesture, like swiping from the left edge towards the right? Most demos are direct screen captures instead of showing a user and their hands, so I could not confirm this.

I figure most iOS games have adopted some kind of standard practice for this. What is it?

EDIT: I found this article about iOS 7 doing a left-right swipe to go back one page, apparently for safari. This was kinda my first though, because surely there is a back gesture for the back button of web pages? I don't know if this same gesture is standard practice in iOS games, but I put it here because it's my first guess.

Answer 1

The standard practice is to have a button somewhere onscreen to do this. That's because it is obvious, clear and present whenever the user decides they need to pause.

While the swipe / gesture is a nice idea, users will have trouble actually remembering how to pause, when the time comes - remember that they're not going to read the help each time before they play, instead they'll maybe read it just once - when they first play your game. It could be a few sessions before they ever decide they need to pause; by then they've forgotten how. Then again, you could have a loading screen before each level, with a tip showing user how to pause.

In case they have forgotten how to pause using a swipe, they will probably hit the Home button that goes back into iOS, and when they find the game icon and come back in, gamestate should be paused (you'd need to code this explicitly if you haven't already). This is unorthodox as the primary means of pausing, but it may work if you absolutely cannot tolerate a button, since it is in any case standard behaviour for mobile games.

Auto-pause once a certain amount of time has gone by without user input. Whether or not this can be made to work with your game, is down to you.

Have a pause block, or pause tile revealed beneath a vanished block. These can be scattered randomly around. Of course this may trigger unwanted pausing during actual play. You could also have these trigger some sort of an "upgrade / level up screen" that implicitly pauses the game.

Allow some kind of multi-tap (say tap three times in quick succession) rather than a swipe. Again you will have the difficulty of ensuring the user knows how to do this, but you'll be less likely to have the input confusion that a swipe may cause. Maybe something like holding your thumbs on left and right edge of the screen for a second could work well.