> I thought most phones eventually moved to a software back button.
The Android OS implements the software back button, not the apps...and it's always at the bottom of the screen where I can easily reach it. iOS does not implement any such back button - each app has to implement its own and the convention on iOS is to place that back button all the way in the upper left corner of the screen which is very inconvenient to reach for.
> I have no idea what you're talking about. (re: organizing icons)
So, let's imagine that you have 3 app icons on one of your home screens in iOS...
Can you put one of them in the lower right corner? Nope.
Can you put one of them all the way on the right side while the other 2 stay on the left? Nope.
Can you do anything to position them absolutely? No you cannot.
You must resort to jailbreaking or other hackery (like blank icons) to make this work.