In addition to this, any page outside of the tabs navigation structure has issues with displaying the back button, presumably for reasons related to the lack of animation.
For example, my app has a dashboard as the first screen with no tabs. From the dashboard you can tap an icon to go to any tabbed page. For this example, say I tapped ‘News’. News has a list of articles which you can tap to see the full article. When I navigate to a full article the back button is not visible until I navigate to a different tab and then back again to News. It is very strange behaviour and is not limited to me, David Chen also has this issue in the comments on this blog post: https://blog.nraboy.com/2014/12/understanding-tabs-ionic-framework/
This is a pretty major problem for us, it has caused us to have to ditch ionic on several projects. I agree that forcing UI practices on us is not welcomed.
EDIT: Since writing this I’ve come up with a temporary solution; use modals to create views outside of the tab structure.