Ion-nav-back-button doesn't appear with my project structure?

[brandyshea]

A back button will not show when navigating from a non tabbed state to a tabbed state, there are some issues for this here:

Beta14: Navigating to a page with ion-tabs doesn't have an transition animation

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 …

No "Back" button on certain navigations

So this is because you are going from a tabbed view, to a non-tabbed view. So because tabs can maintain multiple navigations stacks all at once, they tend not to play well with view that are not tabbed views. So what you are seeing is a case where ui-router and our history manager can’t keep track all a multi-stack history view, and a linear history view.

Back button not showing when coming from nested pages (tabs)

Hi, after rereading this closed issue I think this is not a problem but the expected behaviour. The back button is displayed if the the user goes from Tab A->Parent view to Tab A->Child view (same tab). If the user goes from Tab A to Tab B->Child view, the back button must not display. The reported problem in that issue (the user goes from Tab A to Tab B->Child view and can’t navigate up to Tab B->Parent view) is working fine at least in the latest version.

There’s a large github issue on this here:

bug: No view transitions when going to/from tabs

Unfortunately, we will not be fixing it in 1.0 because of the limitations of ui-router. Fortunately, Ionic version 2.0 supports this and it is currently in Alpha: Announcing Ionic 2.0 Alpha - Ionic Blog