I've never understood the hate for the "Hamburger button". It's here, it works fine and doesn't hurt anyone.
Some options just don't need to be in the face of the user 100% of the time. Why do I need a "setting/more" button at the bottom of the screen all the time?
I can understand, it's often overused. Some applications would be better by using "tabs", some would be better by just placing the most-used buttons somewhere in the screen when you can always watch them. But why not doing both? Put your most-used features in an easy and discoverable position, hide stuff that the normal user don't need often in the hamburger button (A good example for that is the Play Store, the slide menu has a link to settings, an about, and the user picker to switch user).
Also, the proposed solution is to have an auto-hiding tab bar. Please, please, think twice before implementing this. It's really annoying to have something popping up and disappearing when I'm interacting with your applications, and not with your menu.
The Hamburger button has the advantage of staying to his place until the user decide to interact with it. This kind of tab bar instead is almost random. The user has to scroll up/down to show/hide it, which one already do when interacting with the applications. Also every applications seems to do it slightly different, so pulling up half of the screen might be enough in one, but not enough to show it in a different one.
So, the hamburger button might be horrible, but the tab bar is worse, at least in my opinion. The user interact with it more just because it's getting more annoyed by it.
As an additional note, see the recent Google+ for Android redesign, which removed the hamburger button. Now it has two bar at the top of the screen which disappear/appear while scrolling, occupying almost 1/5 of the whole screen. Plus a "+" button hovering the content all the time. The general consensus (at least, the one I've heard) is that it's a terrible upgrade.
In regard to the Google+ for Android "redesign".. Roman Nurik confirmed, this morning, that the navigation drawer pattern isn't going anywhere anytime soon. [1]
Also, if any devs are thinking of including a bottom tab bar for their Android apps, please don't. [2]
The navigation drawer is ergonomically equivalent to the deprecated "dashboard," except for touching to the right of the drawer to dismiss it. It looks a bit better, but it works just as poorly, being a place where you can do nothing but go to some other place.
As for the warning against using a "bottom tab bar" that's an iPhone idiom that should not be carried to Android. BUT Android has a split Action Bar option that is an Android-kosher way of displaying commands along the bottom of handset-sized layouts, and automatically putting them in the top action bar on large tablet-sized layouts.
The screen shot next to the "bottom tab bar" discussion is a bit confusing. It does not actually show tabs in an action bar, as the caption indicates it should.
Who cares what performs better in user tests, right? User behavior is clearly imaginary, you should just do what Google tells you to in their design documentation, because it's 'consistent', regardless of whether it makes it harder to use your software or hurts your revenues so you can't pay salaries. Consistency is most important!
"It's here, it works fine and doesn't hurt anyone."
Do you have any stats that shows it works fine? Do you have any stats that shows it doesn't hurt users (not understanding navigation or not able to complete their task)?
Cause what I see is you basing your view on this pattern and generalizing a statement for all users.
Oh, that's sure better. I missed the "persistently" in the article, my mind automatically assumed that it was auto-hiding (must be the late hours).
Anyway, I still don't agree that it's always better than a sliding menu. Sometime it is (when you use it exactly as you would use tabs), sometime it isn't (when you use it to show options that nobody really cares about) and sometimes both can easily work together (when you have tabs and options). It's just bad advice to say "don't even think about it, just kill the hamburger button and switch to tabs already".
There is a reason is we still have menu on the desktops (even if the trend lately seems to kill them), which is because those "mostly useless" options aren't that useless 100% of the time, and it's always good to have them somewhere that doesn't occupy space.
Some options just don't need to be in the face of the user 100% of the time. Why do I need a "setting/more" button at the bottom of the screen all the time?
I can understand, it's often overused. Some applications would be better by using "tabs", some would be better by just placing the most-used buttons somewhere in the screen when you can always watch them. But why not doing both? Put your most-used features in an easy and discoverable position, hide stuff that the normal user don't need often in the hamburger button (A good example for that is the Play Store, the slide menu has a link to settings, an about, and the user picker to switch user).
Also, the proposed solution is to have an auto-hiding tab bar. Please, please, think twice before implementing this. It's really annoying to have something popping up and disappearing when I'm interacting with your applications, and not with your menu.
The Hamburger button has the advantage of staying to his place until the user decide to interact with it. This kind of tab bar instead is almost random. The user has to scroll up/down to show/hide it, which one already do when interacting with the applications. Also every applications seems to do it slightly different, so pulling up half of the screen might be enough in one, but not enough to show it in a different one.
So, the hamburger button might be horrible, but the tab bar is worse, at least in my opinion. The user interact with it more just because it's getting more annoyed by it.
As an additional note, see the recent Google+ for Android redesign, which removed the hamburger button. Now it has two bar at the top of the screen which disappear/appear while scrolling, occupying almost 1/5 of the whole screen. Plus a "+" button hovering the content all the time. The general consensus (at least, the one I've heard) is that it's a terrible upgrade.