It varies per game, but my most common use is to replace the thumbstick clicks. I don’t like how it feels to click in the thumb sticks, feels like I’m adding extra wear and tear to them.

In first person games, I’ll often bind jump, sprint, reload, and melee to the back buttons so I can move and aim while performing those actions.

I use the back buttons in Deep Rock Galactic to mirror the A B X Y functions. This allows me to jump for instance without taking my right thumb off of the stick. I have found this is super useful as I can be steering my POV while jumping. Took a minute to get used to but now I absolutely love it.

Rock and Stone, miners!

I use them in place of the bumpers so my fingers can stay on the triggers.

Nothing yet but this thread is giving me ideas :)

In games where combat uses the bumpers a lot I bind the back buttons to that. For the rest of the games it depends on the what I find annoying to do repeatedly and end up mapping that to a back paddle.

For example on Breath of the Wild the back paddle was run which allowed me to run with one hand.

In games that don’t have good auto-save (like Skyrim), I’ll map one of the back buttons to quick save.

I pretty much never use them, don’t have the right hand shape and grip for it.

Some games have button layouts that make certain actions a pain. Two examples.

Horizon Zero Dawn - Healing is by default done by hitting dpad up. You generally want to press this button whenever you take damage to essentially trigger health regen, but doing so requires taking your thumb off the left stick, which means you can’t simultaneously avoid even more damage. Bind to back button, problem solved.

BallisticNG - Weapons are bound to X, discard weapons is bound to B, and accelerate is on A. So when you pick up a weapon, to discard/use it you either have to drop thrust (bad, never do that) or awkwardly shimmy your thumb to either hit X or B without letting go of A. Bind X and B to back buttons, problems solved.

In first-person games, I always rebind the jump to one of the back buttons. Coming from kbm, it weels weird that looking around and jumping at the same time is not possible.

I mostly play modded minecraft on my deck, and they’re really handy for modifier keys or macros that you need to keep active while pressing something else using the front controls

Fast forward in emulators. Also, the menu toggle in Retro Arch.

In Dungeons of Dredmor, an old mouse and KB roguelike, the community made a good layout where every button is mapped to a keyboard key to open the various inventory and crafting windows, etc. With the track pad right there to act as a mouse, it’s honestly just as good as a mouse and KB. Maybe even better.

flappy bappy wise the bottom ones are the joystick clicks, and the top ones are the shoulder buttons (i find my shoulder button pressed to be on the runliable side while using triggers)