Back in 2017, Apple kickstarted a new trend of UI navigation on our phones via dedicated navigation gestures instead of using on-screen buttons (or a dedicated button tucked in the bottom bezel in the case of the iPhones). There’s no denying the fact that there was a somewhat steep learning curve to go through before getting used to the new navigation gestures on the iPhone X. But ultimately, this became the new trend going forwards that all OEMs sought to join. Google had a go at it the following year, though Android Pie’s navigation gestures looked like a hasty attempt to announce Android as a native supporter of gestural navigation. This year though, Google went back to the drawing board and gave it a more serious thought.
Apart from dropping the dessert naming scheme, Google’s new refined gestural navigation was the biggest announcement in the Android 10 launch. It’s fair to say that the reception was fairly positive at first. However, the more I use these navigation gestures, the more I realize some of the fundamental flaws in the way Google adopted this trend.
Let’s begin first with a quick review of the navigation gestures. Swiping upwards from the bottom edge of the screen navigates the user to the home screen. Swiping upwards and then holding midways brings up the Recent Apps view. Unlike iOS, Android users had the luxury of navigating backward via a dedicated on-screen button. And this is where one of the major flaws of the new navigation gestures stems. In Android 10, to go back you have to swipe ‘inwards’ from either edge of the screen. That means that swiping inwards anywhere on the left or the right edge will trigger the gestural navigation system. This is where things go badly wrong for quite a lot of people, as I shall explain below.
While the right edge is mostly free of any UI elements, the left edge is the complete opposite of that. Most apps have slide-over menus that can be accessed by swiping inwards from the left edge, or by tapping on the ‘hamburger’ menu on the top left corner, which requires a lot of thumb gymnastics unless the user succumbs to the fact that human hands are far smaller than the hands of a Gorilla and decides to pull out his other hand to assist with this surgical operation.
With the new ‘inwards’ back gesture overlapping these slide-over side menus on the left edge, accessing these menus has suddenly become a big ordeal. Those who don’t use their phones with one hand that often won’t find it that much big a deal since you could just tap on the hamburger menu icon in the top left corner. However, if you are among the people who used to handle that task with one hand, you’re forced to resort to some workarounds. To evade this almost inevitable clash, you could hold and then swipe inwards on the left edge of the screen. Another workaround is to swipe in an arc-like path from the edge of the screen, which I found to have worked more reliably than the former trick.
Now that pegs the question here, why do the users have to put up with this inconvenience? I think it’s only fair to ask Google to sort out things like these themselves properly instead of relying on our geeky inner self to come up with patchy workarounds. And it doesn’t take that much time to come up with some more elaborate solutions that Google could come up with on their own. For instance, maybe Google could have given us the option to disable this specific gesture on either of the edges. Maybe they could have decided on a specific region to trigger the gesture instead of having the back gesture triggered when swiping inwards anywhere on the entire edge of the screen.
The worst part is that Google is now forcing every OEM to adopt these navigation gestures, even if that means doing away with their own homebrew version. I have been an avid user of OnePlus phones for quite some time before buying myself an Essential PH-1, and among the things OnePlus impressed me with is their navigation gestures. More particularly, I liked the fact that the back gesture was not triggered by swiping inwards from the sides of the screen, rather when swiping upwards from the right or left third of the bottom bezel. The only thing that would clash with it was the keyboard and, to OnePlus’ credit, this didn’t happen nearly at all. But thanks to the presence of Google’s own navigation gestures in Android 10, OnePlus is forced to depreciate its much more refined navigation gestures in favor of Google’s edition.
Now don’t get me wrong, it is not all bad with Google’s new navigation gestures. I, for instance, happen to appreciate the new app switching gesture where you swipe on the bottom bezel to slide through all your recent apps, even though it can be a bit tricky — sometimes the order of the apps gets messed up. I also absolutely adore how Google integrated a new set of animations to go in tandem with the new navigation gestures to make it feel more natural — swiping upwards to go to the home screen is perfectly animated. It may look like I am going a bit too far with my beef with Google since it’s only one aspect I am complaining about. But this one aspect is something all users deal with a lot throughout the day. And for me, this one flaw breaks the deal to me.
Thankfully, Google had the mercy of leaving the user the choice to roll back to either the classic 3-button navigation bar or last year’s 2-button navigation bar (though swiping the pill retains the same swipe-between-all-your-apps behavior of the new navigation gestures). In case you find these two options a bit too archaic to use, you might want to check out this app as an alternative solution.
Featured-Image: The Verge
