Ever since its appearance in Android Pie, I always consider 2 button navigation is a bad attempt by Google trying to play catch-up with the fad generated by the iPhone X. However, due to a bug with A13 QPR2 it had to be temporarily removed and many were not happy about this. So, 2 button navigation users, may I ask why do you prefer this method? To me it makes you do more for the same action whilst doesn’t save any screen space.
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For Android power users like the people on this community, gestures are a no brainer. However for your average user they are undiscoverable and not easy to use. Especially for middle aged and older users.
Hence Samsung uses the 2/3 butto layout by default. My wife is 45 years old and can’t use gestures so she’s using the 3 buttons.
So is every other middle aged+ person I know.
I’ve switched to purely gesture navigation and never looked back. Wouldn’t surprise me if they’d remove 2 button too eventually.
Never understood 2 button navigation, it’s just a lot of wasted space for just 2 buttons. Gimme 3-4-5 buttons to do useful stuff if you’re gonna use the space.
I felt the same. 3 button do the job quicker (a single tap to get what you want) but occupy a part of the screen. Gesture makes you do more but give you back the screen estate. 2 button seems to combine the downside without offering anything advantageous.
Is the amount of screen being occupied by 3 button navigation bar really that big? It’s a few lines of text at most.
Yeah it’s small, but a few phones got burn in from it (my cousin’s LG V30 is one example). Personally I use 3 button on a LCD screen so that’s not a problem for me.
Is burn in still an issue on devices in 2023 though?
I also find the back gesture to be surprisingly convenient. It’s easier to reach, in part because you can reach it from anywhere on either side of the screen. And the gestures from the bottom lets you go back/forward an app, home and also all of the recent apps. And also assistant or an app of your choice by swiping from the bottom corners.
Plus, on top of that, on LineageOS you can also bind a custom action for a second stage for the back gesture if you swipe it further away, like kill app or go back to the previous app. And left/right side from the top for notifications/quick settings, and swipe at the top for brightness.
Zero pixels used for what, 9 different actions? It’s pretty sweet!
I really miss the remappable 5 button nav I had in Android 8…
Dedicated buttons for copy, paste, and undo would be amazing. I don’t think Android has good support for undo though, it would be cool to undo accidental swipes like when you accidentally swipe away a notification, or if you accidentally tap the space around a dialog box and it disappears
Agreed! I’ve thought this for a while. It’s crazy that iPhone still doesn’t have a back button, and it blows me away that neither iOS nor Android have undo or redo.
Ios kinda does have undo via a shake but you could also say it’s not discoverable, slow and awkward. No idea if Android has anything system and not app-lvl though.
I’m not using two-button navigation but there was one nice thing it did in Android 9: you could flip the pill to the right and hold it to scroll through open apps until you’ve reached the app you wanted to switch to (or move your finger left/right to scroll in that direction), and only then lift the finger.
Unfortunately that only worked in Android 9. In Android 10 you could only swipe to the very next app. Not sure why they butchered that carousel navigation; probably to bring it in line with full gesture navigation.
I still have a half working version modded into my Pixel 7 Pro. I like the gesture to go home, but I prefer having a back button because with gesture navigation I can’t use the pullout menus.
For recents (what’s broken, I have to go to the home screen first before I can pull it up) I use it much less frequently and would rather a half swipe to activate.
I really hope the bug gets patched, but I’m expecting it to stop working entirely in Android 14
EDIT; Saw another comment mention the slide on the bottom bar to switch apps, which I also use much more frequently than the recents gesture
with gesture navigation I can’t use the pullout menus
You can. Just tap and hold the edge of the screen
Been using gesture nav for a few days and man this is jank. Many times holding the edge activates a long press action on something on the screen. Worst offender being discord. Only reason I’m still using it is that I’m sure I’m going to lose 2 button nav here in the next update or so.
I’ve been using it for years and never have issues with it. I guess it just takes some getting used to
Most likely, I did some more research into it last night and apparently a two finger swipe or a 45 degree swipe will activate the bar more reliably, both of which are a bit obnoxious. I’m sticking with it for now, we’ll see how it goes!
I personally swipe up/down then away from the edge
