Android Q May Change the Back Button To a Gesture (theverge.com)

Android's back button might be going away entirely, replaced with a quick swipe to the left from the home button. From a report: XDA Developers has been digging into a leaked, early set of code from the next version of Android, codenamed Q, and the latest discovery from those forays is this potential demise of the back button, as well as a quicker app-changing animation when you swipe to the right. The way that gestures and buttons work in Android 9 Pie (the current iteration, at least if you're lucky enough to own a phone that runs it) is a little bit split. Google's Pixel has just a home "pill" and then a back button appears only when it's needed.

Here's a quick video XDA made showing the gesture system Google is experimenting with in Android Q. It is, as anybody could have predicted, a little messy. For something as core to a phone as "going home" or "going back," the fact that different phones have different methods could be a problem.

Comments

Re:Buttons

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not easier, they just want more minor annoyances to detract from larger grievances

Re:Buttons

[hey!]

A lot of phone UI changes are not about making phones easier to *use*, they're about making the phones easier to *sell*.

Consider wrap around screens -- do they actually *improve* the functionality of the phone in any way? Or do they exist just to make you say "ooh" the first time you hold it? Or ultra-thin phones -- is a 7mm phone any more convenient, or would you rather have a 10mm phone with 2x the battery?

The very earliest Android phones had a dedicated area with four buttons stenciled on it: back, menu, home, and search. Now there's other reasons they did it this way, but this happens to be the way a UI functionality purist would design the interface. The button row interface is (1) manifest (you see there's a widget there to frob and it gives you some hint of what it's about), and (2) stable (those common buttons are always in the exact same place).

Every change made accessing these functions since that day hasn't been to make the users' lives easier; it's been to impress them when they're shopping for phones. And it quite evidently works, so you can't really blame Google or the phone manufacturers. Consumers get excited by novelty. You'll never get better vendors until you get better consumers.