you’ve been plugged in to the Android community for the past few
months, you have probably seen that there’s been a growing controversy
over the gestural navigation system coming in Android Q. Google’s
implementation of the back gestures essentially breaks the ability to
open up a common feature in apps using a swipe: the left-hand navigation
drawer.
You can still tap the “hamburger” button, of course — and
that’s what more than 90 percent of Android users do, according to
Google — but the 3 to 7 percent of users who slide their thumb over to
open those drawers are finding that a common thing they do hundreds of
times a day suddenly doesn’t work anymore.
That gesture now maps to back, though Google has tried to
make some affordances to make it possible to open the drawer without
reaching up to the button. Those affordances are, well, pretty bad.
I got on a call with a
few Google product managers yesterday to talk about this issue, and I
came away better understanding the company’s reasoning behind these
changes. Later today, the company will also put up a blog post
explaining its thinking. Like much of the Android community, I’m not
sure I fully agree with the changes Google is making. Unlike much of the
community, though, I don’t think Google has gone too far. Instead, I
think Google hasn’t done a good enough job of communicating why it made
these changes and — more importantly — standing behind them.
If you’re not following the Android blogs, you might say
this is a tempest in a teapot. But what’s brewing in this seemingly
small teapot is the future of the operating system used by the majority
of people today — one that’s bigger than the iPhone and bigger even than
Windows. So although it will take some time for Android Q to arrive on
most phones (Android updates are a whole other controversy), it will
eventually.
You hate to see it, especially since it was totally predictable. I specifically worried about it when I received the very first demo for Q back in May.
It was also predictable because, generally speaking, the internet hates
interface change. Twitter’s web redesign is just the latest example in a
long history of hating new layouts. The Android community is
particularly fertile ground for this kind of ire since it’s made up of
technical people with strong opinions on what phones they prefer, which
is a byproduct of having way more options than iPhone users.
There are other reasons beyond the back button that have
caused consternation. The speed and quality of Android’s animations
throughout the beta process hasn’t been great, but I think things have
improved quite a bit over the past few months. Google has also been
tweaking the gesture for bringing up Google Assistant as well as the
visual indicators for that gesture over time. They’re much better now,
but it took a few months to get there.
The beta process itself has also partially caused this
reaction. Google changed the look, feel, and behavior of its gestures
several times over the course of various Q betas, which has led
everybody to wonder where it’ll end up. It also led everybody to hope
that if they express their opinions loudly enough, it will force a
change.
That’s all for the good. It’s how betas work, and it’s
especially how Google’s betas work. A philosophy of openness and being
responsive to user feedback is great, but in this case, Google should
have been clearer in communicating and much more confident in standing
by those changes. By trying to make everybody happy, the company is
achieving the opposite effect.
Let’s talk communication first. I learned a ton from my
chat with Google’s product managers, and I understand some of the
changes far better now. Some of the recent changes could have been put
in a much clearer context.
For example, the latest beta has a “Back gesture sensitivity” option.
Adjusting it changes the size of the area on the sides of your screen
that are sensitive to the back gesture. I assumed it was there as a
response to all of this foofaraw, but it’s not that at all. Instead, the
huge diversity of Android phones out on the market means that some of
them simply have different sensitivities on their screen edges. The
reason it’s a user-facing option and not just a default setting is
because of phone cases. If you have a case that covers the edge of your
screen, you might want to change that setting to make it easier to hit
back.
The other recent addition is a “vertical app exclusion
limit.” Essentially, app developers can choose to have a portion of the
edges of the screen disable the back gesture. Many thought that was
meant for app drawers, but no. Lots of apps have swiping actions like
galleries or sliders that you need to be able to grab all the way at the
edge of the screen. So developers can disable back next to those areas
to ensure the back button isn’t accidentally triggered.
Google also hasn’t been very public in communicating what
will happen with non-Pixel phones and third-party software. Lots of
phones — especially Samsung and Sony — use the edges of the screen for
their own custom features. Google will allow that to continue, but only
if there’s a visual indicator for the sliding action and only if it’s
kept to the top portion of the screen. Similarly, Google’s gesture
navigation system doesn’t work with third-party app launchers yet, but
that’s a technical issue that should get worked out soon.
Communicating all of that more clearly would have
resolved a lot of the complaints, but not all, and that’s where I think
Google should have communicated more forcefully. It’s vitally
important that Google enforce consistency across the entire Android
ecosystem. It can’t allow the core way you get around to be different
across Samsung and OnePlus and Huawei and LG and whatever.
Using gestures to get around is simply better — as long
as it’s well-implemented. There are a ton of benefits to it: it’s more
intuitive and easier than tapping a button; you can make a big, broad
movement instead of hitting a little touch target; you get more screen
real estate for your apps. The iPhone may have popularized this trend in
recent years, but it was coming either way.
Here’s something I learned from Google: the back button
on Android is used 50 percent more often than the home button. It’s a
wildly important feature, so it has to work the same everywhere. That’s
why Google is reserving the entire left- and right-hand sides of the
screen for it. Any confusion with going back would mess with the most
commonly used core navigation feature on the most popular operating
system on the planet.
If Google had simply said that the right and left edges
of the screen were reserved for back, and that was that, we’d have
grumbled and written some hot takes and then, eventually, just accepted
it. App developers would eventually adjust their apps to work better in
the new system, too. If Google is right that fewer than 10 percent of
users even used a swipe to open the app drawer, it would have been
better just to hold the line.
Instead, Google has tried to add a confusing and poorly
implemented “peek” gesture, where you are supposed to be able to hold
your finger down on the edge of the screen to make the drawer “peek”
out, then slide your finger to open it instead of going back. It’s
finicky and should be scrapped.
Google’s decision to allow the traditional three-button
layout as an option in addition to this gesture system is a concession
to everybody who dislikes this new system. But to me, that’s just
another avenue for angst. Android is all about choice, and being able to
choose allows you to imagine something better. A side effect is that
choice can actually make you feel more dissatisfied.
Samsung, OnePlus, Huawei, Apple, and now Google all have
different takes on how gestures work to navigate around on a phone. I
don’t fully know if I think Google’s take on it in Android Q is better
or worse, but it’s obvious that it is necessary. There’s a grammar to gestures on touchscreen computers, and it’s fast becoming our common language for getting around on them. Swipes are replacing buttons everywhere.
And there’s no going back.
Credit - TheVerge
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