Navigation bar or gesture controls?

Xepher@lemm.ee to Android@lemmy.world – 103 points –

Wanted to see how everyone in the community felt about the using the android navigation bar buttons vs using gesture control.

I've used the navigation buttons since they released on android and just recently started trying to use the gesture based navigation. It's been a little difficult for me to adapt to it so far, but curious what others experience has been.

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I started using gestures, and haven't been able to transition away since.

Both have their pros and cons.

It's especially hilarious when, as a Pixel owner, I try to help my spouse with their iPhone, and I immediately get confused/frustrated when swiping on her phone does nothing.

Same here! My wife gets annoyed, scrolling on my phone and accidentally hitting the "back" gesture. So I guess it goes both ways

I use the nav bar. Never got used to gestures and don't need them.

I'm interested in using gestures but I'm on a tablet 98% of the time. I even use a tablet for phone calls and SMS. Gestures feel too much like exercise on a bigger screen.

I still prefer the navigation buttons. I just can't get used to gesture controls

Gestures solely for the edge swipe to go back. It just makes sense and I can never go back. Plus one-handing big phones with the nav bar is tough

The back gesture is fine until it takes me out of an app. I hate that. Sometimes I trigger it unintentionally because I’m trying to swipe in an app but the system picks it up instead.

This stopped happening for me once I lowered the back gesture sensitivity all the way. It was a little tedious at first trying to grab the very edge of my screen, but I got used to it pretty quickly

I'm so used to gesture control now that I struggle to go back when I need to sort out my mum's phone for her.

A navigation bar is so simple, so direct, with little room for error.

It was actually painful and annoying for me to try navigating with gestures after updating Android, to the point where I simply disabled them because someone had the right idea to make them default.

Yet, for me this was peak ->

I want physical buttons back.

To be honest with you, I was a die hard 3 button fan, and an anti-gesture person (cause iOS vibes). After sometime, it was like the best way to navigate! Can't go back to 3 buttons ever again. It feels so slow, and choppy.

P.S. If your apps has swipe to left to do X, you should change them for a better experience.

Yeah, I keep running into issues with apps with swipe actions. I don't want to delete or archive an email if I'm just trying to use the back swipe function!

Have been using gesture control since android 10 came out.

Nav bar, gestures are just awkward. Faster to tap than to swipe.

Gestures because on-screen buttons just suck for full screen apps. Buttons only work if they're always in the same place and always available. Why the hell would I want them to be hidden? Give me my hardware buttons back please.

Gestures are only half-way usable because I patch the android framework to ignore apps' requests to change orientation (fuck that) and the pill to be much smaller but even then landscape is pretty meh with it taking way too much movement to change apps and the pill requiring quite a lot of vertical space that is already very limited.

I never got on with gestures, the effort of swiping is not worth the additional 5% screen size for me.

Although I will add that the pill navigation with a separate back button that Android 8 or so introduced was by far my favorite back then and I would love to have that back

I started using Pie controls with Paranoid Android back in 2015 and never gave them up. It's great for muscle memory

Me too! I actually miss Pie controls sometimes. I know 3rd party apps can replicate it but it just not the same. Maybe it was because of the time period.

I really dislike gestures as I'll accidentally trigger them all the time. I just want physical buttons back. They're far superior for me. Sadly it is not a common opinion so I'll just have to deal with whatever is popular.

When I got my P7P i had to switch back to the bar immediately and I was "navigating" out of games/apps with the gesture.

Used to be a bar person, but at some point it broke on the custom ROM im running for a few updates so i switched. Been using gestures ever since. I like them maybe a lil less because phones are too big, but it feels faster

but at some point it broke on the custom ROM

The life of custom ROM users 😅. I sympathize with you.

I like gesture controls on my Pixel. It took me a bit to adjust, too, but now I can't go back. My biggest gripe is that swiping from the right side of the screen will go back or exit an app instead of letting me go forward (thinking of Chrome specifically). Also, it can be hard to crop images because the gesture area conflicts with the edge of a lot of images.

edit: typo

Gestures but swipe to right to go back disabled through adb so I can still swipe for drawers

I noticed that I can open drawers pretty reliably if I first swipe up or down right on the edge and then start pulling out the drawer, worked pretty good especially for Boost as it had drawers on both screen edges

I'm pretty sure the intended gesture is just to hold the edge of the screen where the drawer is for a second, then drag. Works alright for me, anyway...

I wasn't aware of this. It works surprisingly well. Thanks!

I tried to get used to that but just couldn't 🙃

Can you share the command?

Depending on which one you want to disable -

adb shell settings put secure back_gesture_inset_scale_right -1

adb shell settings put secure back_gesture_inset_scale_left -1

I still use nav buttons. I really liked apps that had that left slide out drawer (something Google pushed for a while and then quietly abandoned) and I kept navigating elsewhere while trying to pull out the menu drawers, so I went to buttons.

My final cool app with a drawer, rif is fun, is no longer on my phone, so I guess I can switch to navigation gestures... But it would take a lot of getting used to and "what gesture goes where?" (Note that I am particularly bad at remembering this sort of stuff - I'm the type of person who keeps a screenshot of a keybinding map on my second monitor while playing games.)

Once I got used to gesture controls in android 10 I never looked back. It was hard to adapt but now it's muscle memory.

I use edge gestures for gesturing but I keep the 3 button on the screen just in case. I like both.

Gesture navigation is good enough for me to use, but bad enough to be infuriating.

Its better than the navigation buttons, because non-tactile buttons are bad generally. Gesture navigation lets you navigate basic system interactions without looking at the screen, but its badly implimrnted. A horizontal swipe often accidentally becomes a back.

A physical set of navigation buttons would be best, but gestures is a solid second place, C tier navigation system.

If you own a recent Samsung device, definitely try One Hand Operations app - takes gesture navigation to a whole another level. One of my favourite apps.

I do. Thanks for the recommendation, I'll take a look

I have a Pixel 7 now. Use gestures. Sometimes when I'm on the iPad I'd want them there too.

I'm the weirdo who misses the hybrid two button layout. It has some gestures and some nav bar and once I got used to it I did like it. The new gestures nav throws me off something terrible.

I'm using the aosp/pixel gesture nav. Took a bit to get used to and I rarely have weird glitches (like using the fast swipe to previous app, but the app manager is yeeting to the last app or so; the nav bar/pill being visible in a video; the pill being on the wrong side of the display after having it rotated), but I like the look and feel. Also I'm still hoping that we will get to the point where it's "embedded" like in iOS.

I prefer navigation bar, but I tolerate gesture controls due to the ease of swiping between apps.

3-button nav bar all the way. gesture navigation just feels so ambiguous and inexact compared to discrete buttons. I never understood why google decided to copy that stupid anti-feature from ios when they already had a superior system that worked (and still works) perfectly well.

I started using gesture controls back on my One Plus 6t and just haven't looked back since. I do wish gesture controls had some more uniformity between manufacturers. Like when I got my Pixel 6a there were minor differences in how you use multitasking. My SO gets tripped up when using my Pixel cause the gestures are different from her iPhone.