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.
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.
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!
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 don’t feel like testing it out on my own device, since haven’t had one that hasn’t gotten burn in yet. Especially with how expensive phones have gotten that I’ll be using it beyond the usual two year upgrade path.
Biggest advantage of gestures has been not getting burn in for me. Getting nav bar burn in on amoled screens over the years has led to me doing my best to avoid static elements. I’ve even burned in static elements from apps.
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 really miss the remappable 5 button nav I had in Android 8…
I was on Lollipop and had root, I had next and previous music buttons on either side, good times
I want to use gesture navigation without giving up my favorite launcher. Too bad I can never full enjoy it.
Which launcher is that? I love Nova, comes with all the gestures I need.
Oh, I thought you were talking about system navigation gestures. I am using KISS launcher