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Comment by m52go | Hacker News Reader

I was just watching a video a couple minutes ago about changes to system navigation in Android Q [0].

Oddly, I don't see any mention of it in this blog post.

Can someone explain how (1) switching buttons into gestures and (2) changing the recent apps screen from a list of all apps on 1 screen to a full screen for each app...how are these good ideas? What is the design philosophy for these changes?

They seem like gargantuan steps back in ease-of-use and intuitive design.

I'm looking forward to jumping to a Pine64 or Purism phone before I am compelled to use this mindless ripoff of stupid Apple interface design.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCM2SR5pDn4

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> changing the recent apps screen from a list of all apps on 1 screen to a full screen for each app...how are these good ideas? What is the design philosophy for these changes?

If you mean how the "cards" are now side-by-side instead of "stacked", I can assure you this is a HUGE improvement. I use this already on my Oneplus 6T.

The likelihood of requiring a recent app decreases enormously the further back in time you go. 95% of the time, you want the the previous app. 4% of the time, you want the next most recent app. 0.5% of the time, you want the third one... (all figures made up by me on the spot).

My point is, swiping left-to-right to expose cards in the past is FAR better than pulling down and shuffling through this crazy infinite deck of cards that flies by top-to-bottom.

But in that stack you could see titles, and directly switch to the one you want, if it was one of last N.

Exactly. The new interface, even if it makes logical/quantitative sense, is functionally worse. I don't ever need to see the whole screen of an app to before deciding if I want to switch to it or not. Having all the titles and windows of open apps in 1 tidy list is way more functional, even if I only rarely access old apps.

To get back to your last open app you double-press the "last app" button on android P. Way better than swiping.

Android P on Pixels actually has the option to double tap on the recents icon or flick right from the home button. Flick right should be just as easy as double tap in theory, but I haven't learned how to make it work 100% of the time yet.

https://m.androidcentral.com/how-enable-android-p-gesture-na...

Android P on Pixels already works like that. The video shows a prototype of changing the appearance of the cards to make them larger.

> Oddly, I don't see any mention of it in this blog post.

From my experience, gestures and navigation changes quite wildly between beta builds, as they test different things to get feedback, so what you see here may be very different from what we get on release. I'm guessing the blog post covers the more stable features.

Huge steps back in UI to rip off Apple are par for the course in Android now.

Pie was an enormous step backwards.

Just a nitpick, but the two changes referenced in the parent comment (whole screen 'cards' for multitasking view and using gestures for such) are straight from WebOS for both Apple and Android. Being a step back in UI is also a bit subjective, I personally find it a lot easier to navigate between the apps I regularly use now.

Edit: Just installed the android Q beta and the back button is still present, I was not aware of the potential loss of the back button. I can see why that would be considered such a step back in usability.

I think you're going to be in for a big ol' frothy glass of reality check juice if you're thinking Purism is going to have better usability than Android or iOS...

> The back button is vestigial tech debt. Gestures are the future.

I don't necessarily think that the back button will remain, but I think it SHOULD remain. Gestures are cool, but the back button is like the undo feature: it gives user a visible, clear button to correct a mistake or cancel an action. Gestures are not immediately visible/discoverable, so while for a tech savvy it might not be a problem, for the average consumer (think of your dad, or aunt, or grandpa) it is a usability regression.

Devils advocate: the iPhone has never had a physical back button and it's a wildly successful device with people across all walks of life and levels of technical experience.

I think a lot of Android users feel this way but it is clear that Android is moving away from physical buttons. It's a crutch that Google is finally getting rid of.

In the early iPhone-versions almost all apps had a back-button on the top-left corner during nested navigation.

I miss it.

Sorry I wasn’t trying to say the UI button is bad, I was referring to the physical button.

All apps that use UINavigationController i.e. nested still have the back button in the top left corner. Nothing has changed.

More a case that apps have moved away from this UI style in favour of other conventions e.g. burger menu.

On the other hand, most ordinary non-technical folk I know of don't know about about iOS swipe-to-go-back gestures, as iOS has largely moved from buttons to non-discovered swipes, special presses that most people won't know about unless they RTFM which they never do.

How many people know about Shake-to-Undo?

The swipe to go back gesture only applies to navigation controllers in which case there will always be a back button in the top left corner.

And yes they removed the home button and replaced it with a swipe up. But they have an annoying dark black line to indicate this. And you literally can’t use your phone without this one, simple gesture.

Another devil's advocate: undo on iOS is nigh-undiscoverable.

> The back button is vestigial tech debt. Gestures are the future.

The back button is discoverable. Gestures are not.

My iPhone is full of magic gestures I dont know or care about, but suddenly they get triggered and ruin whatever I worked with.

And I can’t simply disable the infuriating madness either. It’s not an option. Why?!?

Please, pretty please, give me my buttons back. They are simple. They work. They don’t need documentation, tutorials and instructional YouTube videos.

TLDR: Buttons are real hot stuff. You should have buttons.

I think basic usability and user-friendliness on iOS has been going backwards since iOS7. I still think the platform overall's preferable to Android (hobbyist interests aside) mainly because Android started so far behind and, despite improvements, continues to bumble about, but I miss having an OS that I liked using but that I'd also unhesitatingly recommend as a primary device for my tech-confused relatives.

Apple never got rid of the buttons though.

They just removed the border but you can easily add them back in by going to Accessibility and enabling Button Shapes.

> Please, pretty please, give me my buttons back.

The problem is you have very loud early adopters who are abrasive and forcefully tell everyone that X is the new hotness and you're an old grandpa for wanting old-X and, ha, by they way, I'm pissing on your lawn. So, the rational majority get tired of trying to be heard and give up. Google and Apple, thus, never hear from them.

> if you're thinking Purism is going to have better usability than Android or iOS

Luckily, I don't think that. It's not what I thought of Linux on my laptop when I moved to it full-time either. But here I am a year later, loving it.

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