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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

The way they show and demonstrate gestures, along with the UI at the bottom, strongly suggests that they intend to eliminate the semi-"hard" buttons in favor of gestures. That would save space, give people a bit more control over fullscreen apps, and provide a less "modal" UI where the same gestures always work even if the buttons aren't available (such as when playing fullscreen video).

Also, "Get security updates faster." is huge; this is effectively saying "no matter who makes your phone, you still get updates".

Deprecating "Device admin for enterprise" makes it much safer to access work resources from an otherwise personal Android device, without giving your IT department the ability to remote-wipe your entire device.

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> The way they show and demonstrate gestures, along with the UI at the bottom, strongly suggests that they intend to eliminate the semi-"hard" buttons in favor of gestures.

Yes, that's the case. When you're using gesture navigation the only visible UI left is the horizontal bar at them bottom. Apps adjusted for gesture navigation will also draw behind that line.

Gesture navigation is still an option which might not be enabled by default on all devices, but I strongly suggest trying it out. I used it quite some time with the latest release candidates of Android 10 and once you're used to it, you don't want to go back. Especially the back swipe is really nice.

How the final implementation came to be is covered by an excellent blog post from Google: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/08/gesture-na...

> once you're used to it, you don't want to go back.

Your mileage may vary. I've never learned to get along well with gestures, although I did give them a solid try.

Try smart launcher, and set up your own gestures. I haven't been a fan of gestures either historically, but smart launcher has converted me. Single finger up / down / left / right; double finger up / down / left / right; double tap on screen, and a couple of others.

I don't understand how 'swipe from the left' can be used as a universal back gesture. Isn't it the case that most apps use that gesture already to open a menu?

Then again I still miss having physical back and home buttons since I upgraded to a newer android phone. It would be nice if manufactures added more buttons to the side of the phone so the other fingers have something to do.

> I don't understand how 'swipe from the left' can be used as a universal back gesture. Isn't it the case that most apps use that gesture already to open a menu?

That's also discussed in the blog post I linked. tl;dr: Only a small subset of users (3-7%) uses a swipe gesture to open these menus (all others use the hamburger menu) and these users have to adapt now to do different kinds of swipes for opening the menu and invoking the back gesture.

Android has 1.3 BILLION users. 3-7% is tens of millions of users

After reading your comment, I went through my most commonly used apps and found that they all have a hamburger button in the top left corner that brings up the same menu as a swipe from left gesture. Somehow I never noticed those buttons before, leaving me feeling a bit spooked. How is it that something I look at dozens of times a day could go unnoticed for so long?

I had the inverse reaction: I discovered that all these apps support swiping from the left. At least the hamburger menu is visible - there is nothing really advertising the swipe gesture.

You can swipe at an angle (around 45° up or down) to open the menu, and straight out to go back. Not very intuitive/discoverable, but works pretty well once you get used to it

Their own charts/graphs on that page show that the new approach is WORSE (by their own metrics) than the 3 soft buttons.

I hope there remain ways to hack the buttons back (in 9.x there was):

  #install a 3rd party launcher (nova)
  pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.google.android.apps.nexuslauncher
  settings put secure gesture_swipe_up 0
  settings put secure system_navigation_keys_enabled 1
  reboot

You don't need any "hack", right in System > Gestures > Navigation, all three options are openly available (100% gesture, 2-button + gesture, old 3-button style). I believe they intent on keeping it all available for sometime, if only for accessibility reasons.

Also, the charts show that it's either equal and better, and there's also the implicit fact that not showing buttons also means more screen space, so even if usability metric is the same, visually it's a win.

>Also, "Get security updates faster." is huge; this is effectively saying "no matter who makes your phone, you still get updates".

I have been hearing this for years.

Probably from clickbait sources. Recent talk in the area has been legitimate.

https://www.xda-developers.com/how-project-treble-revolution...

https://www.xda-developers.com/android-q-apex-biggest-thing-...

Android 10 lets you download and install certain security updates through Google Play as easily as an app. That is a first, and it should not be understated.

> Also, "Get security updates faster." is huge; this is effectively saying "no matter who makes your phone, you still get updates".

They say this with literally every release of Android ever. It's just posturing, I'll believe it when I see it.

> strongly suggests that they intend to eliminate the semi-"hard" buttons in favor of gestures.

If that happens, that's an OS that is unacceptable to me. It's bad enough that physical buttons were eliminated in favor of the soft buttons. That bothers me to this day, but I learned to live with it.

Eliminating even the horrible soft buttons, though, would be a bridge too far in terms of reducing usability.

It's a setting, you can keep the soft buttons if you like.

Good to know, but that does rather sound like they're on the chopping block...

I hope the gestures are better than when they first came out with the "pill". I tried it for a week and it was an awful experience. Maybe it's because I use the double tap on app switcher to quickly get to last app a lot and the pill was really bad for that (slow and would switch to wrong app half the time).

Yes, it's much much better. That one was unfortunately in a half-way between gesture and buttons and felt very unfinished. This one is much smoother and easy to quick switch between apps. It feels a lot more natural, and the bottom buttons are actually gone, saving space.

9 already implements the swipeable "pill" navigation. It isn't on by default if you upgraded from 8.

I use that today, yes; however, that only eliminates one of the three buttons. On Android 9, you still have a back button and a home button.

I tried the pill, couldn't manage to get used to it. I just hope they don't go "we know what's best for you" on this one.

I tried the pill and eventually turned it off. Android 10's navigation seems a lot more fluid, though maybe a little less discoverable.

edit: to be clear, I now have the option for traditional 3 buttons, 2 buttons (pill), and no buttons (all gestures).

This is orders of magnitude better than the pill one, which not only felt unfinished, it didn't even actually get rid of the bottom bar, which seems like the whole point of gesture navigation...

I used to really dislike work profile, but I gotta say it has gotten much better over the past few versions. For one, it seems like they're implementing a way for Calendar to share between personal/work in a single view, which was a huge pet peeve. They also allow for custom keyboard on your personal profile in Q which is great.

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