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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Swiping from the edges is exactly what I was hoping Google would do with Android, instead of wasting screen space with buttons. I think all Android's buttons could be repurposed into "edge actions", although they'd have to make them intuitive enough for people to get it quickly.

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Edge actions and gestures are great as shortcuts for advanced users. I'm starting to think that "no chrome" UIs will never be suitable for ordinary users. Especially because they, practically speaking, will never be standard.

Tough to make invisible things intuitive, but you can always force a quick intro tutorial like webOS and Windows 8. Trouble is, hand your device to someone else and they might have no idea how to operate it.

Jolla is really pushing edge gestures in their interface, and in the demo videos that have floated around in the last couple months it looks like a joy to operate.

In Phobuuntu's defense, you just need to know that the app quickmenu is on the left, status bar on the top, previous thing on the right, and application options on the bottom.

Android innovates on connections between apps more than the interface design itself. For the most part, the interface design is simply a modified desktop approach.

However, I would note that Google changed the old search button into a "swipe up from bottom" approach for Android 4.1. This brings up Google Now + voice search. So there is some "swipe from edge" functionality.

For Ubuntu Phone, the functions of the different edges will take getting used to. Of course, power users will eat it up.

Isn't this what Windows 8 did for submenus?

I found it incredibly confusing in the context of using a mouse, but never tried it with touch.

Swiping from the left and right edges on phones is prone to get confused with the swiping inside apps, that's the reason that none of the big mobile OSes have it. I am curious to see whether that's taken care of here.

This is already a problem with Chrome for iOS. It makes building apps in the browser difficult when swiping on the left and right edges triggers a "tab" switch.

Chrome for Android does the same (you can change tabs by swiping left-right), and it's very unreliable - I manage to change tabs by accident by swiping, but can never do that on purpose...

Interestingly, I find the gestures from the side work much better on the Nexus 4 with the screen curve. Seems they designed the phone with chrome in mind.

Given that the Nexus 4 screen is designed to support edge swipes I wouldn't be surprised to see Android move in that direction.

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