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Comment by BHSPitMonkey | Hacker News Reader

On Android, in most places where you can zoom (browsers, Maps, etc.) you can zoom one-handed with a double-tap (where the second tap is held down and dragged up or down to zoom in or out before releasing). It's actually a pretty smooth interaction once you know to do it.

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I've used android for years and never knew you could do this. This is one of the things I hate most about all those gestures : there's no way to know about them unless you just try a bunch of random things, or you google for "android browser gestures" or something like that. Give me buttons to do the same things those gestures do! Hide them behing menu if you want, but give me functionality that I can use right now without having to hunt for them on the web.

If it helps, double-tap (or sometimes long-press) to zoom occurs in many photo apps on various platforms.

FWIW this also works in Google Maps for iOS. I wish it worked system wide.

This is kind of system wide on iOS. Almost all apps that support zoom supports double tapping to zoom in. Safari zooms into the HTML element you double tapped on and fits it nicely on the screen.

Another gesture you'd never know you could do - double tap with two fingers will zoom out in google maps (e.g., the inverse of double tap with one finger). I think this works on both Android and iOS.

From google maps on my one plus. Menu > "Tips and Tricks" > "Zoom in and out in more ways than one." I didn't know about it either, but it took a minute to find the how to explanations. Personally I prefer standardized gestures to buttons to save the screen space, but thats just me.

Yes, this gesture is actually amazingly better than pinch-to-zoom, my only annoyance with it at present is that Android Firefox doesn't implement it - the only app on the entire platform that doesnt have it.

No idea why they think it's OK to ignore system wide standard gestures for years, but it's an obviously improvement that can't take much work to put in place.

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