In playing catch-up with the obvious solution since the Android Pie betas where most navigation was switched to gestures, Google is finally switching the back button to a back swipe in the upcoming Android Q.
Gesture navigation first made its debut in stock Android with last year's Android Pie, confusingly called ‘swipe up on home button' it replaced the classic three button setup of back, home and multitasking with back and the ‘pill', which would go home when tapped and open the new multitasking when swiped up on.
Running rather counter-intuitively to the point of gestures being to maximise screen real estate, Google's solution uses exactly as much as the button navigation which is not going to change with Android Q; however the navigation and its addition will make more sense as the still-remaining back button will be replaced with a swipe to the left on the pill.
So whilst this change doesn't really make the changing to gestures make sense in and of itself, it does at least make the gestures more congruent… and means there's actually more gestures than button taps, unlike Android Pie where swiping up for multitasking is the only actual gesture.
The new functionality also bears a visual change from the short'n'fat home pill in Android Pie to a thin, long sliver – just like iOS I may say – which currently doesn't save any screen real estate but probably will when it's finished.
This functionality was first spotted in early stages in the first Android Q beta though it didn't work, and whilst it still be not implemented by default in the newest one, these ADB commands can be used to enable it for those with Pixels running the beta:
adb shell settings put global prototype_enabled 1
adb shell settings put global quickstepcontroller_edge_width_sensitivity 48
adb rebootadb shell settings put global navbar_color_adapt_enable 1
adb shell settings put global quickstepcontroller_gesture_match_map 172233
Other manufacturers and developers have been showing Google up on the gesture front for a few years now, with various different implementations from the likes of Xiaomi, Huawei, OnePlus, and more, many of which entirely remove any button/pill UI and thus actually maximise screen space, but for now we must ‘suffer' with Google's odd implementation.
Source: XDA Developers
