Apart from new features like Dark Mode and Focus Mode, Google will also introduce new navigation gestures with Android Q. What’s interesting...
Apart from new features like Dark Mode and Focus Mode, Google will also introduce new navigation gestures with Android Q. What’s interesting about these gestures is that they work just like the ones that iPhones have, and will be mandatory for smartphone makers to implement them. The company will also allow the third party navigation gestures along with the two types it will bring in the next iteration of the Android OS.
As mentioned, Android Q will have two types of navigation gestures: the original three-button navigation, and a new iPhone-like one. “In the future for Android, we’re going to be supporting 2 nav modes moving forward. The first one is 3 buttons, you know Android users love 3 buttons. We know that it’s super usable and it also addresses a lot of accessibility needs that gestures just cannot. On the other hand, we also know that there’s a lot of desire for gestures, so we will be supporting 1 gesture mode, which is what you saw, moving forward in Android – and only that one,” XDADevelopers quoted Ronan Shah, Product Manager at Google on the Android System UI team as saying.
According to the tech news platform, the latter will no longer have any buttons for the user to press, the bottom bar is thinner. In simpler words, the latest nav gestures look a lot like the ones in the iOS. The company also asking the developers to make changes to accommodate the new gestures. “Users increasingly want immersive experiences in Android, and one thing that device makers have done is try to approach this from a software side. And what they’ve done is built their own gesture nav,” Shah said.
“And every device maker has a different impression of how gesture nav should work. What we recognize on a platform side is that kind of gets insane for a developer. Thinking about N different gesture navs when you’re trying to develop, design for, test for, your app, it just kind of gets insane. So with that in mind, we introduced this gesture nav in Q and we’re going to be standardizing the ecosystem as of Q on 3 buttons and our model moving forward,” Shah noted.
This shouldn’t be seen as a compulsion because Google says that it won’t explicitly disallow third-party gestures. According to AndroidAuthority, Google sees third-party gestures “as a power user option.” This means that OEMs will be forced to offer Google’s traditional 3-button navigation and new gestures, and they can also include their own navigation gestures, giving users more options to choose from.
from Latest Technology News http://bit.ly/2LBBwOK
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