Good-bye to the Back button on Android: here’s what will be replaced
It seems that Google is thinking of replacing the back button of Android, which since the dawn is a milestone in the operating system, with a gesture.
The Back key could soon be deleted on Android in favor of a gesture to the left from the Home key. To discover in advance the intentions of Google was the attentive XDA Developers, who investigated part of the code of Android Q discovering the possible abandonment of the back key and also another gesture: with a swipe to the right, you will pass in a manner faster to the previously active app.
After all, the way buttons and gestures work on Android 9 Pie is a bit controversial: in the stock version (what we find on the Pixels) the bottom bar has been replaced by a kind of stylized icon that has multiple functions, while the Back button only appears when available. The other smartphones with Android 9 Pie do not always use the same style, and the various producers sometimes adopt personalized gestures.
If you activate navigation via gesture on third-party devices, the Back button is in many cases stuff of the past. Huawei, for example: allows you to swipe one of the two side edges to go back; OnePlus, on the other hand, allows you to perform the same operation with a swipe from bottom to top in the lower parts of the display. In short, the transition to navigation via gesture on Android is not going too well.
Different solutions can create a bit of confusion, and not all users are ready to switch to the new navigation mode. The new solution provided for Android Q aims to simplify the approach, it is said that it will not be implemented, nor that the third-party manufacturers will adopt it without distorting it. Yet navigation via gesture is certainly not such a modern technology.
The first time we saw it was with Palm Pre and its webOS, in the distant (in technological terms) 2009. The smartphone allowed to perform different gestures for basic operations, with an approach that broadly iPhone X is managed to replicate almost ten years later. With Android, the situation has become more complex and complex, so much so that using the gesture on two devices from different manufacturers means having to completely change the approach with your terminal.
