Wanted to see how everyone in the community felt about the using the android navigation bar buttons vs using gesture control.
I’ve used the navigation buttons since they released on android and just recently started trying to use the gesture based navigation. It’s been a little difficult for me to adapt to it so far, but curious what others experience has been.
I started using gestures, and haven’t been able to transition away since.
Both have their pros and cons.
It’s especially hilarious when, as a Pixel owner, I try to help my spouse with their iPhone, and I immediately get confused/frustrated when swiping on her phone does nothing.
3-button nav bar all the way. gesture navigation just feels so ambiguous and inexact compared to discrete buttons. I never understood why google decided to copy that stupid anti-feature from ios when they already had a superior system that worked (and still works) perfectly well.
I still prefer the navigation buttons. I just can’t get used to gesture controls
Nav bar, gestures are just awkward. Faster to tap than to swipe.
I’m the weirdo who misses the hybrid two button layout. It has some gestures and some nav bar and once I got used to it I did like it. The new gestures nav throws me off something terrible.
The back gesture is fine until it takes me out of an app. I hate that. Sometimes I trigger it unintentionally because I’m trying to swipe in an app but the system picks it up instead.
This stopped happening for me once I lowered the back gesture sensitivity all the way. It was a little tedious at first trying to grab the very edge of my screen, but I got used to it pretty quickly
Used to be a bar person, but at some point it broke on the custom ROM im running for a few updates so i switched. Been using gestures ever since. I like them maybe a lil less because phones are too big, but it feels faster
but at some point it broke on the custom ROM
The life of custom ROM users 😅. I sympathize with you.
A navigation bar is so simple, so direct, with little room for error.
It was actually painful and annoying for me to try navigating with gestures after updating Android, to the point where I simply disabled them because someone had the right idea to make them default.
Yet, for me this was peak ->
I want physical buttons back.
I still use nav buttons. I really liked apps that had that left slide out drawer (something Google pushed for a while and then quietly abandoned) and I kept navigating elsewhere while trying to pull out the menu drawers, so I went to buttons.
My final cool app with a drawer, rif is fun, is no longer on my phone, so I guess I can switch to navigation gestures… But it would take a lot of getting used to and “what gesture goes where?” (Note that I am particularly bad at remembering this sort of stuff - I’m the type of person who keeps a screenshot of a keybinding map on my second monitor while playing games.)
