Google plans to make default navigational gestures mandatory for all devices running on Android Q

At I/O, Google announced a whole new gesture experience that takes tips from Apple. The new gesture experience is supposed to improve upon the one announced by Google along with Android Pie. The company has now decided to make these new gestures default on smartphones coming with Android Q or the ones which will be updated to Q later this year.

During the keynote, Ronan Shah, product manager at Google on the Android System UI team, confirmed that Google plans to go ahead and make these navigational gestures default on Android Q.

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.

– Ronan Shah

Mr Shah also explained why Google decided to take this decision.

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. 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.

– Ronan Shah

However, Google’s navigation gestures will be available alongside the OEMs gestures (via AndroidAuthority) so the users will have an option to switch if they don’t want to use Google’s gestures. It’s odd to see Google saying something on stage and contradicting itself offstage. The good news is that you won’t miss on awesome gestures from OnePlus and Motorola after upgrading to Android Q.

Source XDA Developers