Rocking it old school or keeping on the cutting edge?
These days, nearly any phone you buy will come with a pretty similar navigation system. From Google’s latest Pixels to any budget device from Motorola — not to mention the ever-popular iPhone lineup — you’ll be swiping up, back, left, and right to get to your home screen and recent apps. It took a long time to get here, with Android 9 Pie using a controversial two-button gesture system that tried to split the difference.
That said, you aren’t necessarily locked into these gestures if you don’t want to use them. A quick dive into the settings menu allows anyone to return to the classic 3-button navigation setup, complete with dedicated icons for back, home, and recent apps. Switching between the two is easy, with Android never locking you into one system or the other. In fact, Google has continued to support its classic navigation settings, even moving Assistant from the virtual home button to the physical power button in Android 13 DP1.
Of course, we’re ignoring the elephant in the room. Samsung phones — even the brand-new Galaxy S22 series — have stuck with the dedicated 3-button system to this day. Beyond that, they’re still using the company’s default reversed recent and back buttons, a legacy choice leftover from the days of physical and capacitive buttons on devices like the Galaxy S7. All of that is adjustable in settings — not just gestures, but un-reversed buttons as well — but a vast percentage of people buying Samsung devices are unlikely ever to change the default arrangement.
In 2019, we asked our readers if they preferred gestures, buttons, or something else. Those two choices were practically tied, with only a single percentage point putting buttons over the top. It’s been a long three years, of course, and I’m curious to see if our audience has moved in one direction or the other. So, after years of trying both out, which do you prefer?
Do you prefer gestures or buttons for navigation on Android?
Read Next
About The Author
