alt Hacker NewsGoogle hasn't been able to properly do / fix Android gesture navigation for more than half a decade now. The amount that edge swipes in things like photo editing apps are detected as backswipes (sometimes destroying 10+ minutes of editing) is laughable.
Technically this is because a lot of apps thumb their nose at the requirement to have safe areas around swipeable elements in their app, but as a user, that is not my problem to fix. It's Google's.
The workaround is so ridiculously easy too: only allow backswipes to count in the lowest 15% of the bottom left of the screen. Yet despite having hundreds of engineers earning ±350.000 per year work on this problem for years, they haven't been able to either implement or even think of it.
The real fix would be to deprecate the three button layout in Android 18 and remove it in Android 19. Force apps to comply.
Replies
The real fix would be to bring back physical control buttons and leave the touchscreen for the rest.
Also, I have 6GB of RAM in my phone - switching from a browser to youtube, or vice-versa, should not cause the other to clear and start back again from a freshly-loaded state.
350,000 a year and people can't even get basic things to operate properly. Google needs broken up and their engineers need to go back to the 90s and learn some real programming skill.
I think you are grossly minimizing the effects on your change on both users and developers. Neither are going to comply and then you have further fragmented the user base and removed a bunch of apps.
I use an Android tablet and I only backswipe at the upper left.