Android Q’s gesture navigation won’t support custom home apps at launch
We don't have any Beta 5 pictures yet, but here's what the gesture navigation system looked like in earlier builds. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]
Today Google is launching Android Q beta 5, the fifth of six beta releases before we get the final version of Android Q, version 10. Google already finalized the Android Q APIs in Beta 4, so what does that leave for this release? Apparently lots of changes to gesture navigation.
To recap: with Android Q Google is introducing a brand-new "Fully gestural" navigation system, which eschews Android's traditional three-button navigation system for a gesture system that enables all three functions (Back, Home, and Recent Apps) to be triggered with swipes. The new navigation system saves a ton of space, with only a transparent gesture bar at the bottom of the screen, just like on an iPhone X.
Three functions do not quite cover all of the functionality of the old three-button bar, however. You could also long-press on the home button to summon the Google Assistant, and in previous betas, this feature didn't make it to the gesture-navigation system. For Beta 5, Google is introducing a new gesture for the Google Assistant-swipe up from the corner. Dragging in from either bottom corner of the screen will now open the Google Assistant, and Google says "you'll notice 'handles' that serve as a visual affordance that we're continuing to tune."
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