Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
Tl; DR
- Google works on a native option for Android stocks to return the three -button navigation bar, a functionality requested for a long time by users who have Samsung devices.
- This deals with a major point of pain, because the default navigation arrangement of Samsung is the opposite of the Android star, forcing users to recycle their muscle memory.
- Evidence of unprecedented feature has been found in an Android Canary version, but it will probably not be launched before a future update of Android 16 quarterly.
Changing phones can be pain, but you can do a lot to facilitate the process. The use of a password manager and the restoration of backups of your important applications and files can facilitate transition, but some things cannot be transferred. If you go from a Samsung phone to a pixel, for example, you cannot transfer many system settings because they do not exist in Android stock. A particularly notable example is the Samsung three -button navigation bar. His omission in Android stock obliges users to recycle their muscle memory for buttons exchanged behind and recent. Fortunately, Google can finally approach this point of pain by adding an option to return the navigation bar in Android stock.
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The three buttons navigation scheme on Android screen has existed since the release of Android 4.0 in 2011, and it has always been composed of these three buttons from left to right: back, house and recent. Samsung phones, however, return this order, placing the return button on the right and the recent button on the left. This makes sense for the brand’s consistency, because older Samsung phones with physical keys also had the rear button on the right.
Even if Samsung offers the possibility of modifying the order of the button or switching to navigation on gestures, most of its users respect the default value. Google, however, does not provide a native option to return the buttons. This is a point of frustration for many people who go from Samsung devices to phones with versions in stock or almost actions of Android, such as Sony Xperia devices or Google Pixel phones.
At the beginning of 2023, Sony engineers submitted code To the open source Android project (AOSP) to add a parameter that would exchange rear and recent buttons, but they abandoned the fixes in April. At the time, we thought that Google had rejected functionality, but it seems that we were wrong. We have spotted the evidence that Google is now working on an option to return the navigation bar, although we will probably not see the functionality running live for at least a few months.
By searching in the latest Android Canary version, I spotted the code for a new feature that exchanges the order of back and recent buttons in the three buttons navigation bar. It is not yet activated, and there is no user -oriented tilting for this, but the objective of the code is clear. Although the functionality cannot yet be activated, the change itself is easy to visualize. Here is what the navigation bar will look like once this option is available:
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
Since this feature is not yet available, we do not have a calendar for when it is put online. This should not be a particularly difficult functionality to implement Google, but the company must also test it, decide where to place the switch, create an illustration and translate text chains, among others. We could see it put online in the second quarterly version of Android 16 – scheduled for December – as soon as possible, but there is no guarantee.
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