- The Android P public beta has been out for a week or two.
I've been playing with it, you've been playing with it,
and you already know that there's a bunch of gestures
that you use to get around the OS but here's a question,
is swiping really that much better
than just pushing a button?
I'm not gonna at the end of this video come down on
'They're the best, they're great, you should love them,'
or 'Nah, they suck, they're terrible.'
There's plenty of articles about that,
instead I wanna look at why I think
Google decided to go with gestures and swiping
instead of just tapping buttons on the bottom.
These gestures are important
honestly because they just feel different,
and I know that's really floofy and soft and whatever
but you're affective relationship with the phone
changes when you are swiping around
instead of just tapping a button
and for Android in particular, that tactility,
that tangible direct interaction
is part of the philosophy of the design
of the operating system.
For a few years now,
we've had this thing called material design
and the stuff on your screen
should be sort of like magic paper
that you slide around and move
and there's something sitting on top of the other thing
and by switching to this gesture system,
you start moving that paper around
instead of tapping a button and having it move itself
and that just feels more direct,
it feels more, like I said before, human.
When I say it's more human, I mean that kind of literally.
When you move something around in the physical world,
you're actually moving a thing through space
and your brain thinks spatially in a lot of ways.
When you tap an icon, it's like a if, this, then, that,
sort of programmatic thing that just happens
but when you actually move a card
or move a piece of UI on the screen,
it feels to your lizard monkey brain
like you're moving a thing on a table
and it just feels a little bit more natural
and a little bit easier to understand
in this intuitive sense
even though I hate the word intuitive and UI,
but we can come back to that in a whole other video.
Before we get too deep into this,
there are a couple of caveats
that are actually really important to mention.
The first is I'm testing this on a Pixel Two XL
and so what we see here might be slightly different
than what you see on other Android phones
when it's eventually released.
Number two, this beta's not that good.
It's kinda hard to show on camera
but you know it when you feel it,
it's some combination of animation, speed, and physics.
On this beta it just feels off.
It's not even as good as what I experienced
when I used it on Google's campus the week before IO,
that might've been a different build, I'm not sure.
Anyway, enough caveats, let's get into it.
If we're talking major new functionality with these gestures
on the Pixel I think there's two that are really important.
When you have an app open,
you have one gesture access
to a really important thing in the overview screen.
When you swipe up real quick,
you have these predictive apps at the bottom
which are really accurate, I use them all the time now
and you also get the Google search bar which is a big deal,
you just swipe up tap and then you can keep typing
and you'll get something that you want
and in Android P, it's actually gonna be way more powerful
with those actions and slices,
and so, you don't have to think about
where that search bar is,
you can just start typing
and you'll end up with what you want way faster than before.
Now if you're an Android person,
I know what you're thinking,
'Yo, Dieter, the square button does that just fine'
'in the beta, you don't need the swipe to do that.'
You're not wrong, you're totally right,
but there are some other reasons
that this gesture interface is more efficient.
The first is you can just fat finger it,
you don't have to hit the home button exactly.
You can swipe up from
pretty much anywhere at the bottom of the screen
to get to this new overview screen or the new gestures.
The second thing is no matter what app you're in,
you can swipe all the way up
and you'll get to your full app drawer,
so you have instant access to all of your apps
instead of hitting home then swiping up for the app drawer,
it saves you a step.
And then third, most importantly,
there's this lozenge home button thing
and you can just swipe it over to the right
to switch to your last app,
same as double tapping the score button,
or you can drag it over
and kind of jam through in a little scrolling action
your recent apps and then let go to jump to an earlier app,
it doesn't have to be the last one,
it can be like the one you used three or four apps ago
and it's a much faster way to get to those.
So that's my basic overview of why I think
gestures in Android P could be better
than what we had before,
but we should talk about the elephant in the room
and that elephant is named iPhone 10.
So the big question here with the iPhone 10 is
did Android P just steal all the gestures from the iPhone
and I have to admit, there are some similarities,
so you swipe up to get to the overview screen
and you can just sort of swipe over to the right
on the bottom to switch between recent apps
and that's very, very similar,
but there are some differences.
The first, the thing I haven't really mentioned yet is
on Android P, you tap the home button to go home
and so they're mixing metaphors
whereas the iPhone is a little bit more consistent.
The other thing is that Android has more spaces.
It has an app drawer in addition to a home screen
whereas the iPhone just has a home screen so
I don't think it's fair to say
they exactly stole this from the iPhone 10.
If we're gonna talk about stealing gestures and swipes,
we should really talk about this other phone,
Palm Pre.
So I know you've been waiting for it,
for the moment when Dieter talks about
webOS and the Palm Pre.
Well, fans, mobile accomplishers,
here it is, I'm gonna talk about webOS again.
So, look, there's a lot of stuff that webOS did
that's very similar to what Android does
and what the iPhone 10 does.
You swipe up to go to a multitasking screen.
You swipe up again to go to all of your apps.
You can from this overview screen,
just start typing and do a search,
just like you can on Android P.
There's a lot of stuff that's very, very similar
and that's just borrowed,
but there's stuff that was different on webOS
that we don't see here at all
so webOS was really into this idea of cards
and they would be grouped together
and they'd be organized spatially
instead of just most recently and
there's some benefits to that but also some drawbacks
and we don't need to get into all of that.
To me, the point is that
they're just borrowing ideas form each other
and I don't think it's really stealing,
it's just that they're certain tools in UI
and like you pick some and you try and make them your own
and in particular I just think that swiping
is kind of a trend and user interface goes through trends.
It changes over time and people borrow from each other and
that's not the end of the world.
(light electronic music)
Alright, so, having looked at webOS,
miss you buddy, and the iPhone 10,
what do we think about gestures on Android P?
Well, there's two things
that everybody's really talking about.
One I don't care about, one I'm super worried about.
The thing I don't care that much about
is the mixing in metaphors.
I get that you still have to tap the home button,
I get that the back button still shows up, but,
you know what, we're not building a zen garden here,
we're making a functional phone OS and we're smart people
and we can figure that out, so that's not the problem.
The real thing that's gonna be troubling is
they have to nail the animation and the smoothness because
if you're swiping around and moving stuff
and it feels janky,
literally one of the description of the beta
on Google's one webpage is that there's a lot of jank,
if it feels janky this thing is going to fail massively.
They have to get it right and there's no in between.
Either it's gonna be a disaster
or it's gonna be actually a really surprisingly cool success
because there is that extra functionality
that I've been talking about.
So, that's it, I think the gestures could be great,
I can't make a final judgment yet,
but the bottom line is they have to nail the feel of it
but if they do pull it off, it's gonna feel great.
Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.
I wanna know, how would you set up gestures on Android
if you could just do whatever you wanted.
Let me know in the comments
and then head over to this video by Eater,
it's The Kitchen Gadget show and I actually really love it.
They just did an episode on
whether or not the Instant Pot is worth it,
you should check it out.