hi and welcome back to Tech Talk I'm Ken Mingis executive editor Computerworld
I'm here with JR Raphael our Android expert we're gonna be talking about
Android 10 and focusing on gestures and what the hell is going on this year
stick around
okay so jr. thanks for being here man hey thanks for having me good to be here
it's good to have you back um you know obviously Android 10 is out there and as
you've written about several times on computer world you know one of the big
changes is gestures yes and there's there's this big debate you know that
goes on and you know we're gonna deal with this in a future episode about you
know who comes up with gestures and who can improve them and who adopts them and
who copies them and and all that but I wanted to get a sense for you from you
about especially Android 10 what's changed because this is I recall one of
the things that happened was that with the last version of Android we got new
gestures and there's Android 10 we got revamped gestures right which is gonna
mean a lot of Android users have to redo some muscle memory really quick yeah a
lot of change a lot of adjustment and if you've been following along anyone who
watches the betas of Android 10 the public betas at Google piss out there
have been a lot of little steps along the way where things have evolved so
especially if you're really tuned into Android Android news there's been a lot
of little changes in evolution Android 9 which still had a name was known as pi
hi Kendra 10 I know I kind of missed the naming games and the Android 10 just
sounds so so Apple like in some ways and not in a good way it's like that's the
whimsy yeah it'll always be queen of puddings there you go I'm still linked
I'm some Android quiche and though it's not sweet but it's the only thing I can
come up with a little sugar on top anyway gestures alright so yeah
PI so pi kind of introduced this hybrid system where they were testing the
waters there was still a back button that would appear on the screen button
or you know it's okay Osbert virtual button yeah but it would appear is need
an actual tap a bowl dedicated button and it wouldn't always be there like on
your home screen you would see it but when you open up your browser you opened
a Gmail or whatever app it would pop up with irrelevant you know then there was
kind of like a pill one button in the middle that was the home button you
could tap it every time you hit this different ways it was kind of like a
mash up it was gestures it was also traditional buttons a little bit of both
it was a little it was awkward it was kind of like
they were trying to do gestures without really hard without really committing to
it exactly yeah and so Android can completely reinvent the wheel with that
taking a model that as we've talked about a lot is much more similar to
Apple's iOS not exactly the same but it definitely has there's undoubtedly some
some overlap so you know now there is no actual button you have a little kind of
line on the bottom of the screen and you can swipe up on it to go home you swipe
up and hold to get to your your overview your recent apps to me between apps you
can swipe left or right on it to move between recent apps and then instead of
a back button you now can just swipe in from the left or right side of the
screen anywhere to go this this doesn't sound to me and you know again coming
from the Apple side of things where there have been a variety of gestures
and changes over the years I know that you know Apple did some changes last
year in 2018 and you know it really does require learning new ways of navigating
your phone you don't really think about it because you know you get so used to
you know swiping and swiping up swiping down how is someone say coming to
Android 10 for the first time supposed to know what these new gestures are ER
is here is it spelled out in a way that makes it clear what you know what you
want to do if you want to go back or go to your home screen or you just need to
read up on it or how does a user know that that's a good question I think
we'll have to see cuz it'll be up to each if I realize those people probably
haven't even gotten the Android 10 yet right right and to its credit what
Google seems to be doing and I think what most advice makers will probably do
is leave the gestures off by default if your device didn't have them to begin
with so you know if you're using a phone that has the old three buttons on it if
you upgrade to Android 10 whenever you get that upgrade you would be able to
turn them on in the in the settings but by default it's not gonna be there
that's that of course when we start seeing new phones come out with Android
10 they will presumably more and more have them enabled the one phone that
I've seen that does have them enabled by default which was the new 1 + 7 t phone
it did do a nice little tutorial when you first start up and you select you
could select between you know traditional buttons or the gestures and
then when you went to gestures it would tell you you know swipe up here to go
home swipe up here and hold and kind of walked you through a little tutorial
doing it and I think that's that's gonna be key because it really is an
adjustment like you said and I think the first day or two of
anyone using it you're gonna be a little you just feel out of sorts you know like
you don't know where you are you're it's such a key part of the phone experience
well speaking of out of sorts we were talking with video producer Chris here
who is not amused he's an Android guy not amused with the change in the
gestures because the he thinks are too reminiscent of Apple and you know would
you say that that's the case do you find that the gestures that that Android 10
now has or more iOS like they really have adopted whatever Apple was doing
yeah I mean by and large I don't think it's not identical there are areas that
are different like in iOS you don't have the universal swipe in back saying
because back has never been kind of as prominent in iOS as it is an Android but
yeah I mean at its core there's there's there's certainly a lot of overlap and
it's hard to deny that they took some inspiration from that you know sort of
the way it works in treating it as a standard so you know for me when I first
went to it I think I had a day where I just felt discombobulated and I wasn't
quite sure I don't know and to be fair - that wasn't an early beta when I was
using it's gotten a lot better along the way and I think once most people give it
you really feel good I saw a few days to a week I think yeah you said earlier
about a week so give it a week and you should be good to go if you can't figure
it out after a week you may want to you know rethink this whole gesture thing
yeah but the nice thing is Google is leaving in the old 3 button traditional
Android set up as an option when they when PI came around that wasn't an
option people were upset most people who just preferred that and
then for you know accessibility purposes some people have a harder time with
gestures and with tapping so from here on out Google has mandated that every
device has the option to go back to the old three button kind of style for those
who want to live a more analog life as I say you've had you had written last week
that you know with the gestures and things that you there's still - what you
call fatal flaws or at least serious issues with with what's going on what
was that about yeah so a lot of the things I wrote about early on and the
early betas have been addressed and things have definitely been smoothed out
and gotten better but they're really too big lingering flaws that having used
this final version of the enrich and ten gestures for a while just keep jumping
out at me the first is consistency where they're and it mostly ties to that back
command this living in what people find a little
weird too you can swipe in from the left or the right and that's both back either
wait to go back yeah you would logically think the right would be a forward yeah
but the idea is that there has never been a forward command in Android it's
always to go back and for you know whatever way you're holding your phone
left or right-handed hold in your left hand your right hand there's always a
simple way to do it that's easy to access is that why it's done so if
you're if you're a lefty you can swipe or if you're you know either way yeah
someone some Googler said that at some point it uh I think we're in some Q&A
they said that it was kind of for accessibility reasons and to make it
easy to hold in either hand okay but still the problem with that gesture is
it just it can it kind of overlaps and conflicts with a lot of other existing
commands within Android so some of the examples I gave when you're swiping in
google photos you might pull up your phone and you'll be swiping between
images and your gallery yeah that's sort of that same exact swiping mechanism and
often I'll be flipping through images and accidentally go back and get taken
back out to you know the main view instead of being in when that happens
and you go back to photos please take you back to where you were in photos or
do you have to go back or does it take you back to the starting point in photos
it'll take you back to like the main photo screen so if you're looking
through saying oh you've gone through a hundred photos and you accidentally hit
back and then you go back to photos you got to go through those hundred photos
again it'll take you back to whatever screen you were okay risa okay okay but
it's still irritating and so the proper procedure is to scream and yell and that
kind of stuff and it's not the only place like in if you do any kind of
photo editing sometimes I use an app called AZ screen recorder to take some
of the you know screen video cast that that show up in my stories and in that
too there's there's a little swipeable tool and you're moving through the
timeline and suddenly you go slightly too far to the edge and you've been
taken take yourself back in it and if an app doesn't have a confirmation do you
wish to go back you could potentially lose what you're trying to do is the
assumption there that that application developers you know as these gestures
become more prominent or more common that the app developers themselves are
gonna tweak the apps so that you would avoid situations like that I mean is it
up to the I guess it's up to the app develop a and I think that's kind of the
problem is that's the assumption but Google needs to set a standard and make
it clear and make it consistent because right now I mean the
there's a lot of the absent a problematic are Google's own apps which
really tells you a lot yeah that's weird it is we're not coordinated on that
that's a question okay what would you know yeah yeah I mean even Gmail you can
swipe away messages you know if you want to archive a message you swipe it and
the Google's own messaging app you swipe away messages to dismiss them a lot of
apps use that gesture and I think the idea in theory is that you do a slightly
different kind of swipe for one or the other but it's just you don't get that
consistency and you never know what's gonna happen and you know in Gmail
sometimes I've tried to swipe back to go out of the app to my home screen and
websites only archived but I'll mess an important email that you needed to hang
on to right which is still there but it's archived now right and if you don't
see it you know in the five or seven or however many seconds you have to hit
that undo button then that happened to me once where I said well I've no idea
archived away now you know what happened it's my permanent excuse for the next 10
years that I just accidentally swiped it away maybe it's a good thing it'll give
us an excuse alright so consistency is an issue and then and then you would
also written about commitment yeah and that kind of is that same thing most of
it revolves around that back gesture a pretty common swiping pattern in Android
is swiping in from the left side of an app to open its main menu there called
navigation drawer like a drawer yeah yeah okay yeah and again swiping it from
the left side of the screen just like the back so Google tried to kind of make
a compromise and and let both things exist in a weird way with just slight
variations like they have this gesture that what they call peaking where you
slide in but you don't just swipe in like you're going back you slide in a
little yeah then you keep going but it's just you never know what you're gonna
get how can you do that and so there are - it's just like we need to just commit
to it and say this is now the system back gesture we don't have other
commands that do that if you want to open the navigation drawer you can tap
this or slide them it maybe have a slide at the top to open the drawer and a
slide from the bottom to go back or something like that something that's
very discreet and you know it's either or it's not kind of in between right
right and it gets even more muddled Google actually went and added a setting
if you kind of dig through Android settings for the back gesture
sensitivity so you can adjust and say you know I want
open my afterwards more often and this is so I'm gonna make it less sensitive
but you shouldn't have to do that the basic you know system command and even
with that it still doesn't quite get you that knowing for sure what you're gonna
get so Google needs to really commit to it and say this is the new gesture where
we're gonna reserve this area of the screen this kind of swiping is for
androids back command and developers if you want your apps to work on Android 10
you're gonna have to not interfere with that right any sense
I don't know obviously it's very premature but is there any any sense at
all that with Android 11 we might get revamped gestures again it's make three
in a row okay there's no way to know right you never know you never know I'm
I'm sure they'll refine it hopefully they won't reinvent the wheel again but
it's Google I mean how many times have we seen in the past were something
they're all in on something and then surely they're not it's gone deleted so
yeah you never know okay any any final gestures you'd like
to offer Google before we let you go well I won't do one that would get us
okay no it's really not that bad I know the whole system has come a long way I
think it just needs a little more refinement probably that ideally should
have been done before this came out but still maybe 10.1 well we'll have the
answer and we'll clean things up a little it's tough because their Android
is an open ecosystem there's so many people players every manufacturer kind
of does their own take on it of course like with iOS or a lot of apps out there
but a certain point Google's gotta kind of stand up and take control and say
this is how we're doing it everybody needs to get in line you know much we
talk about borrowing a page from Apple's playbook Apple certainly is it and you
you will you will work with our system as we've got it and or you won't yeah
which case your app won't work right there's probably a happy medium between
those two but Google needs to get a little more firm and get developers
commitment we're looking for at Google when it comes to gestures commit great
ok thank you so much for the details now I do understand kind of what's going on
in the Android world with gestures it sounds like as with everything practice
will make perfect give it a week if you're new to Android 10 and see how it
goes thanks to you I appreciate it yeah
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can answer them and in the meantime for now that's a wrap
thanks jr. thanks