Gadgetory

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 is 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 them they're the best they're great you should love them or no they suck they're terrible there's plenty of articles about that instead I want to 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 fluffy and soft and whatever but your effective 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 what 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 an if this then that sort of programmatic thing that just happens but when you actually move a card or move a piece of you know UI on the screen it feels to you're you know 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 dimensions the first is I'm testing this on a pixel to excel and so what we see here might be slightly different than what you see in other Android phones when it's eventually released number two this beta is not that good it's kind of 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 so before I oh that might have 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 an Android P it's actually 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 to swipe to do that you're not wrong you're totally right but there are some other reasons that this Chester 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 you know 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 and swiping up for the app Shore it saves you a step and then third most importantly there's this lozenge Home button thing and you can just swipe it over the right to switch to your last app same as double tapping the square button or you can drag it over and kind of jam through and a little scrolling action your recent apps and let go to jump to an earlier app it doesn't have to be the last one it can be like the one you use 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 and Android pee 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 pee 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 a very very similar but there are some differences the first the thing I haven't really mentioned yet is on Android pee you tap the home button to go 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 we're going to 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 web loss is 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 from each other hand I don't think it's really stealing it's just that there are 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 all right 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 what I'm super worried about the thing I don't care that much about is the mixing of metaphors I get that you still have to tap the home button I get 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 going to 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 own web page 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 going to be a disaster or it's going to 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 judgement 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 want to 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 bye eater it's the kitchen gadget show and I actually really loved it they just did an episode on whether or not the instant pot is worth it you should check it out