Question of the Day: Android P Gesture Navigation, Thoughts?

Now that a number of you have had a solid day to play with Android P Beta on your Pixel or Pixel 2 (maybe Essential Phone too!), we need to talk about Android’s new gesture navigation. Are you loving it? Hating it? Still not sure about it?

If you missed it, I went into a lengthy overview of the fresh new gesture setup in a video yesterday, where I showed off how app switching works, some of the shortcuts Google has included, and that the back button is still there as a thing you can use for some reason, since it hasn’t been implemented into the gesture button, even though it should have been (seriously, you should just slide the home button to the left to go back).

Do I love it? I’m not sure yet. I think it’s a change, possibly for the sake of changing something rather than a meaningful change that has improved the experience. After all, you still just have a navigation bar area that is using up screen space, only now it’s filled with semi-confusing swipes instead of simple tapping. I think it could be improved pretty easily (like killing the back button and adding the left wipe I just mentioned, swiping down to access the app switcher to not make the app drawer so confusing, etc.). Obviously, I still need more time with it to see if this is good or not.

What about you? Have you come to any conclusions yet? Has this improved Android for you? Have you already gone back to the old-style buttons?