Summary
- Pixel devices may soon allow users to swap the order of the Back and Recents buttons in the three-button navigation bar.
- Samsung users may experience frustration when transitioning to non-Samsung devices due to the flipped button configuration.
- This might arrive in a future version of Android, but it’s currently inactive, even in the pre-release builds.
Three-button navigation is still a thing, but it’s really only used widely by Samsung these days, which still ships it as the default option over gestures. If you’re more of a three-button nav person and you want to move to a Pixel, your muscle memory could soon kick right in after your next upgrade.
The standard Android layout, present since Android 4.0 in 2011, places the “Back” button on the left, “Home” in the center, and “Recents” on the right. Samsung, however, has historically flipped this arrangement. On Samsung devices, the “Back” button is on the right and the “Recents” button is on the left. This decision was made for brand consistency—it mirrored the layout of physical keys on older Samsung phones before the Galaxy S7, where they still came with capacitive keys and a home button.
Some code has been discovered on the latest Android Canary build that directly implements a feature to swap the order of the “Back” and “Recents” buttons in the three-button navigation bar. While the feature is not yet active, and there is no user-facing toggle for it, this would allow Pixel phones to swap around their keys if they wish to do so.
Samsung already provides its users with the ability to revert to the standard Android layout or switch to gesture-based navigation, but the default setting remains the flipped configuration. This means that a lot of Samsung users who use three-button navigation are used to having their Recents button on the left and their Back button on the right. And when these users transition to a non-Samsung device, they are forced to retrain themselves, leading to a period of frustratingly incorrect button presses. This is typically an option in custom hardware, including custom ROMs, but it has surprisingly been absent from Google’s flavor of Android as well as from AOSP Android. This would finally change that.
It should be noted that engineers from Sony submitted code to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) that would have added a setting to swap the Back and Recents buttons. However, these patches were abandoned in April of this year. Turns out Google didn’t abandon the concept, and it’s something it might explore in a future version of Android. The keyword here is might. This is just inactive code right now, and not only would it need to appear as an active feature on a future Canary or Developer Preview/Beta build first, but it would also need to make its way through the release pipeline into a final Android version. The Android Canary channel was just recently introduced, so for all we know, these bleeding-edge features being introduced now might not pop up until Android 17 next year, or even later. Or never. We’ll have to wait and see.
Source: Android Authority
