If you didn’t know or haven’t tried the recent preview builds on your own device, then you may have missed that the Android 13 Beta 3 has altered the gesture navigation bar. This is the first change to this UI since gestural navigation was first added back in Android 10. There is more than a passing resemblance to the thick navbar that you’ll find on iOS devices that use gestures.
This is just a cosmetic change, as gestures work exactly the same as they always have with the new navbar in Android 13. While there is still time for Google to make changes, it’s likely that this is what will greet Pixel owners that update to Android 13 when it finally arrives in a stable form.
What is most surprising is that we expected our readers to dislike the change. It actually falls predominantly into two camps: those who love it and those who simply don’t care. 32% of our readers love the change, citing the “larger bar” as it’s more visible and it makes it more obvious for features like one-handed mode. That said, the larger size doesn’t change the activation area.
31% of you said you don’t care, with some, like reader Spaha saying they continue to use three-button navigation rather than gestures. Some like reader Jitterry even claim that they “couldn’t care less” about the bigger, bolder Android 13 gesture navbar even going so far as to state they had “never noticed when it’s there or not.” That seems pretty surprising given the change is quite substantial — at least visually.
18% of our readers said they simply tolerate the change. Luckily, because there is no effect on the usability or functionality, it is easy to just let these changes pass by. However, reader destinyhud makes a great point about the introduction of a black border in certain applications because the gesture navbar is larger in Android 13. It would be great to have a toggle to adjust this in Pixel system settings for sure.
A fairly small 15% of our readers said they outright hate the change here. Reader Mrd1 said they would actually like to see a return of the two-button navbar as it fused all the best bits of gestures with the functionality of on-screen buttons baked in. That’s kind of hard to argue with, and it would be great to see Google restore the feature or at least allow some level of customization.
ANDROID 13 EXPECTED RELEASE DATE
Back in February, Google released the first developer preview, and on 26 April released the first Android 13 Beta for Pixel devices. As per the timeline shared by Google, the 2 Beta released in may and Beta 3 and 4 are scheduled to release in June and July respectively. Google is expected to release the final and stable version of Android 13 in August 2022.
NEW QUICK SETTINGS TILES
Tiles in the quick settings are the quickest way to access shortcuts. With Android 13, Google has added a few handy ones to the tiles. These include:
- Colour correction quick setting tile
- One-handed mode quick setting tile
- Security and Privacy Controls quick setting tile
- Device Controls quick setting tile to control smart home devices
- QR code scanner quick toggle
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