 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, 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 wanna 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 floofy and soft and whatever, but your affective 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. When 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 UI on the screen, it feels to your 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 in 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 to mention. So the first is I'm testing this on a Pixel 2 XL, and so what we see here might be slightly different than what you see on other Android phones when it's eventually released. Number two, this beta's 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 the week before I owe. That might've 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 in 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 the swipe to do that. You're not wrong, you're totally right. But there are some other reasons that this gesture 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, then swiping up for the app drawer. It saves you a step. And then third, most importantly, there's this lozenge home button thing, and you can just swipe it over to 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 in a little scrolling action in your recent apps, and then let go to jump to an earlier app. It doesn't have to be the last one. It can be like the one you used 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 in Android P could be better than what we had before. But we should talk about the elephant in the room, and that elephant is named iPhone X. So the big question here with the iPhone X is did Android P 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 very, very similar. But there are some differences. The first, the thing I haven't really mentioned yet, is on Android P, you tap the home button to go home, 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 X. If we're gonna talk about stealing gestures and swipes, we should really talk about this other phone, the 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 X 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 WebOS 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. And I don't think it's really stealing. It's just that there are certain tools in UI and 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 X, 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, one 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 gonna 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 webpage 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 gonna be a disaster or it's gonna 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 judgment 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 wanna 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 by Eater. It's the Kitchen Gadget Show and I actually really love it. They just did an episode on whether or not the Instant Pot is worth it. You should check it out.