Joe Hindy / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google is working to bring back predictive support for three-button navigation in Android 16.
- Predictive feedback lets you preview where the back button will take you.
- Currently, this feature only works with gesture navigation.
I’m sure this has happened to you at least once in the past: you press the Android back button and, instead of an app taking you to the screen you were expecting, the button leaves the screen completely. application. It’s frustrating for users because it can cause them to lose progress, and it’s also frustrating for developers because it reduces usage. To solve this problem, Google created predictive backtracking, a feature that lets you preview where navigating back will actually take you. Currently, predictive feedback doesn’t work if you use three-button navigation, but that should change in this year’s Android 16 update.
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Predictive feedback is a feature that Google has been working on for a few years now. It was first introduced as a developer option in Android 13 and became enabled by default in Android 15. It lets you preview the destination of the back gesture before completely terminating it, letting you decide if you want to go back or stay. the current screen. If going back takes you to your phone’s home screen, you’ll even see a preview of your current home screen when you swipe in, making it much less likely that you’ll accidentally leave an application.
Google designed predictive feedback for gesture navigation, which is the intended method of navigation on Android. However, for accessibility reasons, Android still supports the old three-button navigation method that has been around for over a decade. Many users prefer three-button navigation for its speed and simplicity, so it remains very popular.
For this reason, Google is looking to bring back predictive support for three-button navigation in Android 16. With a few changes in the second developer preview of Android 16, I managed to enable an early preview of this new behavior. As you can see in the embedded video below, when I press and hold the back button, I can see which page I will go to next when I release the button. This even works in apps that support predictive feedback, such as Google Calendar. However, I am currently unable to see a preview of the home screen when I return. I think this is happening because it’s either just a bug or unfinished work. The back-to-home animation will likely work once predictive back support officially rolls out for three-button navigation users.
I don’t know when Google will bring back predictive support for the three-button navigation method, but I’ll be surprised if this isn’t built into Android 16. Android 16 is expected in the second quarter of this year, but this new behavior may appear before the stable version. It could very well go live in the first beta of Android 16, for example, scheduled for the end of the month.
Predictive back support isn’t the only upgrade to the three-button navigation in Android 16. Google is also developing a new corner swipe gesture that lets you invoke the default Assistant when you use the three-button navigation. Additional changes to the three-button navigation would be appreciated, including the much-requested ability to swap the previous and recent button order.
