I've been playing with it, you've been playing with it,

and you already know that there's 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 on

'They're the best, they're great, you should love them,'

or 'Nah, 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 you're 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 a 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 and 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.

The first is I'm testing this on a Pixel Two 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 kinda 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 IO,

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 gonna be 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 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 score button,

or you can drag it over

and kind of jam through in a little scrolling action

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 10.

So the big question here with the iPhone 10 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 10.

If we're gonna talk about stealing gestures and swipes,

we should really talk about this other phone,

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 10 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 was 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 form each other

and I don't think it's really stealing,

it's just that they're certain tools in UI

and like 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.

(light electronic music)

Alright, so, having looked at webOS,

miss you buddy, and the iPhone 10,

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 in metaphors.

I get that you still have to tap the home button,

I get that 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 one 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.