In the first developer preview for Android 12, we can see that there are some slight tweaks to the navigation gestures. However, Google did opt to leave the gesture bar at the bottom of the screen, which looks ugly and most of its partners have removed in their versions of Android.
The biggest tweak to the navigation gestures in Android 12 is the fact that they now work instantly in fullscreen apps. For example, if you opened up an image on Twitter, you’d first need to exit the fullscreen, before you could go home or simply go back. Now, you don’t need to exit. The gestures work right there in the fullscreen app. It’s a minor tweak, but definitely a useful one.
It’s worth noting that this might no work in all apps.
A subtle tweak that most users may not even notice
This is one of those subtle tweaks that most users may not even notice on their smartphone. As muscle memory sets in and tells you to exit the fullscreen app first before going back or going home. So it’ll take some getting used to this change, or you could always result to still exiting the full screen app before going back. As that will still work here.
It’s a tweak that we may see tweaked a bit more before the final release of Android 12 comes out later this year. Many times features like this do tend to get tweaked a bit before Google releases the final version of the newest version of Android. So things could change over the course of the upcoming developer previews and betas. So do keep that in mind.
If you want to flash the Android 12 developer preview onto your Pixel device, you can find instructions on how to do that here. It’s relatively easy, but it will take some time.