Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google is working on a native option for stock Android to flip the three-button navigation bar, a feature long requested by users switching from Samsung devices.
- This addresses a major pain point, as Samsung’s default navigation layout is the reverse of stock Android’s, forcing users to retrain their muscle memory.
- Evidence of the unreleased feature was found in an Android Canary build, but it will likely not launch until a future Android 16 quarterly update.
Switching phones can be a pain, but you can do many things to make the process easier. Using a password manager and restoring backups of your important apps and files can ease the transition, but some things can’t be transferred over. If you’re switching from a Samsung phone to a Pixel, for example, you can’t transfer many system settings because they don’t exist in stock Android. A particularly notable example is Samsung’s flipped three-button navigation bar. Its omission in stock Android forces users to retrain their muscle memory for the swapped back and recents buttons. Thankfully, Google may finally address this pain point by adding an option to flip the navigation bar in stock Android.
You’re reading an Authority Insights story. Discover Authority Insights for more exclusive reports, app teardowns, leaks, and in-depth tech coverage you won’t find anywhere else. These reports reflect developments at the time of writing. Some features or details uncovered in leaks may change before official release.
Android’s on-screen three-button navigation scheme has been around since Android 4.0’s release in 2011, and it has always consisted of these three buttons from left to right: Back, Home, and Recents. Samsung phones, however, flip this order, placing the Back button on the right and the Recents button on the left. This makes sense for brand consistency, as older Samsung phones with physical keys also had the back key on the right.
Even though Samsung provides the option to change the button order or switch to gesture navigation, most of its users stick with the default. Google, however, doesn’t provide a native option to flip the buttons. This is a point of frustration for many people who switch from Samsung devices to phones with stock or near-stock versions of Android, like Sony Xperia devices or Google Pixel phones.
Back in early 2023, Sony engineers submitted code to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) to add a setting that would swap the Back and Recents buttons, but they abandoned the patches this April. At the time, we thought Google had rejected the feature, but it seems we were wrong. We’ve spotted evidence that Google is now working on an option to flip the navigation bar, though we probably won’t see the feature go live for at least a few months.
While digging through the latest Android Canary release, I spotted code for a new feature that swaps the order of the Back and Recents buttons in the three-button navigation bar. It isn’t enabled yet, and there’s no user-facing toggle for it, but the code’s purpose is clear. Although the feature can’t be activated yet, the change itself is easy to visualize. Here’s what the navigation bar will look like once this option is available:
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
Since this feature isn’t available yet, we don’t have a timeline for when it’ll go live. This shouldn’t be a particularly difficult feature for Google to implement, but the company also needs to test it, decide where to place the toggle, create an illustration, and translate the text strings, among other things. We could see it go live in the second quarterly release of Android 16 — scheduled for December — at the earliest, but there’s no guarantee.
Thank you for being part of our community. Read our Comment Policy before posting.
