Gesture controls without clear navigation bars aren’t just for the iPhone X. Some Android smartphones let users save screen real estate by using home button gestures, and now OnePlus’ newest Oreo beta build for the OnePlus 5T includes a feature that disables the navigation bar and instead prioritizes gestures. We haven’t had a chance to test this yet, but Reddit user MisterMrMister uploaded a video of the gesture controls in action.
You can see that the phone’s navigation bar is missing, but the user is still able to pull up different pages, toggle between windows, and exit apps.
MisterMrMister says, “The gesture for going home is pretty smooth and responsive, including going to the recent app overview.” The user continues to note that the back button gesture is a “hit or miss for me right now. Sometimes I seem to ‘miss’ the right area to activate it.”
Like we learned with the iPhone X, gestures take time to get used to, although most people seemed to adjust pretty quickly after losing their dedicated home button. Maybe this is the start of the end of not only buttons, but also nav bars.