{"id":49417,"date":"2025-08-06T11:56:04","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T11:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/49417\/"},"modified":"2025-08-06T11:56:04","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T11:56:04","slug":"google-and-samsung-are-quietly-making-their-android-phones-work-alike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/49417\/","title":{"rendered":"Google and Samsung are quietly making their Android phones work alike"},"content":{"rendered":"

Don’t look now, but Google and Samsung might just be reconciling their age-old differences when it comes to how users should navigate Android. And like most times when the two have<\/a> joined<\/a> forces<\/a> for the betterment of the ecosystem, it’s a two-way street with the changes they’ve been spotted making.<\/p>\n

Two news reports have emerged in the last week that feel a bit like dots waiting to be connected. First, SammyGuru<\/a> spotted a change in Samsung’s One UI 8.5 setup flow<\/a>: After booting up a new phone, the system gives you a clear option between navigating the device with “buttons on the screen” or “swipe gestures.”<\/p>\n

While Samsung has offered gesture navigation as an option ever since Google added the feature to AOSP back in the Android 10 days, users had to seek it out. As a result, most Samsung phones you’ll spot in the wild will have three buttons at the bottom of the screen: Recent Apps, Home, and Back.<\/p>\n

But the order of those buttons is where the other piece of news comes into play. As spotted by Mishaal Rahman in a report for Android Authority<\/a>, the latest Android Canary build for Google Pixels has a new piece of dormant code that, once activated, mimics Samsung’s layout when using button navigation.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

Source: Mishaal Rahman \/ Android Authority<\/a><\/p>\n

Connecting the dots or grasping at straws?<\/p>\n

The fact that these two changes were spotted in development during the same week could be a complete coincidence \u2014 but it could also be a sign of something larger at play behind the scenes. It wouldn’t be surprising at all if we found out down the road that Google had nudged Samsung to get with the gesture-based times, or that Samsung had responded by saying “I scratch your back, you scratch my Recents-Home-Back.”<\/p>\n

Either way, these reports paint a promising picture for Android fragmentation.<\/p>\n

I scratch your back, you scratch my Recents-Home-Back<\/p>\n

Samsung is one of the last button nav holdouts \u2014 most other Android OEMs, like Motorola and OnePlus, joined Google in effectively defaulting to swipe-based gesture navigation years ago. But with Samsung’s huge sales figures eclipsing everyone else in the ecosystem, it’s entirely plausible that more than half of the Android phones in use today are rocking on-screen navigation buttons.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Pixel phones are somewhat lacking when it comes to customization options, so being able to flip the layout after switching from Google’s default gestures to button nav would be a welcome change. And while the new piece of code spotted by Rahman was inactive, he was able to activate the feature and found it to be working. So it’s not far-fetched to hope the option might ultimately find its way into AOSP for all Android phones to use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Don’t look now, but Google and Samsung might just be reconciling their age-old differences when it comes to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49418,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[49,48,190,61],"class_list":["post-49417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mobile","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-mobile","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49417\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}