Android should embrace Apple’s approach to multi-touch gestures

Android has come a long way in the last 16 years. The T-Mobile G1 — or HTC Dream where I’m from — bears little resemblance to the excellent smartphones we use today, with its chunky bezels full of navigation buttons and slide-out keyboard. Physical keyboards wouldn’t last long on Android, though; the original iPhone proved that going all-in on the touchscreen was the way to go. However, despite the time that has passed since then and all the ways in which Android and iOS have grown more alike, Apple’s operating system still uses multi-touch gestures in ways Android doesn’t, and Google really needs to catch up.

Some of the multi-touch features I’ll discuss here can be found in some Android skins. One UI, for example, lets you use a second finger to swap between home screens when moving app icons. None of them match iOS, though, and only implement a half-baked version of one feature or another. I want Google to standardize this in Android so we can all benefit from it.

Multi-touch gestures are everywhere in iOS 18 and iPadOS, and it’s the latter where they make the most sense, using that larger display to the max. I tried to show off some of my favorite unique iOS and iPadOS gestures in the video above, but keep in mind that things look more janky than reality: it’s trickier to use a tablet on a stand like that compared to a normal situation where it’s in my hand or lap, plus there’s a camera in the way impeding my gestures. Still, I think the video highlights the many ways in which Apple makes the most of its devices’ displays.

My favorite use of multi-touch is navigating the iPad with gestures, regardless of whether my iPad has a home button. Thanks to multi-touch gestures, I don’t need to reach down to the bottom of the screen to switch apps or go home. A quick flick up with four fingers sends me home. Swiping and holding with those same fingers opens the app switcher, and swiping right or left will switch between the apps I currently have open.

Looking at gestures that are on both the iPad and the iPhone, drag and drop is the most obvious example. Rather than navigating through the media picker in whatever messaging app I’m using to find a screenshot I’ve just taken, I like to drag it from the screenshot preview and drop it into the messaging app of choice. This is useful for sharing links, too. Instead of copying and pasting, I do the same thing as the screenshot: drag the link with one finger while another closes the browser and navigates to the desired destination. These gestures save me from using Apple’s horrendous share sheet or trying to figure out its text selection mechanics.

Android 7.0 Nougat added the ability to drag and drop text back in 2016. In fact, being one of the first to find that in the developer preview and posting about it on Google+ eventually led to me pursuing this whole tech writer career. Unfortunately, Google’s drag-and-drop is as half-baked and unfinished now as it was eight years ago.

The issue with Google’s implementation is that the app needs to support it. On my iOS devices, any text that can be selected can then be dragged and dropped somewhere else, while Android apps need to support it themselves. On my Galaxy Z Fold 4, I can drag and drop text from Chrome into the app where I’m writing, but I can’t drag and drop selected text from Twitter. On my iPhone or iPad, I can. This same inconsistency applies to every other multi-touch interaction, and in the end, I’ve given up on using it rather than memorizing a list of apps and services it sometimes works with.

I’ll admit, though, that Android’s single-finger navigation is, overall, better than what you’ll find in iOS: Apple still can’t decide which of three back button/gesture implementations it should use, while Android has always had an intuitive back button or swipe. However, Apple’s maturity in the tablet space still shines through when you switch to multi-touch.

Using multiple fingers to manipulate a screen this big feels natural and, in my anecdotal experience, is something easier for people to learn. Some of my older family members prefer to use the old three-button navigation on their Android phones but found the iPad easy to navigate when they first picked it up. They love using the four-finger swipes to swap between apps.

Thanks to the rise of the foldable, more natural interactions with large screens are more important now than ever. Tablets have largely been stay-at-home devices, but phones like the Pixel 9 Pro Fold make it easy to carry a large screen around with you. I regularly use a Galaxy Z Fold 4, and whenever I pick it up after using my iPad Pro, I try to navigate with the four-fingered gestures, only to be disappointed when nothing happens.

Implementing more natural multi-touch features into Android is all down to the software. Our touchscreens have been able to detect multiple inputs for years since the very beginning of the smartphone as we know it, and it’s high time Google finally caught up. Maybe it’s a bit late for Android 16, but I do hope Google catches up with Android 17.