is anyone else bothered by the lack of the 3 buttons at the bottom

I think there's a setting to bring back the buttons, if you want that.

Settings -> System -> Gestures -> System navigation

Yeah this is what I do. I tried gestures but I really prefer the buttons.
- There's two of us! Really the minority in this thread. For me there was no guide so i was extremely confused at first. Then I found it interfered with one of my most used apps that featured similar gestures so I turned it off and never went back.
- Just stick with the gestures for a week or so. You'll get used to it. Wouldn't want to go back to the button row anymore.
- Same for me, I think there are a lot of us 😀
  I just haven't been able to get use to gestures instead of the buttons.
- Hello fellow cat! Correction fellow lazy cat
Oh my God, thank you. I hate the gestures. I'm constantly going back when I'm just trying to scroll or turn pages
Just upgraded my phone and found this setting myself. Thank god you can change it back to the 3 buttons.

Definitely try gestures.

Being able to "go back" from a gentle swipe at any height is a blessing for the small hand. The rest of options are really, really intuitive.

Unless you have some mobility issues, you'll never come back after a week.

i've no mobility issues, but i can't stand that back gesture. it interferes with the ability to open drawers; and i can't spam it quickly to get out of a "deep" page in an app
gestures do have pros (for instance, the ability to hold and scroll through recents) but the back gesture just seems straight up worse to me
- it interferes with the ability to open drawers
  It's funny, but I tried looking around the old Material Design guidelines and I haven't come across any mention of swiping to open a drawer. I know it was on Android Developers, but it appears that from the point of view of the design team, it wasn't really "officially" recommended?
  Regardless, Discord, IMO, offers a better implementation for side sheets, as the metaphor isn't that you drag something from beyond the screen into view, you just drag the view itself to the side and that reveals the side sheet. And it works in the middle of the screen so it doesn't interfere with the system gestures
it frequently misfires when I don't want it to and fails to fire when I do. I used it for a couple of months and then went back to buttons after getting frustrated.
You just made me try it out, it's... Interesting. Hard to get used to, but I like the extra screen space.
- Give it a week. You shortly will not go back.

Pretty sure you can still enable 3 button navigation in settings. I still use it

I had that for about half an hour, but I wouldn't want to switch back. Gestures all the time

Took me awhile to get used to gesture, but can't go back now. The only thing that still bothers me is the old UX of the slide out side menus was clearly overlooked with gesture navigation and is really awkward.

I'll never forget the day I realized my reddit app (Relay for Reddit) had a drawer that pulled out by just sliding your finger to the right from anywhere on the screen. As long as you didn't slide from the left edge, it pulled the drawer out. Why we don't make that the default is beyond me.

It's possible to adjust it so you have three little buttons but you can also use gestures from those buttons. Not the sides. I used to use that setup for a long time but know I'm just using the regular gestures for now. By the way I'm on a Samsung Galaxy S20.

These settings are samsung specific. Samsung had optional gesture navigation before it was in android. Different gestures though (the 3 button swipe from the bottom option). So nowadays you can choose between the old style samsung gestures, the android gestures and toggle the button row on or off on samsung phones.
- Interesting. I assumed it was an Android feature rather than Samsung.

initially I didn't like the gesture controls but they really are better than having buttons wasting space and burning in the screen

Can't agree. I thought they sucked. I gave it two weeks but it just felt worse to me.
Is burn-in really an issue? I've never noticed it on any of my OLED devices
- maybe not these days

I used a phone without gestures the other day and had such a hard time with it, it was crazy how unintuitive the buttons felt in comparison to the gestures!

The simple fact is, neither is actually all that intuitive, they're learned, but gestures definitely get to be very convenient and a much quicker form of navigation.

I would definitely not want to go back.

It's funny, if you swap gestures with buttons in your post, I'd agree 100% lol
- @Vlhacs Yeah, like I said, we call things intuitive without realizing that nothing in this is intuitive at all, it's all learned behavior.
  For me now, swiping at the edges of the screen makes complete sense and needing to go to a certain place at the bottom of the phone to go back was weird because "why would I go to the bottom of the screen to go backwards, that doesn't make sense", but it was definitely a learning curve to get to this point!
  With all that said, hell, there are still times I really miss the old trackball and full keyboard from the OG G1 (the dedicated hardware button for the camera was nice too, but double tap power isn't terrible). I wouldn't want to give up screen space for the trackball, but damn if it didn't really help with fine navigation and using the phone in the cold!
  Different strokes for different folks, I'm just glad we've got options so we can all be (mostly) happy with how things work!
I remember it is especially intuitive when it goes full screen in landscape mode, like I think it needs one swipe and then choosing the needed button (it is better to swipe twice) or deal with the space occupied by the Android buttons on the right edge of your screen... iugh.
I jumped to the Android bandwagon later (2020) and as I came from iOS I never used them, but I tried them anyway... And they are not for me...

I'm so used to gestures I can barely use a phone with button navigation. When I have to help my parents/grandparents with their smartphones I take longer just because they use buttons lol.

Also the 3 button navigation is not gone afaik. All OEMs I've used have it buried in the settings somewhere.

I really wanted to like gestures. I used them for over a year.
\ Even after all that, switching back bottom navigation immediately felt right.

I loved Android's 3 button nav for years but after like a week of using gestures I couldn't go back. Once I got the hang of it, it was way more fluid feeling to use.

I like both but use gestures because I don't want to lose screen space on the bottom. I like full screen apps

Haven't used the 3 buttons navigation since 2016 or 2017

gesture navigation is fine for me. but i more want stacking recent tasks back

I prefer gestures. But if you like buttons just go to settings and turn them on.

I don't know about your phone, but there is probably a setting to enable button navigation.

However, I was in similar situation when I bought my phone, I even enabled the buttons at first. Then I thought to try gesture navigation for sometime, and now I love it. It's much easier and faster in most cases.

Nah, I jumped to gestures the first chance I did. 3 button navigation is old school, and on large screen devices, it's not good. Gestures have a larger surface area for activation and require less precise input to active. I also use one-handed mode+ of samsung, so I have the entire 3 sides of the screen to activate as desired. They are just that much intuitive and convenient for me.

Gesture all the way

Try gestures. They get easy after a time. Pro tip: to open hamburger menus tap and hold left edge of screen for 0.5s and pull it out to the right. Works every time and no accidental back swipes.

A diagonal swipe also works.
- Oh, i havent tried that. Thanks for the tip
These tips are very helpful! Thanks. Any others?
- Not that i can think of atm.

For me it's the opposite now. My boyfriend still uses the 3 bottom buttons and I am so used to gestures by now that whenever I use his phone I am always a little thrown off. To me it just feels more intuitive to swipe rather than to go to the bottom of the screen to tap a button.

I really miss the 2 button navigation bar. using the pill to switch between apps felt intuitive. however I don't think I could go back after using gestures.

Had the same initial reaction to Pixel. But its really grown on me. The swipe to go back is awesome. Having said that, there is a setting to get the buttons back, in case this doesn't grow on you

It's just too easy to accidentally swipe back. A massive massive flaw in my opinion. The amount of times I catch my self entering a screen scrolling vertically and then accidentally exiting only to lose my place when I return.

Having said that the speed of doing actions has increased for me. It's just the accuracy has decreased at the same time.

you can adjust the gesture sensitivity
- Not enough it seems. Still a huge false positive rate. Made worse by horizontal lists in a lot of apps. Developers are supposed to be able to enforce special zones where the gesture isn't recognised allowing for horizontal scrolling but this doesn't seem to be working either.
  A poorly implemented feature that takes the ecosystem backwards.

You're looking for settings --> navigation bar

I very quickly got used to the gesture controls, and now appreciate the extra screen space.

Just changed back to buttons thanks to a comment on this post. I had been using gestures since I got my new Pixel mid-July (since my carrier stopped supporting the 3a and gave me a 6a for $50). Never got used to it, constantly kept accidentally swiping to go back while doing other things.

This isn't quite as good as the 3a, which had buttons for back and home, but swipe up for the app switcher, but it's definitely better than 100% gestures

Fuck gestures! And people, can't you understand other people like buttons instead of gestures? If you don't have an answer to what OP asked, why bother to "give advice"?

Yeah, I'm lucky that I have the option of both gesture or three button nav of which, I still use the latter because it's better for me.
I was big on gestures back in the day with LMT and something I've found with MiuiOS is they now have that with Quick Ball as it's called. It's ace, and also a bit like AOSP Browser side gestures which I also used to use.
Further, slightly off topic ranting? Yes, where I work they currently have an obsession with installing touchscreens on HMI panels to control machinery. Problem is the touch resolution on them is dogshit so peeps end up start trying to use with them with their pens etc and physically damage the screen.
Before these touchscreen "interfaces", we had nice IP68 physical buttons on a Siemens panel that did the very same functions. Sickens me how much they cost for a lower quality interface.

Just use the standard navigation bar

I switched to "drag up" nav bar as soon as OLED and burn-in became a thing. So technically I was already "gesturing" before gestures were integrated :3

Once proper gestures came in, after the initial learning period, I never looked back!

Past two phones I've had (Galaxy Z fold 3 and OnePlus 7 Pro) I've had the option for gestures or buttons.

I always pick gestures, I get more screen real estate and the gestures feel good and intuitive.

If you don't like them, change it, that's the benefit of Android, you can do what you want.

Not to mention how often the on screen navigation buttons would just burn in. There'd be a permanent outline where they normally are if you were to view any full screen media.
Definitely made sure to enable gesture navigation on my current phone and that hasn't been a problem.
- I was about to consider trying this on my phone and then I read your comment and realized my phone is 3 years old and has had the buttons in the same place (portrait) for 95% of the time it's screen has been on and it will 100% have burn in.
- Is screen burn in still a problem for modern phones in 2023?
Yup i found the setting. Thank you all. Alghtough i will try to use gestures for a while since i see few comments saying they got used to them,maybe i will also get used to them alghtough i have my doubts( Particulary beacuse i like to move between apps quite often ,quite fast,and thats the worst gesture of them all )
- You don't need to go via the task switcher at all with gestures, swipe along the bottom, left or right, instead of up, to go directly to the previous/next app. Much faster than the buttons and the main reason I was excited for gesture, as I'm also a huge mobile multi-tasker.

Gestures are great and intuitive, definitely give it a bit more time before changing back imo!

I love the gestures themselves. I hate that they "try" to follow device orientation.

It's a guesswork if the screen is rotated or if the media itself is just so. Also i've had multiple cases where the gesturebar is on the portrait bottom but the gestures are on the landscape.

Oneplus did it correct when they had their own gestures. The gestures were always on the same spot regardless of the device orientation. You always knew where they were. Also i think they worked in fullscreen apps without first swiping the gesture bar out.

edit: just wanted to add that i'm on android 12, i don't know if they are less finicky now.

Gestures is the only way forward, I feel.

Once you learn them they are fast, simple and highly efficient.

The 3 buttons navigation feels like what we had to use in the past so that it would be easier for anyone to use.

However, I feel like the buttons are a very primitive way of doing things

I tried to like gestures it for a few days but had issues so I went back to 3 button

The back button on ios is super far away. Back gesture you can do anywhere.

You can still use the 3 button layout but I really wouldn't recommend it. Gestures are quicker and easier.

I prefer gestures but I don't like them - it's too easy to swipe out of an App when you're actually trying to do something else like pull out a side menu or switch along a carousel, or interact with something (e.g. swiping mail away). I tried to reduce the sensitivity of the gestures and then they became too useless.
Unfortunately a lot of apps still aren't designed with gestures in mind (mainly side swipes) and need optimising. Hopefully this will improve over time. I'm guessing carousels in particular are now no long practical in Android.

Gesture nav really bothers while gaming. For the rest, it works fluidly.

I'd recommend a new launcher. Lawnchair is totally free. I personally use Nova Launcher (paid). Both give you the option to have the buttons back.

Lawn chair is great. I used to cling to those 3 buttons, but I got the pixel 7a a few months ago and tried the new gestures and love it. Couldn't imagine going back to the 3 buttons

I'm glad my phone and the ROMs I've used have had the option to switch between the two

Not sure since I don't have the phone, but does this apply? https://www.asus.com/support/FAQ/1041064/