As good as Android 9 Pie has been since its release, the one universal pain point it has thrown up for users has been its multitasking system, which is a weird mix of gestures and buttons that just doesn’t work well. At Google I/O today, Google made it known that it’s building an all-new gestural navigation for Android 10 Q that ditches the buttons and makes swiping in from either edge of the phone act as a back button. It combines the iPhone’s basic swiping interactions with Huawei’s EMUI edge-swiping back gesture.

I’ve reviewed a number of Huawei and Honor’s recent phones, with both brands running EMUI atop Android 9, and I find the side swipe for back to be a really good solution. I got so accustomed to it while reviewing the excellent P30 Pro, in fact, that I found myself repeating the gesture on Pixel and OnePlus devices that didn’t recognize it. What’s really good about swiping in from either edge is that it uproots your back button from a fixed position on the phone. The entire height of either edge of the phone is available to swipe in from. It doesn’t matter how you’re gripping your device, a back swipe is always within convenient reach and doesn’t require you to readjust your grasp.

The downside to Huawei’s approach, which Google is now emulating, is that it clashes with side menus in apps, which are brought in by swiping in from the left edge. Apps that work like this include Gmail, Google Photos, Google Maps — it’s basically a design paradigm for all of Google’s first-party apps — and a whole bunch of other prominent and popular apps. In Huawei’s case, disambiguating between a swipe that intends to bring the menu in and one that’s meant to act as a back gesture is mostly done by making a lighter swipe for the menu and a more assertive one for the back action. That’s obviously less than ideal.

Google’s solution, at least until it’s had the time to revise its own apps and encourage developers to follow suit via its design guidelines, is to treat the first swipe in from the left as one triggering the menu rather than the back gesture. So, if you want to swipe in from the left to go back, you have to do it twice. App developers will apparently have the freedom to override that behavior, but Google sounds determined to make sure every Android device manufacturer and app developer falls in line and adheres to its new navigation paradigm. It’ll take a while for Google to free up both edges of an Android device for back swipes, but Android Q is getting us started on that path.