Ever since vendors started cooking up their own solutions for gestural navigation a few years back, the landscape has become convoluted and confusing for users and developers alike. Google is looking to clear that up for everyone with a handful of new guidelines for smartphone vendors. These will apply to all new Android phones launched after January 1, 2020.

We've already covered how Google will be making third-party navigation more difficult to enable out-of-the-box, but there's a lot more to these new gesture requirements than Google outright banning something.

When it comes to user interface elements, there are lots of things fighting for screen real estate. Aside from navigation gestures, we've seen plenty of other swipe-inward actions appear over the years, most notably from Samsung. The Edge Panel, as debuted on the Galaxy Edge devices some years ago, appears when users swipe inward from the curved glass edge. This conflicts with Google's design of swipe-in from the side to navigate back and, thus, Google has mandated that such features only reside on the top 1/3 of the screen in the future.

This effectively fixes the issue many had with Android 10's gestural navigation, as the top 1/3 of the screen would be reserved for other actions. This includes special vendor features like the Edge Panels as well as simply pulling out the left-hand menu that many apps use. Google is also providing a way to adjust how far inward users will need to pull for the back action to happen, so there's a bit of room for customization.