Latest Action Launcher beta adds support for Android 10 gesture navigation

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Google introduced its own take on navigation gestures with Android 10 to replace Android Pie‘s awful two-button navigation system. However, the new navigation gestures had their own set of issues. One of the most annoying things about the gestures was the lack of third-party launcher support. Due to this, users had to rely on the navigation buttons if they wanted to use a third-party launcher on their device. Several launcher developers raised their voice against the shoddy implementation and Google released a fix earlier this year in October. Sadly, the fix only worked on the Pixel 4 series at first. With the Android security patches for December 2019, Google finally rolled out navigation support with third-party launcher for older Pixel devices. Now, the latest beta update for Action Launcher brings native Android 10 gesture navigation support to the app.

Action Launcher’s Chris Lacy recently took to Twitter to announce the rollout of Action Launcher public beta v45 which comes with support for Android 10’s gesture navigation, live wallpaper support in Quicktheme, and more.

The first public beta of Action Launcher v45 with Android 10 gesture navigation support (🎉🎆🥳) is rolling out to the beta group. Do let me know how you go with it (DMs open)! APK: https://t.co/bZszfjpigY

Join beta: https://t.co/bLcmDkKSiW — Chris Lacy (@chrismlacy) December 18, 2019

We reached out to Lacy regarding the latest beta release. When asked about what it took to get Action Launcher to work properly with gesture navigation, Lacy said, “Frankly, a fair bit of effort. Supporting Android 10’s gesture exclusion zones was relatively straightforward. The main problem was related to the way Action Launcher behaves after a settings change. Like all launchers, Action Launcher just ‘kills and restarts itself’. Turns out, depending on the Intent flags passed in when an app kills and restarts, you can get the Android 10 SystemUI to a point where it will simply fail to recognize gestures. Identifying this and working around it took time.” Interestingly this bug where gestures stop working even happens with the stock launcher in Android 10. You can replicate it by changing the locale in your device Settings.

Lacy further added that he also had to do “some work cleaning up gestures that had been assigned to the Home button (for example, Action Launcher allowed users to assign a trigger/shortcut when double-tapping the legacy home button).” If you’re interested in checking out the latest update for yourself, you can enroll in the beta by following this link. You can also download the public beta APK from the link below to try it out on your device. Along with the gesture navigation support, the latest beta update brings a couple of other new features to the app. Here’s the official changelog for Action Launcher v45.0-beta3:

NEW: Android 10 gesture navigation compatibility.

NEW: Quicktheme supports live wallpapers (requires Android 7.1 or later).

NEW: Startpage search engine support.

NEW: Add Action Launcher 2020 Supporter Badge. Bonus goodies this year include 5 traffic wallpapers.

FIX: Bug where Quicktheme colors would cease working after a time when using Muzei.

FIX: Fix ActionDash notification icon displaying on Quickbar.

Download Action Launcher v45.0-beta3