After 16 years, Android still doesn’t make the most of its touchscreen

[phillynews215]

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.




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