Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “30 fun Android and Google Pixel gestures”.
Hello again, ladies and gentlemen, i’m joe handy from android authority, gestures and shortcuts are really useful tools, but there are so many that it’s difficult to keep track of today, let’s check out 30 or so fun, android and pixel phone gestures that you may or may not Already know about all of these are time stamped in the description, so i will be maintaining a brisk pace. Let’S get started. Our first gesture is a quick way to switch between applications without using the recent apps menu. You simply swipe left and right from the navigation bar at the bottom of the phone to quickly switch between apps.
The app furthest to the right is your most recent and the one furthest to the left is the least recent. Please note: i could not get this to work on the old school softkey bar, so this is likely a navigation only gesture unless i’m doing something wrong. When google implemented the swipe to go back function, it made hamburger menus way more difficult to use.
However, there is a baked in solution, simply start at the edge and swipe diagonally down and to the right, and it opens up the hamburger menu in applications where those still exist. You can also two-finger swipe in from the edge to do the same thing. Whichever one works best for you, another useful gesture turns on one-handed mode, which is a boon on the larger pixel 6 devices, simply swipe down from the very bottom inch or so of the display and it’ll enable the mode it’s a little sensitive. So it may take a try or two to get it right. You must also have one-handed mode enabled in the settings which you can find under system and then gestures this one by contrast, works all the time, simply double press the power button. While your phone is locked to gain instant access to your camera, this one is kind of cool, because you can do it before the phone even leaves your pocket if you’re fast enough, every pixel device from the pixel 5 onward has a neat quick tap feature that A lot of pixel owners forget to use you can set it to do things like take screenshots, launch, assistant and other such things.
Unfortunately, i have a pixel 4, so you’ll have to settle for this gorgeously scrolled screenshot. To show you what it looks like those with a pixel, 5 or onward should definitely enable this one. Next up are a couple of google launcher shortcuts that most people probably know about you can swipe down on the home screen to access notifications at any time, so you don’t have to reach to the top of the phone.
You can do the same in reverse for the app drawer. Of course, most of you probably already know about long pressing, app icons to see various shortcuts for that app a useful feature depending on the app everybody knows that you can switch accounts in most applications by tapping on the little circle, avatar and then pressing the account You want to switch to. There is actually an easier way, at least in most google applications.
You can instead swipe the profile icon to change the account without needing to open any menus. It’S definitely useful for someone like me who uses their work account quite a bit. It is actually possible to pinch to zoom with only one finger. This works in a handful of applications, but you probably know most of them. They include google photos, google maps, google drive and a few others. Basically, what you do is double tap.
The screen hold that second tap and then move your finger up and down to zoom. That way, this makes one-handed use of those kinds of things a lot easier and it’s pretty fun to do. Next, we float onto some youtube gestures. One of the easiest ones is to simply swipe up on any active video to make it full screen. This works whether the video is playing or paused, and it’s infinitely easier than hunting for that tiny, full screen button in the corner. Moving on you can swipe down to relegate any active video to the mini player at the bottom corner.
Most people know about that one. However, you can also swipe down a second time on the video to close it out. If you don’t want it there, it’s an easy solution. If you don’t want to pull the video back up to pause it in order to make it stop, you can double tap at any point on a playing video on either the left or the right side to skip forward or backward by a few seconds. I actually hit this on accident fairly often, but it’s still a useful command.
If you want to rewatch something you missed, you can adjust this in the settings by going to the general settings and then double tap to seek in order to customize it to your liking. Youtube extended that functionality after it introduced chapters, you can double tap with two fingers to instantly move backwards or forwards a chapter, in fact, that little trick will probably be really useful for this very video, and you should give it a try if you’re watching it on Mobile, of course, you can also seek by gesture another way. If you tap and hold for a moment, you can then use your finger to seek on a second by second basis.
This is a bit harder to do with longer videos, but it works great for shorter videos. This one is also a bit inconsistent until you get the hang of it, but it otherwise works well. Next, we move on to google photos where the gestures are pretty easy. This one is pretty popular: you can pinch to zoom on the main screen to switch between day week and month views it’s handy for obvious reasons, and it’s really easy to use. Another neat google photos trick is to swipe up on any image or video to reveal its information. You can also add a description and do things like move it to archives, download the image or add it to an album, it’s easier than hitting the three dot menu at the top of the screen, which does basically the same thing.
You can do a little bit more with viewing photos as well, at least if they’re motion photos or photos with a short video associated with them. If you long press the image it’ll play the short video or if the video is already playing it’ll, stop the video and show you the still again, it’s a little bit easier than hitting the control at the top of the screen, which again does basically the same Thing apparently, our next one is a newer feature, but you can double tap or pinch to zoom on videos during playback. Now in google photos you can also do that double tap and swipe gesture. I talked about earlier in the video to zoom in and out it’s nice when things are consistent like that.
Next we move on to google camera. A few of these gestures are pretty well known, so you probably already know some of them like this one where you can swipe left or right on the viewfinder to switch camera modes, it’s a bit faster than selecting them from the bottom menu, but it works. The same way, another neat one is the ability to long press on a thing in the viewfinder to look it up via google lens without the need to take a picture first here you can see that it recognizes the chromebook and shows me results for chromebooks in The gesture settings of google camera you can make the volume rocker do a specific action on my pixel 4, it’s shutter zoom volume and off this lets. You do things like take photos without touching the screen or using the volume rocker to zoom in on your subject. Without the need to pinch and zoom, i personally just leave it on volume, because i like doing things the old-fashioned way. Lastly, in your android settings you can go to system and then gesture, and then you can set it to switch from the front to the back cameras with a double twist.
It’S honestly a little bit easier to assign a double tap to switch cameras from the google camera settings, but it still worked fine and you can keep the double tap to zoom. If you use this method now, we move on to gboard, where i think some of the most useful gestures in this article are. For starters, you can delete whole words by swiping left from the delete key. This is especially useful for minor typos and long words, where pressing the delete key over and over again can become annoying this next one is my personal favorite.
You can long press the space bar and swipe to change the location of your cursor. This is especially great for links in google chrome, where you may have mistyped an address, and i’ve found it particularly useful when i have to go back in a larger body of text, and my initial tap didn’t get me exactly where i wanted to go. Finally, for gboard at least this one is pretty basic. If gboard has learned a word that you wish it didn’t, you can long press the word in the suggestion box and drag up to delete it. Gboard will unlearn the word and it won’t suggest it to you anymore, and now we head into the home stretch with some fun gestures from some other google apps tons of people know about swiping, left and right from the url in google chrome to switch tabs. But you can also swipe down on the url bar to quickly show you every open tab.
I prefer this method myself, but you can use either one to get around more easily in google messages. There are a few nifty gestures. The one most people probably know about is the ability to swipe left or right on a message to archive it. However, you can also pinch to zoom in a specific message thread in order to make the font larger or smaller.
If you have trouble reading it, google calendar has a couple of gestures worth knowing. The first is very similar to google messages on the schedule view you swipe from left to right to delete a particular event. If it’s a recurring event, it’ll ask if you want to delete just that one or the entire instance. Also in the day three day or week, view you can hold and drag to move events around both gestures are very useful for cleaning and organizing your calendar clutter. Google maps is a pretty fun application to use with gestures. It works with some of the ones we mentioned earlier, but there are a couple of others that are pretty cool. The first is the ability to swipe up and down with two fingers to change your perspective.
I especially like this one while using android auto in the car, so i can better see the things up ahead of where i’m going. Everybody knows about the pinch to zoom and double tap to zoom. You can also tap with two fingers to zoom out, so double tap with one finger goes in single tap with two fingers goes out: it’s weirdly elegant. Finally, you can place two fingers on the screen and rotate to rotate the map more easily. Google keep also has a few decent gestures, but mostly for lists most know about the ability to reorder lists by clicking on the six dot box and then dragging them up and down.
You can also indent items if you want to emphasize them by clicking and dragging the six dot box toward the center of the screen. This one is a little bit funky, sometimes because it’s kind of close to the side of the screen and you can sometimes accidentally hit the back button, but it’s not difficult to do once you get used to it. And finally, let’s talk about a couple of random gestures, just because in google calculator you can swipe down and view things that you did in the past. You can also tap on any calculation from your history to put it back in the current calculator box. If you happen to be watching a video using google files, you can do a couple of neat things if you double tap the edge of the screen, it’ll skip forward or backward in 10.
Second increments: you can also double tap and swipe your finger to adjust the volume, but you should note that the adjustment is rather small, so if you need to get it down very quickly, keep using the volume rocker. Now we only covered about 30 gestures in this article, but the article has way more than 30, so i recommend checking out the article linked in the video description below, of course, to see the full list. This isn’t meant to be an all-encompassing video about gestures.
Just a nice log, one about some gestures that some of us here at android authority are rather fond of. If you have gestures that you like a lot, go ahead and tell us about them in the comments and that about does it for this one folks, if you like this video, you know what to do and if not you still know what to do. The article is again linked up in the description if you want more details, as always, thanks for watching everybody and have a wonderful day. .