Android 14 promises to bring a big change to gesture navigation, making it much easier for you to understand where the back gesture will take you next. This new method requires a bit of work for app developers, so Google made the new back gesture official as early as last year. With this week’s release of Android 14 Developer Preview 2, a few system apps now finally work with the new back gesture, allowing anyone brave enough to install the preview release on their Pixel phone to use the new predictive back gestures.

Once you’re running Android 14 DP2, you still need to enable predictive back gestures in the developer options, but after that, you’re all set to experience the system settings and Google News with predictive back gestures. As the name of the feature implies, it will show you which screen you will navigate to next. This works for different sections within the same app, but it also shows you when your next step brings you to another application or the home screen. Along with the new predictive animation, Android 14 DP2 also adds a redesigned back navigation arrow that sits in a Material You-themed bubble that stretches and moves as you drag your finger from the side of a screen.

Android 14 DP2's gestures in action.

While predictive back gestures look pretty solid in the demos above, it’s clear that it’s still early days. In both Google News and system settings, the next screen doesn’t always reliably trigger, and when canceling the back action by moving your finger back to the edge of the screen, we’ve sometimes experienced full system crashes. The transition also doesn’t work across all screens — the Google News search interface doesn’t always show the next backward step, for example.

Android 14 DP2's gestures in action.

It’s clear that Google has a lot of issues to iron out with predictive back gestures, but the company is planning quite a few more updates before Android 14 is stable. Until then, the company will likely make predictive back gestures a standard part of the system and implement it in more of its own apps. We can only hope that the company will also heavily encourage third-party developers to add support.