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Google adds toggle to divorce the Assistant from its corner gesture in Android 12 Beta 3
If you feel like keeping gesture navigation but don't want the corner-swipe
In hindsight, it was a curious omission, but when Google debuted the diagonal swipe gesture to trigger the Assistant in Android Q/10, the only way to disable it was to change navigation modes or just straight-up disable the Assistant as your assistance app. Now, as of Android 12 Beta 3, it's something you can separately disable if you'd like to.
In addition to the pattern-based tweaks we covered yesterday, Android 12 Developer Preview 2 also a few more lock screen-related adjustments, including a bigger and brighter emergency call button that follows your system accent color and a new enter button that conversely loses its accent color highlight. The lock icon at the top of the keyguard (which disappeared in DP1) is also back, and the break separating the number pad from the bulleted input field has been removed. Together with those changes, everything has been shifted up just slightly.
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- The issue with YouTube's picture-in-picture not working with the new fully gestural navigation system has been fixed in Beta 4, and exiting YouTube via gestures no longer stops playback. The overlay for picture-in-picture opens successfully (assuming you have YouTube Premium).
Android Q Beta 3 introduced a new iPhone-esque navigation bar with back gestures at the left and right edges of a phone‘s display. While this redesign of Android's most fundamental feature will take some time to get used to, one question was left open from the beginning: How to invoke Google Assistant on devices that don't have the Pixel's squeeze option? Well, it turns out there's a rather hidden gesture for that.