Circle to Search is great and is a continuation of Now on Tap that Google should keep prominently as a core Android experience rather than relegating it to Assistant for a few years, but launching it with gesture navigation The method pisses me off.
Gestures The moment I learned that a long press on the navigation bar would launch Circle to Search, I had my doubts. This handle is wide, but very short. How could that be a good touch target?
After using it for a while, you won’t physically miss the general area of the gesture bar, but if you accidentally[最近]It always launches the menu. It feels like your thumb is dragging up from the bottom of the screen (perhaps a few millimeters) before you start the long press, but it’s enough to kill the app and trigger multitasking.
The swipe up gesture is deeply ingrained in modern Android. Luckily I can revert, but it’s annoying that this still happens so often.
Circle to Search feels like it was built for a time when three-button navigation was the norm, and it’s still the default on Samsung devices today. (Even there, I think it’s shocking that Google decided it was legitimate to replace Circle to Search with a press of the Assistant’s Home He button.) This shows how much the status of voice assistants has declined. It feels like a shocking change in behavior that tells the story.)
The solution I currently recommend is to set one of the diagonal swipes in the circle to search, and reserve the other one for the assistant. I’ve always loved this gesture, but apparently Google doesn’t mention it or talk about it. Instead, the company asks you to long-press the power button or press “OK Google” to launch Assistant. I don’t like physically launching the assistant. If Google wants to mandate this behavior, it should mandate larger buttons.
Otherwise, CTS continues to be good, especially when copying text using optical character recognition. The actual experience is a lot of fun, from all the animations to flourishes like being able to flick the search bar up. That’s how you get there in the first place.
Hopefully, you can get used to launching it using gesture navigation, but Circle to Search is clearly here for a long time, so I hope Google reconsiders it.
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