Google first introduced gesture controls to its OS with Android 10, but it still faces teething problems with those who choose to use gesture controls Android 12 may solve that.

The most notable change in Android is the replacement to the back button: swiping right on a small area on the left of the screen should activate it, but it is also an area often used for other functions in apps. In other words, the back swipe may work well in many apps, but in others it will be a misguided and frustrating action.

A common example: trying to go back in WhatsApp and actually quoting reply to a message next to the back area.

Mistaken swiping is a problem that Google has acknowledged for some time, but there seems to be a new approach to solving it once and for all: XDA Developers reports that in the Android 12 developer preview, machine learning appears to be taking place.

Developer Quinny899 found a TensorFlow Lite model and lexicon file labeled "backgesture." Within the latter is a list of 43,000 Android app names (including two created by Quinny899), and the site speculates that this is the master list of software Google is training its machine learning models on.

We found this mentioned in the EdgeBackGestureHandler class in Android 12's SystemUI. When enabled, Android 12 uses a machine learning model to predict whether you are trying to go back or interact with the app based on a number of metrics, including the start and end points of the gesture and the display width in pixels. If this is disabled, Android 12 reverts to the familiar, albeit flawed, swipe detection method.

However, don't get too excited. While it is clear that Google continues to think about the issue of false swipes, XDA Developers notes that gesture prediction is disabled by default. Instead of improving, all of the user testing may have proven to have made swipe-backs more annoying and inconsistent. In a few months, once Android 12 is stable enough to reach the public beta stage (the stage where the software is released to the developer community as well as curious Android users around the world), we should have a better idea.