TL;DR Google is adding a new setting to Android that lets you reorder the three-button navigation bar.
This will allow users to switch from the default “Back, Home, Recents” layout to the “Recents, Home, Back” layout common on Samsung phones.
The feature is live in the latest Android Canary build and may roll out to the public in the Android 16 QPR3 release.
If you’ve grown accustomed to using the three-button navigation bar on a Samsung phone, then you might have a hard time switching to a Google phone. That’s because Samsung uses a different layout for its version of the three-button navigation bar. Instead of putting the back button on the left like on stock Android, Samsung puts the back button on the right.
While Samsung does let you flip the order of these buttons to match stock Android’s layout, the opposite isn’t true. Stock Android doesn’t let you flip these buttons, so people switching from Samsung phones have to either retrain their muscle memory on the new button layout or switch to gesture navigation. To make it easier for Samsung users to switch to Pixel phones, Google is introducing a new Android setting that lets you reorder the buttons in the three-button navigation bar.
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Back in August, we found evidence within Android code suggesting that the operating system will let you flip the order of the buttons in the navigation bar. Our findings were confirmed by code within the second beta of Android 16 QPR2, which adds a new “button order” menu that lets you choose between the default “Back, Home, Recents” layout and the flipped “Recents, Home, Back” layout.
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
Although this new menu was hidden, we managed to enable it for a demonstration, as shown in the video embedded above. We weren’t sure when Google would actually roll this menu out, but thankfully, we didn’t have to wait long. After installing the latest Android Canary release (2510), we discovered that the new “button order” menu is now available under Settings > System > Navigation mode > 3-button navigation, and it works just as expected.
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