Android finally lets you flip your Pixel’s navigation buttons

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.

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.

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.

Given that this feature is now live in an Android Canary build, it’ll likely trickle down to the Beta and subsequently the Stable track. Unfortunately, this feature probably won’t make it into the upcoming Android 16 QPR2 update in December, but we might see it in March’s Android 16 QPR3 release. This isn’t the only new customization feature we’re expecting in that update; the new flashlight brightness slider is also anticipated for the Android 16 QPR3 release. While a lot can change before March, we hope Google sticks with this feature, as it’s something many people have been looking forward to.