Android isn’t ready for desktop PCs if it doesn’t support this basic mouse feature

I wanted to properly test this new Android direction and see how it compared to my beloved Pixelbook Chromebook memories. Most importantly, I wanted to see how close Google is to providing a workable desktop experience. But I hit a wall the moment I tried to connect a mouse to my Pixel Tablet.

One of Android’s most basic features, the back gesture, isn’t adapted to mice. And that, in my opinion, is a big stumbling block for any decent desktop experience.

The Back button has been foundational to the way Android works since day one. Since 2008, it’s morphed from a physical button to an on-screen button to a gesture, but it’s always been here. It’s the most ingrained gesture-function in my brain and my mechanical memory as an Android user. I go back a thousand times on my phone every day, from wanting to step back one screen in an app, dismiss a pop-up, close the keyboard, get out of the app drawer, go back to the home screen from an app I just opened, it’s swipe-and-done. I don’t think about it anymore.

But with my new Logitech M350s mouse ($20-25 on Amazon), I immediately noticed that it isn’t possible. Some apps seem to let me click on the right side of the screen and drag quickly to the left to go back, but it’s not as reliable or as smooth as I want. Other apps don’t even seem to support this, or at least I failed to trigger it there. Any gesture that works less than 95% of the time is not worth my trouble. If I’m wasting time trying and second-guessing whether something will work, I’d rather skip it entirely.

This instantly soured my mouse experience. I was so impressed by how the mouse made all of the desktop windowing gestures, dragging, and clicking so much more precise and usable that I was almost ready to call Android for PCs a decent effort so far. But what’s the point of opening all these apps and organizing them if I can’t go back a step? This isn’t iOS, where anything goes with the Back feature, and developers can do whatever they want, even skipping it entirely. (One day, you’ll read in my eulogy that I refused to use iOS because I hate the way it handles Back so much. I’m not being dramatic, just honest.) No, Android apps rely on Back as an integral interaction because most of them don’t include an on-screen arrow to take you back. They need the OS to handle it, and if I can’t do it with my mouse, how is that even viable?

When I hit this proverbial wall with my mouse, I started looking at solutions. The Logitech M350s isn’t a sophisticated mouse, but it has the basic mouse interactions: a right button, a left button, and a clickable scroll wheel. If Android wants to be a serious desktop PC operating system, it needs to support the most common denominator. This is it.

Tapping both the left and right buttons doesn’t do anything. Clicking and holding the scroll wheel hangs up. Clicking and dragging or scrolling hangs up even more. One of these is supposed to trigger Home, but it doesn’t. I don’t know if it’s a bug, but I’m on the stable Android 16 QPR3 with March Pixel Drop.

I looked for the Mouse settings on my Pixel Tablet to see if I could assign something to Home, Recents, and Back. I found the hot corners feature, so I added Home to the bottom left corner and the Recents app switcher to the bottom right. That didn’t solve my Back issue, though, because there’s no option to assign Back to any hot corner. I looked for button-mapping apps, but neither Button Mapper, Key Mapper, nor Button Remapper registers these extra clicks on the mouse as something mappable. Besides, I don’t expect normal users to install a third-party mapping app just to go Back. Google shouldn’t either.

What I ended up doing was switch away from gesture navigation and bring back the three-button mode. With it, I have a clickable Back button at all times on the screen. Then I used Shortcut Maker to create a shortcut to Android’s navigation settings so I could quickly switch between three-button navigation when I’m using my mouse with the Pixel Tablet and gesture navigation when I’m just swiping with my fingers. It’s the most elegant and inelegant workaround that I could find, and even then, I hate that I have to click a particular button on the screen each time I want to navigate back. I’m so used to this being a seamless gesture that thinking about it makes Android less fluid to use.

Things, it seems, are better with a trackpad because you can assign gestures to perform these actions. But Google can’t expect every Android desktop PC user to only use a trackpad, even if it ships the OS on laptops. There’s a keyboard shortcut for it, too. They’ve got two interaction vehicles covered out of three, so there’s hope for the poor ol’ mouse.

And, to be fair, Google already puts the Home, Back, and Recents buttons on the bottom taskbar of Android’s Desktop Mode, so there’s a chance this will carry through to Aluminium OS when it launches. (The early leaked screen recording we saw didn’t have the buttons.) But even that doesn’t solve the issue entirely. You expect everyone to move their mouse down to the bottom right of the screen to go back? No.

This should be a natively supported gesture on the most basic of mouse peripherals, i.e., the lowest common denominator that people might buy. Going Back should be an option for Android’s hot corner mouse actions — at least that’s better than hitting a specific target button on screen, and it helps avoid pinning the bottom taskbar at all times and wasting screen estate. There should also be a way to assign the Back function to a wheel click and hold, or to a double click on both left and right mouse buttons. The more options, the better for something as crucial as this.

The good news is that Google still has time to fix this before Android arrives on desktops. I know there are more elaborate issues to address with Android’s desktop plans, not least of which is the entire Chrome desktop-mobile dichotomy, and the unnecessary move to scrap everything done with Chrome OS over more than a decade to start fresh with Android. But, putting aside all of those, a desktop-friendly operating system should work well with a mouse. That’s the most basic of the most basic requirements. Time to add those options, Google.