Android Q forces you to swipe right (to clear notifications)

The Android Q developer preview 1 is finally here, and it offers quite a few new features for users to try out. While most updates in the rollout are under the hood, there are several interface changes people are going to have to get used to. Just one of these many changes is an update to how you interact with notifications.

In Android Pie, you could swipe away notifications to either the left or right, flicking it whichever direction you desire in order to get rid of it. In the new Android Q beta, swiping to the left now reveals the context menu – something that was previously revealed by tapping the expand button in the top right of the notification. A swipe to the left will give you options to ‘snooze’ or ‘mute’ a notification, while expanding it gives you even more options, such as ‘block’, ‘show silently’, or ‘keep alerting’.

This change is one that will likely be highly debated, as many people are used to swiping one direction or the other. The shift forces you to only swipe notifications to the right to get rid of them, which could get annoying for left-handed users.

What do you think of this change? Should Google have kept the context menu the way it was previously? There are apparently set to be six different developer previews of Android Q before it is officially released, so it’s quite possible that this feature is changed back if there is a lot of noise about it.

Let us know your thoughts down below!