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Android may soon let you customize your touchpad's three-tap gesture (APK teardown)
- Google is working on a new menu for customizing the three-finger tap gesture for touchpads.
- The new menu will let you set a three-finger tap to do a middle click, launch Gemini, go home, or view recent apps.
- This menu isn’t available yet in the latest Android developer preview or beta, but we managed to manually surface it.
The best Android tablets are great not only for watching videos but also for getting work done. If your work involves a lot of writing, though, you’ll want to pick up a decent keyboard cover to make typing easier. Although Android has solid support for physical keyboards and touchpads, there are still some areas where it’s lacking, especially in the customization department. Thankfully, Google continues to work on new keyboard and touchpad features for Android, with the latest feature being a menu for customizing three-finger touchpad taps.
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An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
We discovered strings for this new menu while digging through the Settings app in the second developer preview of Android 16. The strings suggest you’ll be able to customize the three-finger touchpad tap gesture to go back, go home, launch Gemini, perform a middle click, or view recent apps. Here are the strings in question:
<string name="three_finger_tap_go_back">Go back</string>
<string name="three_finger_tap_go_home">Go home</string>
<string name="three_finger_tap_launch_gemini">Launch Gemini</string>
<string name="three_finger_tap_middle_click">Middle click</string>
<string name="three_finger_tap_preference_title">Use three finger tap</string>
<string name="three_finger_tap_recent_apps">View recent apps</string>With a bit of tinkering, I managed to get the new three-finger touchpad tap customization menu to appear in Android 16 DP2. Once it’s live, it’ll appear under Settings > System > Touchpad & mouse:
The “middle click” and “launch Gemini” actions are the only things new here, as the rest of the actions are already triggered by other touchpad gestures. For instance, three-finger swipes left or right already navigate back, a three-finger swipe up goes home, and a three-finger swipe up and hold shows recent apps. You can also open the notifications panel by swiping down with three fingers and switch between apps by swiping left or right with four fingers.
Only three of these existing gestures are shown to you in Android’s new tutorial for touchpad gestures, so I’m curious to see if Google will incorporate this new three-finger touchpad tap gesture into the tutorial. I’m also curious to see if Google ever plans to release a first-party keyboard cover accessory for the Pixel Tablet, especially knowing that the company has cancelled the Pixel Tablet 2. These features will benefit future Android tablets and Chromebooks running Android, and it’s possible they were also intended for the now-cancelled Pixel Tablet 2.