With Android 10 the App Switcher / App History function changed from vertically scrolling to horizontally scrolling. This makes switching to previous apps very slow, because before there where much more apps displayed at one screen then before. The change include some minor feature like gesture integration copying text directly from the app switcher preview, but those features seem no to work with my FP3-e/os. I don’t need them anyway.
I’d really like to get back the handy vertical App Switcher from Android <10. It looked like this:
I want to second this. While the new app switcher just looks better, I (still) find it inferior in terms of functionality. It remains hard to figure out just how far you have to swipe exactly to get the app in the centre that you actually want to switch to (read: it’s simply quite un-precise). Plus this important difference:
I totally feel your frustration with the new horizontal App Switcher in Android 10. I’ve been using my Fairphone 3 with e/os as well, and I miss the old vertical layout too. It was so much more convenient to quickly switch between apps without the hassle of horizontal scrolling.
I’ve scoured various forums and tried some of the solutions mentioned for other phones, but unfortunately, they didn’t work for me either. It seems like the Fairphone 3 with e/os has its own quirks in this regard.
As for a potential solution, I haven’t found a direct way to revert to the old vertical App Switcher within the e/os environment without rooting. I searched the internet for a long time for information (so long that I wandered into a German article like this one ), but couldn’t find anything… However, considering your interest in going back to the vertical layout, I’d recommend keeping an eye on e/os updates. They might address this issue in the future, given enough user feedback.
And I totally agree with the point about the new switcher looking sleeker but sacrificing functionality. The precision issue is real, and it can get frustrating.
Let’s hope someone in the community comes up with a workaround or that the developers take notice of this concern. Until then, we might need to adapt to the new layout or explore other options if available. It’s a little frustrating for me.
One thing I never liked about the horizontal switcher is that the ‘Clear all’ button isn’t available until after swiping right and reaching the end. When I was new to horizontal I did not even know it was there. Was swiping away every individual piece to clear recents.
I miss the floating Clear All button.
I’ve seen a ‘swipe down to clear all recents’ feature somewhere but I think it was launcher related.
I wasn’t much of a fan of the vertical style either. I’ve always, and still do, use alternatives like Slim Recents or OmniSwitch (sadly the latter never worked on plain LOS).
In all honestly I seriously doubt that /e/OS will add options for Recents/Overview. LineageOS for microG and /e/OS, featurewise, do not stray much from the LineageOS base.
Unless the Lineage people add vertical as an option I don’t see it ever being implemented in /e/.
Question, is it available on any existing ROM? For all we know Google may have removed any code for that. Either in Android or the base launcher which so many others are based on.
Searching the web for ‘android vertical recents’ reveals lots of discussions, workarounds (not universal), but mostly “sorry-not-gonna-happen”.
The vertical style was confusing. When I saw this the first time (I had only Blackberrys before) I couldn’t believe that this is not a somehow crashed window layout caused by a GUI bug - no, it wasn’t!
The horizontal style misses controls. The Close-all could be always visible but also every app could have an “x” button to close. That the app must be moved upwards to close it is not intuitive at all.
The Blackberry 10 OS had a screen showing the running apps which allowed always four of them to be visible without scrolling. These small app windows had an “x” in the bottom right corner. I found this much more usable.
I remember that type of layout in some old ROMs, too.
My daily driver runs Havoc OS Pie. Went straight to using Slim Recents.
Been so long I took another look in the settings. It offers five different Recents! With full extra configurations/tweaks for most.
Never tried them before until today. Liking the grid layout. That would be great to have in /e/ for sure.
