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

I wanted to put this new Android flagship to the test and see how it compares to my favorite Pixelbook Chromebook. More importantly, I wanted to see how close Google was to providing a functional desktop experience. But I hit a wall when I tried to connect a mouse to my Pixel Tablet.

One of the main features of Android, the background gesture, is not compatible with mice. And that, in my opinion, is a major hindrance to any good computing experience.

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

But with my new Logitech M350s mouse ($20-25 on Amazon), I immediately realized that it was impossible. Some apps seem to let me tap on the right side of the screen and quickly drag to the left to go back, but it’s not as reliable or as smooth as I’d like. Other apps don’t seem to support this, or at least I couldn’t get it to work there. Any action that works less than 95% of the time is not good for my problem. If I’m going to waste time trying and figuring out if something will work, I’d rather skip it altogether.

This immediately ruined my mouse experience. I was so impressed with how the mouse made all the gestures of the computer windows, dragging, and clicking so accurate and usable that I was ready to call Android for PCs a good effort so far. But is there any point in opening all these apps and editing them if I can’t go back? This is not iOS, where anything goes with the Back Back feature, and developers can do whatever they want, even bypass it entirely. (One day, you will read in my eulogy that I refused to use iOS because I hate the way it handles Back so much. I’m not impressed, just honestly.) No, Android devices rely on Back Back as an important interaction because most of them do not include an arrow on the screen to take you back. They need an OS to handle it, and if I can’t do it with my mouse, how can that work?

When I hit this proverbial wall with the mouse, I started looking for solutions. The Logitech M350s isn’t an advanced mouse, but it has basic mouse interaction: a right button, a left button, and a clickable scroll wheel. If Android wants to be a powerful desktop operating system, it needs to support the highest common denominator. This is it.

Tapping the left and right buttons does nothing. Clicking and holding the scroll wheel hangs. Clicking and dragging or scrolling hangs even more. One of these should start Home, but it doesn’t. I don’t know if it’s a bug, but it’s on Android 16 QPR3 fixed with March Pixel Drop.

I searched the Mouse settings on my Pixel Tablet to see if I could assign something to Home, Recent, and Back. I found the hot corners feature, so I added Home in the bottom left corner and the Recents app switcher in the bottom right. That didn’t solve my Back problem, though, because there’s no option to assign Back to any hot corner. I looked for button mapping apps, but Button Mapper, Key Mapper, or Button Remapper doesn’t register a single click as possible. Besides, I don’t expect regular users to install a third-party mapping app just to come back. Neither should Google.

What I ended up doing was turning off gesture navigation and reverting to the three-button approach. With it, I have the Back button always on the screen. Then I used Shortcut Maker to create a shortcut in the Android navigation settings so that I can quickly switch between the three buttons when using my mouse on the Pixel Tablet and navigate with gestures when I just twist my fingers. It’s the best and most intuitive operation I can find, and even then, I hate having to press a button on the screen every time I want to go back. I’m so used to the endless gestures that just thinking about it makes Android drool.

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

And, to be fair, Google has already placed the Home, Back, and Recents buttons under Android’s tasktop Mode, so there’s a chance this will carry over to Aluminum OS at launch. (The first leaked screen recorder we saw they had no buttons.) But even that does not solve the issue completely. Do you expect everyone to move their mouse to the bottom right of the screen to go back? No.

This should be a natively supported feature in mouse peripherals, that is, the minimum standard that people can buy. Back should be an option for Android’s hot mouse actions – at least it’s better than hitting a certain button on the screen, and it helps to avoid clicking the bottom of the work area all the time and ruining the screen. There should also be a way to assign the Back Back function to the wheel to hold, or to double-click the left and right mouse buttons. More options, better for something as important as this.

The good news is that Google still has time to fix this before Android hits desktops. I know there are many issues that need to be addressed with the Android desktop architecture, not the least of which is the “Chrome desktop-mobile dichotomy”, and the unnecessary move to throw away everything that has been done with Chrome OS for more than a decade to start anew with Android. But, all that aside, a good computer system should work well with a mouse. That is the basic basic needs. It’s time to add those options, Google.