Gestures are becoming increasingly popular on mobile devices these days. The ability to customize a popular gesture makes the smartphone experience even more personal. Before this recent update began rolling out, the Gmail Android application allowed you to enable or disable swipe gestures while also letting you choose between Delete or Archive. This can be okay for some instances, but I personally have been wanting an option to mark the email as read/unread with a simple swipe. If you’re running version 8.5.20 or higher of Gmail then we’re noticing customizable gestures for left and right swipes with 5 different actions to choose from.
This feature was first spotted in an APK teardown of version 8.4 of the Gmail application. While these teardowns can be a solid insight into what features will be coming in the future, there could be all sorts of reasons why Google decides to not push out something they’ve been internally testing to the public. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case with these customizable swipe gestures as we’re seeing people receiving this application update for the past week.
This new feature is being enabled as a server-side switch. We were able to get the feature in our Gmail app, but it’s not available for everyone yet. Once you get the feature though, you can dive into the general settings area and see the new Swipe Actions option there. Once you go into this next submenu you will be given the chance to customize what happens when you swipe an email to the right and left. As of right now with this new update, we are given the following options to choose from:
- Archive
- Delete
- Mark as Read/Unread
- Move to
- Snooze
- None
This should make the Gmail experience much more personal for a lot of people. Being able to simply swipe to mark an email as “read” is a super handy addition.
Source: Android Police