Back gesture bug on android
I used to have a OnePlus 8 running android 13 where everything worked fine. Then I upgraded to a Xiaomi 15t pro with android 16 and I kept getting a gesture bug in brave browser.
Basically what happens is at some point in time all back gestures stop working. They still give the back gesture animation but just don’t do anything anymore. When you close brave browser completely and open it again, back gestures work again for a short while before they stop working again. Similarly, if I switch to button navigation in settings and use it a couple of times in brave browser before switching back again to gestures, they work for a short while again as well before bugging again. It drove me mad to the point of trying out everything possible.
I edited all the gesture and edge to edge flags with no results, trying all combinations. I turned off page swiping in settings, I tried playing with phone settings, clearing cache and data, all to no avail. every time it worked for a little bit before stopping again.
Fun note: when gestures stop working you can still back if you swipe at the perfect spot at the left bottom screen, but the back animation is different for some reason and it’s very inconvenient because you have to nail the perfect spot. Also I usually swipe back on the right side of my screen when using my phone one handed so it's even more useless for me... It also has a different animation than the android standard back animation. It seems to me that brave is constantly overriding android's back gesture with its own and it's completely messing everything up.
Eventually I found the nightly build of brave in the app store and figured I’d give that a try. It worked… for like a day. Then out of nowhere when I opened a new private tab and wanted to back my gestures stopped working again.
I’ve now tried turning off the bottom navigation bar and so far gestures seem to be working again, but I’ve only been using it now for a couple of hours so I’m still not a 100% sure if the bug while come back again. I will keep this post updated if it bugs again. Hopefully there’ll be a fix soon…
Update: it didn’t work either. 3 hours or so later i opened a new tab in the same group and back gestures stopped working again…
Posted this on brave Community as well but no one seems to care...
It's a real shame because I've been using brave since like the first month it came out, and all my settings and everything are on there. I'm used to using it. It would be a real pain in the ass to switch browsers now at this stage. But the gesture bug just makes one handed operation impossible...
Edit: it seems to me like brave is constantly trying to override android back gestures with its own and thereby messing both up. Like I mentioned before, when back gestures stop working you can still back if you swipe at the right spot. This will also give you a different back animation. This seems to be the back function of brave itself (that shouldn’t exist in android because android has it’s own back functions). This should be an IOS only app function.