Anyone who’s installed custom roms on their older Android phones has probably heard of pie navigation. But this is a little post to share my love for it to those people who have never heard about it.

It’s something I know from the old Gravitybox xposed module, where you slide from the side or bottom of the screen, and a small half-circle pops up with different pie pieces for the normal Android navigation bar buttons. This saves screen space, and needs less finger movement than all other gesture-based navigation I’ve tried. For me, it’s the most comfortable navigation solution. I also think it looks quite pretty (though you can set the colors and icons and size to your own preference).

It’s possible to add pie charts for apps and other stuff, but I’ve always just used the three for Back, Recent apps and Home. (In the past, there was a fourth little button for “Menu”, but that’s long since been deprecated.) When I hold the Recent apps button for a bit longer, I go back to my most recent previous app, for some quick multi-tasking.

After Gravitybox no longer really worked, there was an app called LMT, which provided much the same functions. These days, though, LMT also hasn’t really seen any meaningful updates for a long time, and the best solution for Pie navigation seems to be this app on the Play store (unfortunately not open-source).

Disabling Android’s built-in navigation solutions is needed for it to really work, though, as it replaces the built-in navigation default of just navigating Back. When rooted, your best bet is to just set the normal navigation bar and then using the NavTweaks Magisk module. There’s a number of other workarounds I’ve had to use over the years, but I’ve always managed to replace the normal navigation style with my beloved pie navigation.

Have you ever used pie navigation and do you miss it? If not, what made you switch to the alternatives?