The Pixel 2 is an almost five-year-old phone, but it introduced a feature that I miss more and more with each passing year. It was called Active Edge and it let you summon Google Assistant just by squeezing your phone. In some ways, this is an unusual idea. But in practice, it gave you something that modern phones sorely lack: a way to physically interact with the phone to get something done.
Looking at the sides of the Pixel 2 and 2 XL, you won’t see anything to indicate you’re holding anything special. Sure, there’s a power button and a volume rocker, but otherwise the sides are sparse. Give the bare edges of the phone a good squeeze, though, and a subtle vibration and animation plays as Google Assistant pops up from the bottom of the screen, ready to start listening to you. You don’t need to wake up the phone, long press physical or virtual buttons, or touch the screen. You squeeze and start talking.
Looking at the sides of the Pixel 2, you’d never guess it was actually a button. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales/The Verge
We’ll talk about how useful this is in a second, but I don’t want to gloss over how cool it feels. Phones are hard objects made of metal and plastic, yet the Pixel can tell when I’m applying more pressure than just holding it. According to an old teardown on iFixit, this is made possible by several strain sensors mounted on the inside of the phone that can detect the ever-so-slight bending of your phone’s case when you squeeze it. For the record, this is a change my human nervous system is incapable of picking up; I can’t say the phone bends at all.
Whether you find Active Edge useful probably comes down to whether you enjoy using Google Assistant, as illustrated in this Reddit thread. Personally, the only time I really used Voice Assistant on a daily basis was when I had the Pixel 2 because it was literally at hand. The thing that makes it so convenient is that squeezing basically always works. Even if you were in an app that hid the navigation buttons or your phone’s screen was completely off, Active Edge still got the job done.
It was literally at hand
While this made it extremely useful for looking up fun facts or doing quick calculations and conversions, I’d argue that Active Edge could have been much more useful if you’d been able to reconfigure it. I was happy with the assistant, but if I could just turn on my flashlight with a tap, I’d have instant access to my phone’s most important features no matter what.
This version of the feature actually existed. HTC’s U11, which came out a few months before the Pixel 2, had a similar but more customized feature called Edge Sense. The two companies worked together on the Pixel and Pixel 2, which explains how it ended up on Google’s devices. That same year, Google bought the team of HTC’s mobile division.
Active Edge wasn’t Google’s first attempt at providing an alternative to using the touchscreen or physical buttons to control your phone, either. A few years before the Pixel 2, Motorola let you open the camera by rotating your phone and turning on the flashlight with a karate kick — not unlike how you’ve shuffled music on an iPod Nano since 2008. The camera shortcut appeared in the relatively short a time when Google owned Motorola.
However, over time, phone manufacturers have moved away from being able to access a few basic features with physical action. Take my daily driver, the iPhone 12 Mini, for example. To launch Siri, I have to press and hold the power button, which has been burdened with responsibilities since Apple got rid of the home button. To turn on the flashlight, something I do several times a day, I have to wake up the screen and tap and hold the button in the left corner. The camera is a little more convenient, accessible by swiping left on the lock screen, but the screen still needs to be on for it to work. And if I’m actually using the phone, the easiest way to access the flashlight or camera is through the Control Center, which involves swiping down from the top right corner and trying to select one particular icon from the grid.
In other words, if I look up from my phone and notice my cat doing something cute, he may very well have stopped by the time I actually open the camera. It’s not that it’s hard to launch the camera or turn on the flashlight — it’d just be a lot more convenient if there was a dedicated button or gesture to squeeze. Apple even briefly acknowledged this when it made an iPhone battery case that had a button to launch the camera. A few seconds saved here or there add up over the life of the phone.
Just to prove this, here’s how fast the camera launch is on my iPhone versus the Samsung Galaxy S22, where you can double-click the power button to launch the camera:
There’s less thinking when you can just press a button to start the camera.
Neither phone handles screen recording and camera preview very well, but the S22 opens its camera app before I even touch the iPhone’s camera icon.
Unfortunately, even Google phones aren’t immune to the disappearance of physical buttons. Active Edge stopped appearing on Pixels 4A and 5 in 2020. Samsung also removed a button it once included to summon a virtual assistant (which, unfortunately, turned out to be Bixby).
There are attempts to add virtual buttons that you activate by interacting with the device. Apple, for example, has an accessibility feature that lets you tap the back of your phone to launch actions or even your own mini-programs in the form of shortcuts, and Google added a similar feature to the Pixels. But to be perfectly honest, I just don’t find them reliable enough. A virtual button that barely works isn’t a great button. Active Edge worked almost every time for me despite the fact that I had a powerful OtterBox on my phone.
It’s not that physical controls on phones have completely disappeared. As I mentioned before, Apple lets you launch things like Apple Pay and Siri with a series of taps or presses of the power button, and there’s no shortage of Android phones that let you launch the camera or other apps by double-pressing the power button .
However, I would say that one or two shortcuts assigned to a single button cannot give us easy access to everything we need to have easy access to. To be clear, I’m not demanding that my phone be completely covered in buttons, but I think the big manufacturers should take a cue from the phones of the past (and, yes, the smaller phone makers – I see you’re Sony fans ) and bring back at least one or two physical shortcuts. As Google has shown, this doesn’t necessarily require adding an additional physical key that needs to be waterproof. Something as simple as a squeeze can be a button that allows users to quickly access features that they — or in the case of the Pixel, Google — consider essential.
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