15 Secret Gestures Hidden Inside Your Favorite Android Apps

Fifteen cool finger-friendly tricks inside Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more.
Android is a super cool mobile ecosystem  packed with useful little tricks. I've attempted in the past to highlight the features that come  with each new sugary incarnation. But these  endeavors, however noble, usually prove  fruitless. You see, Android is—for lack of a  better term— a friggin' mess .
Android is less of a leading global platform ( nearly 88 percent of mobile devices are  powered by it) than it is a giant stew being  prepared by thousands of chefs, each of whom  is working on a totally different dish (for  clientele in completely different restaurants).  The end result is a user experience that varies  greatly between device manufacturers, carriers,  and even software generations.
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This disorder muddies an otherwise dynamite  mobile OS. Try as Google might to bring its  unwieldy mobile monster under control , the  platform is destined to remain frustratingly  fragmented for the foreseeable future. Except in one very important regard.
While the look and functionality of the OS  varies, the user experience within apps can be  reassuringly coherent. Someone using the  official YouTube app on a four-year-old  Samsung device still running Lollipop will more  or less have a same experience they would on a new Nougat-powered LG device . Certainly the  experience will be far similar than it would be  YouTubing on an iOS device.
This cohesion gives app developers a unique  ability to provide popular Android experiences  that take full advantage of what these machines can do. Until the advent of the smartphone,  most people interacted with their machines  using a keyboard and mouse. But NOW, we can move around the digital world with just our  fingertips. That's pretty amazing if you take a  moment to think about it. (Like seriously,  imagine being back in elementary school with  an amazing touch-controlled super-machine in  your pocket.)
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Here we present some cool little gestures in  common apps that you may not know about.  We confirmed these tricks using a Samsung  Galaxy S7 Edge and a Nexus 6 tablet, both  running Marshmallow . These gestures should work the same on your Android device as well,  no matter the configuration (let us know if the  comments if they don't for some reason). For  any iOS users out there, some of these may work on your devices, but we can confirm that  many do not. (Interestingly enough, while  Android seemed to translate across phones and tablets, some experimentation found that many gestures that work on an iPhone don't  necessarily work on an iPad and vice versa.)
You may already know some of these, but  chances are there will be some you do not.  Have any favorites on other popular apps? Let  us know in the comments.