Here's why on-screen navigation buttons on Android are bad for you
The resultshonestly surprised us. A whole bunch of people (42.86% out of 5112 votes) chose software buttons – something that we didn't at all expect. Quite frankly, we expected this to be a one-sided poll. We recently revisited the topic at the office, and again found a discrepancy between our views and those of the public (we tend to prefer physical/capacitive). After a few mental exercises that had us attempt to figure out why people nevertheless liked software keys, and failing to come up with a decent counter, we had to concede that it just didn't make enough sense. And that's despite the fact that some folks pointed to 'immersive mode" as soft keys' saving grace – our tests clearly indicate that even stock Android doesn't make use of it with essential apps like your dialer, messaging, browser, camera, app drawer, and so on. It's a feature that is mostly utilized by some third-party apps, and far from all.
So how much screen real estate are you sacrificing for them on-screen buttons? We ran the numbers (after measuring the exact dimensions of the displays of several popular flagships and the space occupied by their on-screen buttons), and the results are telling. On average, you should expect to have about 0.36" cut off from use, or between 6% and 7% from the total area of your display. That means that your 6" Google Nexus 6 actually has less than 5.7" of usable screen space most of the time – less than the 5.7" Samsung Galaxy Note 4, which features physical/capacitive buttons. And the HTC One M8? It has less usable space than the 4.7" iPhone 6.
