10.12.2017

• Android App Key Remapper, Version: 1.12.0, Price: Free

It so happened historically that on smartphones it is more convenient for me to have the navigation button "Back" on the right. And on my BQ Aquaris U Plus, she is just the same on the left and reach for her "oh, how uncomfortable." It's not a problem to get used to it, but it's too late for my fingers to grow in length, and the inconvenience of getting used to it has not gone away. The smartphone manufacturer BQ Aquaris, unfortunately, did not provide a tool to change the functionality of the navigation buttons, even on the screen, so I had to turn to third-party applications.

The most preferred application - GravityBox - did not cope with the task assigned to it. On pressing the "Back" and "Home" buttons, it allowed to hang any action, but it could not somehow affect the "Recent" button. There was a wild idea to block both the "Back" and "Recent" buttons altogether, assigning all responsibilities to the remaining "Home" button, but GravityBox could not simply disable the "Recent" button. The Spaniards in general somehow protected their smartphones "from the fool", and, as far as I know, so far no one has been able to get system root rights on the stock firmware of these smartphones.

Leaving GravityBox alone, I turned to other softs, the specialization of which was precisely the reassignment of the functionality of navigation buttons. In the battle with the software of the Spanish-Chinese gadget, only one softphone with the original name "Key Remapping" was able to win. I am using it.

It has become popular among mobile software developers to divide their functionality into two unequal parts. The first part - free - allows you to use the softinka quite normally for its intended purpose. The second - paid - brings some additional features and convenience. And this, I think, is correct. Also, the "Key Remapper" application has both basic functions (remapping single short and long presses on navigation buttons in the amount of no more than two), and premium features (assigning actions to button combinations, removing the limit on the number of remappings). By the way, the latest version of the application got rid of ads even in the free version.

What should be mentioned without fail is that root-rights are not needed for the functioning of softkeys. Recently, I began to notice that branded firmware has become more functional and customizable (we are not talking about AOSP), so root rights have become less and less required ... Yes, and various payment services do not really like ROOT, although it can be hide. But that is another story...

The application interface is minimalistic.

There are only four controls in the free version. These are the three dots under which the settings are usually hidden. This is a switch to activate and deactivate the service. This is the "Quick disconnect" checkbox for displaying the status of the application on the notification panel (with the ability to pause / resume the service with a tap). And this is a round button with a plus sign to add a new remap. In fact, there are no settings in this application, and when you click on the button with three dots, only one item appears - "About the program".

To activate the service, you need to enable these same accessibility features for the application in the gadget settings in the "Accessibility" section.

To disable the service, you need to do exactly the same steps, only special features for the "Key Remapping" application should be turned off. Logical, isn't it? It's very good that you don't have to manually look for the aforementioned "special" features in the wilds of system settings: the software itself will bring you to the necessary points.

The ability to quickly deactivate the application action (without going to the system settings) appeared only in the latest version. Is she really needed? I don't, but maybe someone will find it useful (needed). When the "Quick shutdown" checkbox is activated, a tile (bar?) dedicated to the "Key Remapping" softink appears in the notification panel. By tapping on it, you can quickly turn off and turn on the active reassignment of the softkey.

The information part of the main and only window of the application is represented by two sections: "Premium features" and "Active reassignments". So far, we do not touch the first and pay attention to the second. Active reassignments - this is a list of reassignments performed at our request. In the free version, as already mentioned, only two reassignments are possible, but that was enough for me. I assigned the "Back" action to the "Recent Applications" button (in the application it is called "Recent Applications", but the meaning is the same), that is, the functionality of the "Back" button. And for the "Back" button, I assigned the action "Recent_Apps" ("Recent Applications", presumably). Thus, the "Back" and "Recent Apps" buttons on my smartphone have swapped places. Hooray!

By the way, I learned about the softinka almost a year ago, but I started using it only about two months ago. Why is that? Because on the sixth Android, not all the functionality of the buttons was transferred. That is, all, but only stock. Let me explain. A feature such as jumping to the previous application by double tapping the "Recent Apps" button was implemented by the Google team only in Android Nougat. And the Spanish developers from the BQ team have implemented this in their smartphones and in Android Marshmallow. But when transferring the functionality of the "Recent Applications" button on the sixth Android using the described soft, the doubletap processing was lost (it was not transferred to the new button, but disappeared on the old one), as it was, as it were, introduced from outside. I didn’t want to lose such a convenient “chip”, so the “Key Reassignment” softkey did not take root for me then. But I didn’t get used to the “Back” button on the left either, so after switching to Nugu I tried to use the soft again. And not in vain did I try. Now the transition to the previous application by doubletap is also transferred to the new button along with the main action ("Recent applications").

The procedure for adding a new reassignment is simple and straightforward; I think a couple of screenshots will suffice. I remove one of my overrides (for the Recent Apps button) and add it again. After clicking on the add reassignment button, you must select a free or premium action. In the second case, you will be asked to pay the money if it has not already been done.

I choose "Short and long press". In the form that appears, I select the "Recent_Apps" button from the drop-down list, and the action for it is "Back". I put the checkbox "Replaces the standard action", and the checkbox "Long press", on the contrary, I do not put (because I need a reaction to the usual quick tap on the button). Everything, you can press "OK".

When you tap on an active reassignment, a completely similar form opens for changing the action (reassignment), supplemented with only one button - "Delete" - to delete the selected reassignment. With a long tap on the active reassignment, the context menu "Edit" and "Delete" is called.

The lists of buttons and actions are truly huge. First, when you select, for example, a button, you see a list of seven buttons and the "Other" item. So, under this item there is a huge additional list, in which the buttons are represented by both official names (used in the code by developers) and numeric and alphabetic representations.

You can connect an adult external keyboard (if your gadget can do this) and remap all its keys to your taste. The same applies to possible actions, although here everything is a little opposite: the initial list consists of a little more than 20 actions, and the additional one (hiding under the item "Other ...") consists of only two lines ("Open application" and "Shortcut" ). As they say, the spool is small, but expensive: almost all the functionality of your gadget can be stuffed into these two points.

There is also a limitation: when the screen is locked, soft button presses are not tracked. There are pluses and minuses here. The disadvantages include the impossibility of unlocking the screen with the selected button while launching any application (Phone, for example). And the plus is that the softinka will not constantly eat battery power in the process of monitoring the state of the buttons.

The cost of the softphone (the cost of unlocking premium features) is $0.99, which is a little less than sixty of our rubles.

After the purchase, the "Show application icon" checkbox becomes available, which allows you to hide the application icon from the list of all applications installed in the system (and even from the list of recent applications). To return the icon, you need to press the "Back" button ten times in a row (the system button, not the one assigned by the application).

Well, and most importantly, but not everyone needs it - the ability to use button combinations. Three concepts are hidden under this term: "Double click", "Triple click" and "Two buttons".

We are not interested in double and triple clicks, because they differ slightly from fast and long clicks. But the use of two buttons increases the number of possible reassignments. I consider this already pampering, but to someone the idea of ​​​​swapping "Back" and "Recent" may also seem wild.

In addition, premium reassignments have one significant drawback - they do not replace systemic actions. That is, if I assign any action I need to the double tap on the volume up button, then the volume of the sound will first increase, and only then the action I set will be performed. No, it is clear that a double tap should not completely cancel the system action (otherwise, how can you adjust the volume then?), but the developer needs to do something in this direction.

And one more thing: I have never had an action assigned to the simultaneous pressing of any two of the three touch buttons ("Home", "Back", "Recent Applications"). Mechanical - no problem, touch - no. Either in the application something, or in my phone.

As a result, I can and recommend using the soft on your smartphones, especially if you need to change the functionality of short presses to the buttons available on the gadget. Here softinka works incomparably. If you, like me, wanted to swap "Back" and "Recent", then you don't even have to buy a softinka: the free version is enough for your eyes. If you want to make more than two reassignments, then you can already sponsor the developer. But the rest of the premium functionality is not even worth the money that they ask for it, IMHO.

That's all, good luck and health to you. Read Helpix.

Physical / capacitive or on-screen buttons - which is better? There are different opinions on this issue, but it is from different angles. And there is still a demand for phones with both physical and touch buttons. Even since Google made it clear that the Android OS is only for on-screen buttons, manufacturers like Samsung and even HTC continue to equip their devices with physical buttons.

However, other manufacturers, including LG, Sony and Motorola, almost completely follow the approach of Google, limiting themselves to soft buttons in their devices. The advantages and disadvantages of physical and software buttons were discussed by Edgar Cervantes in the Android Authority article "Physical vs. on-screen buttons - what's your pick?".

What's more, even the Priv, a phone with a full keyboard, has on-screen navigation buttons. However, the question of which buttons are better and, most importantly, why, remains relevant. Alas, this question is one of those for which there is no single answer.

A bit of history

In 2011, Google released the Galaxy Nexus and the then-new Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system. Subsequently, the new Nexus began to be accompanied by the next version of Android. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was intended for both tablets and smartphones, which was a big step forward for the operating system.

Other changes to the operating system include soft buttons. It was the device of the future, and it changed the idea of ​​what a modern smartphone should look like. Users know this, but many of them still love the physical buttons.

Physical/capacitive buttons

Let's start with a story about the shortcomings of physical buttons. First of all, novice users will have to put in more effort to learn how to use them, especially when it comes to mechanical buttons that require pressing rather than touching. This, of course, is not difficult, but many users are accustomed to the fact that even less effort can be applied.

The second point concerns reliability. Physical buttons are additional elements that can break. And we should not forget that these buttons are permanent design elements of the device. They will forever remain where the device manufacturer placed them. They will not move anywhere and will not be updated.

But there are physical buttons and certain advantages. Many novice users would prefer to feel real buttons under their fingers and feel tactile feedback, which is not to be expected from touch buttons. Some things - like accessing the camera - can be done without even unlocking the phone, especially when the device has a dedicated camera button.

And, very importantly, physical buttons allow you to increase the usable screen space. Phones are getting bigger, their screens keep getting better, but many users still prefer to keep some of the display space free of on-screen buttons.

In addition, it should be noted that some of the physical buttons of modern phones also have fingerprint scanners, which is another reason to keep them in modern devices. As examples of such a design decision, one can cite the well-known HTC 10 phones - a new flagship phone in a familiar look, for which, and the Samsung Galaxy S7.

Screen buttons

Some users like soft buttons and others don't. In this regard, everything is exactly the same as with physical buttons. And there are a number of reasons not to like them that every user who transitions from a phone with physical/capacitive buttons will remember.

As noted above, these on-screen buttons take away valuable screen real estate on your phone. Because they are hidden when playing games, viewing photos and videos, the user experience is less natural when using the phone.

But there are also reasons why users like on-screen buttons. They open up a lot of customization and customization options for the user interface, as the soft button can be added to or removed from the phone screen. Did the developer not add a menu button? No problems. Does the user prefer the left button or the right button to go back? And it's possible. A lot is possible with soft buttons, if the software allows it, of course.

In addition to a richer software experience, the removal of physical buttons also improves the hardware performance of the phone. Free space can be used, for example, for a more capacious battery. Or the manufacturer can make the frame around the screen narrower.

On-screen buttons give manufacturers the opportunity to equip a smaller phone with a larger screen.

Undoubtedly, each of the users has their own reasons for preferring physical or on-screen buttons. What, in your opinion, should be the navigation buttons of a modern smartphone?

Hardware problems are often much more complex and costly than software problems. It's a shame if the screen flies, but, as a rule, I can easily replace it. But here with the buttons can provide much more fuss. If you find yourself in a similar situation (clicking on Home, Back or Menu does not lead to any consequences), then the application will come to the rescue. After installing it, you will get a panel consisting of 4 buttons: Home, Back, Menu and resize. Take note of what needs to be root access on the device.

After installing the application and launching it for the first time, you will get a panel with buttons, which will be placed in the center of the screen. Its location can be changed, you can also adjust the size of the buttons, the distance between them and the transparency of the panel itself.

For button Home you can configure its behavior on long press: either it will run Google Now, or work as a button power. Besides Floating Soft keys allows you to change button icons. If you want to select the vertical position of the panel, then for this you just need to uncheck the option of the horizontal position in the menu. There you can also activate the inclusion of the application at boot.

Behaves very smart. If the panel overlaps any buttons or options of a running application, then it automatically changes its location on the screen, but there is one drawback. After the application that provoked the change in the position of the panel is closed, the panel itself will not be able to return to its old place. This will have to be done manually.

It would be nice if the developers upgraded the existing buttons with more features and added volume control to them. But for now, it's just a dream. If you are interested in such a practical thing as, and are already going to download the application, then you

One of the main advantages of the Android OS can be called quite a wide range of customization options. For example, no matter what model of smartphone you have, it must have hardware buttons that control the volume, turn on the device, or “home”. It is possible to bind other necessary actions to these buttons.

It is much more convenient, for example, without taking your phone out of your pocket, switch one or another music track by long pressing the volume key, launch the "camera" application or another frequently used one. In this article, we want to talk about such a feature of Android - button remapping.

In fact, there are several ways in which you can remap hardware buttons. The simplest, which does not require special knowledge or "superuser" rights, is the free Home2 Shortcut application (Home2 Shortcut).

The program is designed to expand the ability to launch applications with the "Home" buttons (double click), or the combination of "Home" plus "Search" (or + "Menu", + "Back"), as well as long pressing the "Search" and " Camera".

So we do the following:

The next step is to change the interval of double taps (taps) on the button (a smaller value will make the phone (tablet) respond to a double tap with a long interval). For now, we leave it in the normal position.

Now, after we press the "Home" button, a window will appear prompting you to select a launcher, select "Home2 Shortcut", then click "Always":

If everything was done correctly, then by double-clicking the "Home" button, we should see the action that we configured.

Clarification for Galaxy S4 owners who support S Voice. Go from S Voice, then "Menu", then "Settings". Now we remove the checkbox from the second option that launches the Home button.

If you liked the idea of ​​​​how to remap buttons on Android, then try other options using the Home button using shortcuts to programs. For example, by selecting "Other key options" after launching the application, you can reprogram the camera button, if your device has one.

Note The Home2 Shortcut app may not work on the Galaxy S2.

When I once again got a smartphone with hard navigation keys, without the possibility of configuring them at all or activating the Nexus-style on-screen keys, I decided that something had to be done about it. After a couple of hours of digging into the innards of Android, I turned off the annoying backlight, swapped the back and browse keys, and then turned on the on-screen buttons and found peace.

Intro

I’ll make a reservation right away: I’m a big fan of the idea of ​​​​on-screen navigation keys. All these houses, arrows and squares drawn right at the bottom of the screen. Yes, they take up some space there (which, however, is not really necessary in most cases), yes, they may spoil the appearance of applications, but damn it, they are dynamic.

On-screen navigation buttons rotate with the screen, disappear when not needed, change color, and seamlessly integrate into the home screen interface. If we discard the very idea of ​​​​the uselessness of the existence of three buttons at once (after all, Apple people get by with one and do not feel disadvantaged) and rather convenient navigation systems like PIE or the “MIUI navigation bubble”, then the on-screen buttons are the best thing that has been invented before so far.

So. For some reason, my wonderful, wonderful idea that there is nothing better than on-screen buttons is not shared by many smartphone manufacturers. And they don’t even just not share, but they don’t share in a completely monstrous way, forcing you to use a smartphone with touch buttons (AAA!), Equipped with dynamic backlight (AAA-2!) And a Back button on the right side of the screen (AAA-3: decisive blow ).

The situation is unacceptable to the extreme, and given that the good firmware developer did not provide any settings for activating the on-screen keys and settings for controlling the touch buttons, I had to do it on my own. There were two options for further action:

• bring the touch buttons to the desired state, namely turn off the backlight and move the "Back" key to the left side (even if it looks like a "square", it's even more interesting);
• disable the touch buttons completely and activate the on-screen buttons.

I do not like third-party tools, so the decision to do everything by hand came by itself.

Method number one. Setting up touch buttons

First, let's try to turn off the backlight of the buttons. For this we need root, a terminal emulator and a directory /sys at the root of the file system. It's that combination. We are dealing with the Linux kernel, and in systems based on it, all important information about the hardware, as well as the toggle switches that control it, are usually located in the sysfs file system connected to the directory /sys.

Actually, sysfs is not even a file system, more precisely, it is a file system, but it operates with so-called synthetic files. But they are not stored on the disk, this is a kind of interface for communicating with drivers: I read the file - I got data about the piece of iron, I wrote it down - I changed some setting. And for writing, you just need root rights.

So, we get root, run a terminal emulator (or better). And we write the following:

# su # cd /sys

# find -name \*button\* ./leds/button-backlight

Bingo! This is a catalog /sys/class/leds/button-backlight. Let's jump into it and see what's inside:

# cd /sys/class/leds/button-backlight # ls brightness device max_brightness power subsystem trigger uevent

I put my Nokia 3310 on that file brightness is the current button brightness, and max_brightness- maximum. Let's check the guess by writing the value 100 to the first file (well, like 100%, although what scale it is is unknown):

# echo 100 > brightness

Great, the buttons are on and are not even going to go out.

The moment of truth - we write the value 0 to the max_brightness file:

# echo 0 > max_brightness

The buttons went out, forever, like the light bulb in my porch last night.

But just like a light bulb, they can light up again if you reboot. That is, the command is valid only in the current session. Fortunately, this is not a problem, we will put our command in a script on a memory stick:

# mkdir /sdcard/boot # echo "echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/button-backlight/max_brightness" > /sdcard/boot

And we, in turn, put it into autoload using . We launch the application, select the first three checkboxes, use the Select folder option to select the boot directory on the memory card.

Half the task is done, it remains to swap the “Back” and “Browse” buttons. To do this, you need to change the layout of the buttons. In Android, it lies in several directory files /system/usr/keylayout/. There are quite a few of them, but if we discard files like Vendor_2378_Product_100a.kl and qwerty.kl(they store the layouts of full-fledged Qwerty keyboards that Android supports out of the box), then five pieces will remain at most.

One of them is exactly what we need. Smartphones often use the file ft5x06_ts.kl, specific to the FT5x06 touchscreen controller (the buttons are touch-sensitive, right?), but in my case it turned out to be the file Vendor_2378_Product_100a.kl.

If you open this file, you can see the three lines you are looking for:

Key 158 BACK VIRTUAL key 139 MENU VIRTUAL key 102 HOME VIRTUAL

It remains only to swap the numbers 158 and 139 in places (any file manager with support for root rights is suitable for this). After the reboot, the new layout will take effect.

Method number two. Screen keys

It's even easier here. Android has a special debug variable qemu.hw.mainkeys, which allows you to control the visibility of the on-screen navigation keys. If it has a value of 0, the keys will be shown on the screen, 1 has the opposite effect.

We write the variable with the desired value to the file /system/build.prop, and that is all:

# su # mount -o remount,rw /system # cp /system/build.prop /system/build.prop.bak # echo qemu.hw.mainkeys=0 > /system/build.prop

findings

These are the criminal steps sometimes you have to take to make your smartphone a little more convenient. As for me, I settled on the third option: "turned off" the buttons plus installed LMT Launcher. It seems to me that this is the most convenient way to manage.