We navigate most modern phones entirely by swiping our fingers across their displays—but in Android’s early days, all phones came with buttons under the screen. One of these once prominent keys has utterly disappeared, its role no longer a core part of how we navigate our phones.
Android was designed during the feature phone era, when all of our handsets had an abundance of buttons regardless of whether they came with a touch screen (most didn’t). On underpowered hardware with less responsive screens, it made sense for certain actions to be assigned a dedicated physical button.
Android phones came with a varying set of buttons before eventually establishing some consistency. The very first Android phone, the HTC Dream, had five. Two were for starting and ending a call. One was for going to the home screen, and one was a back button. The fifth one was placed apart, directly below the screen. It’s the star of today’s story: the menu key. You can see its presence in HTC’s product tour for the Dream.
I never saw the HTC Dream. The first smartphone I craved was the Motorola Droid (which I never got my hands on). It came with four capacitive buttons directly below the screen: back, menu, home, and search. This became the paradigm that would be common for several years.
On most phones, like the Droid, these keys weren’t labeled. There were icons printed on the buttons instead, such as a back arrow, a set of horizontal lines, a house, and a magnifying glass.
Pressing “Back” sent you to the previous screen, and “home” sent you back to the home screen. “Search” is another key that has disappeared over time, but it’s that fourth button that we’re here to talk about today.
The Menu Key’s Reason for Being
Old Android phones came about at a time when we all did most of our computing on desktops and laptops. Smartphones were in their infancy, and tablets were largely Windows PCs with a stylus input. Most software at this point was still designed with menu bars across the top, with the familiar words such as File, Edit, Preferences, and so on.
Menu bars weren’t going to cut it on tiny touch screens that we navigate with large, blunt thumbs. The hamburger menu button that software has since settled on wasn’t yet an established paradigm. Instead, Android was designed with a physical menu button in mind.
Tapping this button would bring up a grid of options related to the current screen. In a way, this approach changed up app design. Developers didn’t have to find a way to insert options into the app’s interface, since there was a dedicated way to get to them. On the flip side, non-technical people may never have clicked this button, creating discoverability issues.
The Menu Button Disappeared When Buttons Went Virtual
With the release of version 3.0 “Honeycomb,” Android did away with all of its physical navigation buttons. Instead, we were presented with three virtual navigation buttons: Back, Home, and Recents. Since this release was exclusive to tablets, the buttons appeared in the bottom-left corner opposite a clock and status icons in the bottom-right. These three virtual buttons would replace physical buttons on phones with the release of Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich,” the version of Android I remember feeling the most hyped for to this day (we published alist of the best Android versionsa few years ago, and you’ll never guess which was number one).
The menu button’s legacy became a bit messy at this moment in time. Most apps had been designed for older versions of Android, and it took a long time for them to receive updates that incorporated the new design. Many never did. So for years, Android would display three dots in the bottom-right corner as a fourth virtual button when you were using an older app. It was a functional solution, but one that looked imbalanced given the asymmetry introduced.
This awkward fourth virtual button would sometimes appear for years, up until Gingerbread apps started to feel like an old, outdated memory. It went away for good in Android 10, as reported by sister siteXDA Developersat the time.
These Days It’s All About Gestures
The three virtual navigation buttons have disappeared from stock Android, at least as the default setting. These days, only Samsung Galaxy devices still ship with the three buttons by default. I won’t pretend to be nostalgic here. I immediately get rid of them when setting up a new Samsung phone or tablet. Though with the large volumes that Samsung ships, I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of Android users are still navigating with virtual buttons as a result.
Most Android phone models now use gestures, an approach to navigation that the iPhone has also settled on. We swipe up from the bottom to go to the home screen and swipe in from the sides to return to the previous screen. Swiping up from the bottom and holding our thumb on the screen for a few moments brings up our recent applications. In short, we navigate the same way, just with different input methods.
As for menu buttons? Those now exist directly inside apps, and they can vary with each one. Mostuse a hamburger menu buttonplaced at different parts of the screen. Some have managed to do without a menu button at all.
In some ways, the solution we’ve landed on is a step backwards from the days of the physical button. Accessing app settings is less consistent. But would I want to slap a dedicated button on the side of my phone? Apps are more complex than they used to be, and with the size of modern screens, that would likely be more trouble than it’s worth.
