Google Gesture Search

~ the obit ~

Google Gesture Search found things on your phone by letting you draw letters on the screen. You traced a G with a finger, the app offered contacts, applications, bookmarks and music starting with G, and a second letter narrowed it until what you wanted sat on top. It shipped on 3 March 2010 for Android 2.0 and above, which at the time meant the Nexus One and the Motorola Milestone and not much else.

It came out of research rather than a product group. Yang Li, a research scientist at Google working on handwriting and gesture input, built it, and in June 2011 Google Labs opened an API so other Android developers could take the same finger-drawn input against their own data. Later versions added more than forty languages with transliteration, and in July 2014 an update put a widget on the home screen that launched recently used apps.

Then it went quiet. Version 2.1.5 landed on 29 January 2015 and nothing followed it. Android's launcher had grown a search box that covered the same ground by typing, and a research app with no product team behind it is a maintenance bill nobody has signed for. Google removed the Play listing on 13 February 2017. The app had over a million installs and a rating of 4.2 from 65,000 people when it went.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the phones it needed ~

The Nexus One was never sold in Turkey. Google's own phone store served a short list of countries in 2010, and this was not one of them, so the window when Gesture Search was the clever new thing happened on hardware that arrived here grey, late or not at all. Android was ordinary by 2012, and by then the app was two years old and no longer being worked on.

~ the gesture that did not catch ~

Handwriting on glass was a 2010 sort of bet. On-screen keyboards were still clumsy, and a pen stroke felt like it might be the faster way to filter a list. Typing two letters into a universal search field won instead, because it was less interesting and quicker. The API never produced the wave of gesture-driven apps it was meant to seed either.

~ what stayed inside ~

Yang Li kept publishing. The gesture and handwriting work carried on at Google in forms with no icon on anybody's home screen, which is the normal fate of a research demo that ships: the idea is absorbed and the product is deleted. Gesture Search just took seven years to get there, and spent the last two of them already finished.

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