The latest feature to appear in the Android 12 developer preview is a new way to access notifications by swiping down on the gesture bar along the bottom of the screen.
It’s expected that this will be a Pixel-only feature, according to 9to5Google. However, this type of functionality is often found early in developer previews and makes its way to more devices later. For instance, the same thing happened with the face-based rotation feature.
So far, it appears that users that want to enable this need to navigate to the Gesture section of their device’s setting and turn on ‘Swipe for notifications.’ Previously this gesture allowed some Pixel users to swipe down on their fingerprint scanner to reveal the notifications shade from anywhere in the operating system.
This new method will likely work a lot better since most people already have their thumb hovering over the gesture area anyways, and phones are getting increasingly taller.
I often install Niagara launcher on my Android smartphones, and it uses a similar gesture to search your apps. Over time I’ve gotten used to this gesture, so it’s smart that Google is utilizing it too.
Source: 9to5Google