I LOVE the gesture navigation - no more buttons on the bottom!
But that was introduced with Android 10. Or did Samsung wait until 11?
Losing the buttons is nice, but there are things about the gestures I've not been impressed by. For one thing, it's a
blatant copy of iOS gesture navigation: the bar at the bottom, the recent apps gesture, the home gesture, the swipe on the bar to switch to previous/next app are all identical. The only difference is the back gesture, since iOS doesn't have a system-wide "back" feature (though it does have a "swipe back" within an app, so the only real innovation in Google's version is allowing you to swipe from either side). Frankly I find this very weak of Google.
Another is that its interaction with 3rd party launchers is still flaky after 18 months, which tells me that Google don't care. I don't see that as a good sign for the platform to be honest.
And of course there was the famous clash between the back gesture and the side-swipe to reveal menus. I realise that Google are starting (18 months later) to phase that latter out, which removes the conflict but that simply removes a very usable feature: where I have the same app on Android and iOS the lack of that gesture on iOS is a clear usability win for Android, whereas Google's replacement (which in the Play Store is "reach to the top of the screen and tap on your account avatar") is not.
So overall I think that Google did a lazy, imitative job with these gestures and didn't put enough thought into them. They
do get rid of the buttons, but they could have been done better (e.g. it is inherently slower and less fluid than the previous systems because you have to pause to distinguish the two upward-swipe gestures), or made it more user-configurable (e.g. I'd rather have removed the back swipe on one side to eliminate conflicts, or set the heights at which different swipe gestures worked). So I can't help but feel that "making the gestures as familiar as possible to iOS users" was the main design driver.