Google Kills Android Menu Button, Replaces It with Action Bar

Android's Menu button is dead. Long live the action bar?

Following down the path blazed by the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the first Ice Cream Sandwich phone, Google has declared the Menu button dead, leaving just three – the Back, Home, and Recent Apps button – to remain at the bottom of the phone.

Instead, Google recommends that app developers begin using the "action bar," a small dedicated space that identifies the application and what actions users can take. (One example of an action bar might be at the top of the Google G+ application for phones, where the application is identified and users have a choice of actions: searching, writing a post, or opening their notifications. For another, see the image below.)

"Not only should your apps stop relying on the hardware Menu button, but you should stop thinking about your activities using a 'menu button' at all," Scott Main, lead tech writer for developer.android.com, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. "Your activities should provide buttons for important user actions directly in the action bar (or elsewhere on screen). Those that can't fit in the action bar end up in the action overflow."

What does this mean for users? A fairly significant change in how users habitually interact with their Android phone. By now, most users have taught themselves that additional options are accessed by the Menu button, which can appear as a circled "Menu" button or three stacked horizontal lines. Now, Google is saying, those options will all be found somewhere on the screen, and most likely in the "action bar" at the top of the screen. Typical action bar items include refresh, delete, share, Star, and more.

The Galaxy Nexus and most Android tablets also forego dedicated hardware buttons for software buttons, which also seems to be the direction Google is taking with its future user interface design.

So what happens if those actions can't fit on the action bar itself? Users will see the "overflow button" at the far right, which looks like a colon but with three dots, not two. Main also encouraged those apps writers who currently place the overflow button at the bottom of the screen to avoid doing so, to avoid user confusion.