The Mobile Navigation

What changed

On a narrow screen the drawer is gone. Navigation now runs along a bar fixed to the bottom of the screen, where the destinations you reach for most, your dashboard, your bank, your invoices, sit as tabs, with a single Create button raised at the centre. Your organisation and your account stay along the top. The rest of the menu, the less frequent destinations and your settings, the theme and signing out, gather in sheets that rise from the bottom when you ask for them. On a wide screen nothing changes: the top bar from the last release is exactly as it was.

Why it matters

A phone is held in one hand and worked by thumb, and the thumb reaches the bottom of the screen, not the top. The drawer the last release shipped was honest, it held every destination, but it asked for a tap to open and then a reach up into a panel for the thing you wanted. A bottom bar puts the common path where the hand already is. The three destinations you move between all day are one tap away in the thumb’s arc, and the action you reach for most, creating something, is the raised button at the centre, the largest target in the bar and the one nearest the thumb.

The less frequent things are not lost, they are gathered. One button opens the full menu, another opens your account, and both arrive as a sheet rising from the bottom rather than a panel sliding in from the side, so they too land under the thumb rather than across the screen from it. The rule from the last release still holds: nothing the wide screen offers is out of reach on a narrow one. What changed is that the reach is now a short one.

Proof and impact

The navigation draws only on the colour system, so its contrast meets the WCAG AA standard against its surface in both the light and the dark theme, the same checkable guarantee the colour system carries: sample a control and its background and the ratio holds. The raised Create button is held to that same standard, its label legible against its fill in both themes. The destination you are on is marked by weight and by a filled shape, not by colour alone, so the cue survives a colourblind reader or a glance in poor light, the same principle the rest of the interface follows.

Every control in the bar and in the sheets meets the minimum touch-target size, so the whole of navigation is worked by thumb, not only by a cursor. While a sheet is open it holds keyboard focus, it returns focus to where you were when it closes, and it closes on the escape key or a tap outside, so a keyboard or screen-reader user is never left stranded behind it. The organisation you are working in is announced as such to a screen reader, not left as a bare mark. The bar reserves room for the phone’s own home indicator and holds its place through the browser’s collapsing toolbars, so it stays seated wherever the page is scrolled.

There is one mobile navigation now, not two behind a setting: the drawer is retired, not hidden. There is no change to the API and no change to your data. This is the interface you see, not the kernel beneath it. There are no breaking changes.

What is next

The frame is now complete on every width, the top bar on a wide screen and the bottom bar on a phone. What it sets up is unchanged from the last release: the verification state, already carried on a wide screen, brought to where a phone can always see it too, and the dashboard beneath it filling out. The Create menu and the full menu already mark what is on its way, so when those arrive they take a place that is already waiting for them. That is next in line.