Motion Sense gestures, while cool when showing off the phone (assuming they work) they offer very little functionality to the user. Of course Google has not included all possibilities in the first iteration of Motion Sense and has said that they don’t plan on opening up Motion Sense to outside developers (who aren’t Google partners). Luckily we have XDA for that.
A developer over at XDA, Ashergray, has created a Magisk module called OsloBridger that behaves like the Motion Sense Bridge inside the Pixel 4s ROM. It allows specific apps to connect to it and then assigns functions within the app to certain gestures — 9to5Google have made an impressive list of all the things the Motion Sense Bridge can detect here.
The new module basically allows the user to not only adjust the sensitivity of the gesture as well as enabling the various gestures (and we have no doubt more will be added in the future). You can then use Tasker to listen for one of the four intents (created from a recognised gesture) from the module and assign it as a trigger to whatever action you decide. The four gestures and intents recognised at this point are reach, presence, swipe and flick gestures.
From here the possibilities are endless with the ability to make the task applied to each gesture/intent as long as you want and perform as many things as you want. It should be kept in mind though that the in-built Google Motion Sense gestures will continue to work and may interfere so they will have to be turned off in the settings to get full use out of this module.
Keep in mind that at this stage development is very early and you may run into some bugginess but with Magisk Modules they are easily turned off should you have any issues.
If you have a rooted Pixel 4 XL and want to get more out of your phone, and don’t mind playing around in the root space head on over to the Motion Sense Mod page at XDA Developers. Soli gestures were meant to be the big ticket item on this phone but most of them are relatively useless, maybe it is time for me to root my Pixel 4 XL.
