Side stage close/ collapse gesture hard to discover

[Cris Dywan]

Once any app has been in the side stage there seems to be no way to close it anymore as long as the device is in landscape orientation. Moving all of the side staged apps back to the main stage or closing them will leave a black screen behind telling how to use 3 fingers to use the side stage.
This is particularly inconvenient due to bug 1564348 and renders many apps difficult or impossible to use in landscape.

This is on Frieza with OTA 10.1

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

You can slide the side stage away by grabbing its left edge, or tap with 3 fingers. Is neither working for you?

We are missing a tutorial for these, that's for sure.

[Cris Dywan (kalikiana)]

Indeed collapsing the side stage by the shadow on its left works. Also 3 finger tap. And I can even re-open by sliding from the right or 3 finger tap. Sweet.

So this is rather a problem of discovery. I didn't realize that there was a "handle" I could move and the black tutorial box only tells me about moving using 3 fingers, not the other gestures.

[Arnaud Ober (user-deactivated-80571)]

Umh, use the shadow to close the side stage is a very good idea, but I think it's too small for my hands...
I have some difficulties to find the right position to close the side stage. Maybe the size of the touch area is too small?

[Alexey Kulik (doctor-rover)]

@Michał Sawicz, thank you for the trick with 3 finger tap. It's convenient. But it's not obvious, so I didn't know that.
I believe this is a good idea to add a short info on 3-finger-tap gesture to the "black screen [tutorial] telling how to use 3 fingers to use the side stage".

[Alistair Buxton (a-j-buxton)]

+1 the area you need to hit is so small that it takes several attempts even if you know exactly what you are aiming for. If you just guess that maybe you can swipe away the side stage then your chances of actually hitting the absolutely tiny region where it works are virtually nil.

[Alistair Buxton (a-j-buxton)]

Also the first time I encountered the side stage was after opening the weather app and then rotating to landscape mode. The weather app automatically puts itself into the side stage, obscuring the message about three finger dragging.