I'm curious how/if the way that decompose handles the back button will enable or not enable us to support predictive back gestures in Android

Decompose already supports the predictive back gesture when exiting the activity. Between screens is a different story and requires some work. It's already in progress. https://github.com/arkivanov/Decompose/issues/379 Btw I did a POC recently - https://twitter.com/arkann1985/status/1656073241817931778

awesome!

But turned out it's not so easy, will require some work in Essenty.

very cool