Apple Pencil - how to open control center, swipe up, swipe down?

There are some things that the Pencil does NOT do as a navigation tool.

The Pencil works fine as a tapping ( tap target ) navigation tool, but it won't do the many of finger swiping gestures, like the swipe down gesture from the upper right hand corner of the iPad to reveal the Control Centre panel.

The Pencil won't do the swipe down getsure, from the center of the screen to reveal the Notifications panel.

The Pencil will not do any swipe gesture from the bottom of the screen, either, like the swipe up toward the middle of the screen to reveal the iPadOS background app switcher or to bring up the iPadOS Dock when your in an app to be able to do any app multitasking and it will not do any left or right swipe gestures to open or move any other app multitasking windows.

Apple does allow the Pencil to swipe up and down to scroll up and down and to scroll side to side, but that is about it.

So, basically the Pencil has not been allowed, as yet, to perform many swiping gestures that our fingers and simple, commonplace capacitive stylii can do.

If you choose, you CAN send feedback to Apple about this down below.

Tap the link below

https://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad.html

Perhaps consider the wider picture in that the Pencil is principally a drawing/writing instrument - and the User Interface (UI) design must be carefully considered so as to avoid unintended or unwanted conflicts.

For example, when using Notes or other Apps that intended to accept Pencil input, control gestures must be contrived such that they are not “confused” with drawing or writing. For example, if sketching near the screen edges of corners - or editing a picture or photograph - a stroke of the Pencil might trigger an unwanted action or appearance of a menu.

So as to avoid this particular issue, which you may not yourself have encountered, some UI gestures (such as exposing the Control Centre) can only be triggered by a finger-touch or swipe.

The Control Centre can only be exposed using a finger-swipe gesture - swiping down from top-right of the screen.

Whilst the Apple Pencil cannot be used to open the Control Centre, it can be used to select and operate controls from the Control Centre window.

Apple do invite constructive feedback and feature requests via their product feedback pages:

Feedback - iPad - Apple