I have an old OnePlus that need to be changed but I look at that sad yellow-ish absurdly rounded UI with bland icons and I just want to postpone my purchase until the Android design team wants a bonus and rediscovers colours and shapes and change everything once again.
(I'll admit that I'm someone who frequently launches the wrong app because nowadays the icons are all round and blue)
I was a bit annoyed at first. But... like most major redesigns, it came to grow on me. To the point where pre-12 Android now looks kinda dated. Better animations, smoother experience, more contrast and more colors fit the OS well I think.
The only thing I regret is that my personal Samsung phone didn't pick up on the design language - OneUI is much more conservative and, IMO, less attractive to look at. It follows iOS cues a bit too much.
At this point I don't think either is that much better or worse the the other.
For one I have your exact same feeling when using an iPhone. And I know it's not because it's bad, it's just completely different than what I have been using for many many years.
(And yes, i can just go to the app drawer, type "battery" an find the battery settings)
I'm sure that if you stop to reflect on what you've just stated you'd realize that accusing stock Android of poor design from your experience running what is not-Android-design maybe doesn't make much sense?
I'm running Android 12 on a Pixel 6a right now. I flipped up the app drawer, tapped the "Search your phone and more" at the top, and typed "bat" and it has an autocomplete suggestion for "battery percentage". The list then shows a deep link to the Battery Percentage screen on the Battery settings, then a link to the Battery settings area, then a link into the Battery usage area under the Battery Settings. Then it shows Pixel Tips for "Quickly see battery info for your devices", "Make your phone last longer with Extreme Battery Saver".
Your experience is 100% a failure of Samsung, not of Android. The stock Android Open Source launcher does the thing you're wanting. You bought a device which purposefully doesn't do that.
The equivalent would be to install a Linux distro that defaults to just a command line interface and then complaining that Linux is impossible for average users to figure out. There are other choices out there! You could have bought a Pixel, or a Motorola, or a OnePlus, or a Sony, or a Nokia, and all of those would have done this.
Theoretically, you can also install a different launcher which might do this behavior. Maybe try the Pixel Launcher?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
There are lots of other potential launchers which take over the home screen UI. It won't change the settings UI or some of the other Samsung related skinned areas. You can then revert back to the default Samsung launcher.
You have a malfunctioning Samsung device then.
I go to settings, search battery, and choose the first result which takes me to the battery menu.
Android doesn't baby me like that but has millions of other giant problems.
I picked up a device with iOS 6 and marvelled at how beautiful the design was.
Android needs only to give up the flat material design to beat iOS entirely on the design front.
And yes I use Apple.
My old phone works just fine (...for an Android, that is), and I don't even mind the cracked backplate. The battery capacity keeps decreasing year after year, but even that feels like a feature in disguise. It won't get an upgrade to the new Android (by design, I presume), but I don't care. Have I gotten old? Is it me? Or is it you?
Some features I really like that aren't glitzy but are game-changing for me:
* The ability to auto-detect and translate webpages in Safari (or SFSafariViewController)
* Advances in the lock screen and control center
* FaceID and no-password FIDO2 sign-in
I'm sure there are similar things for Android (which I haven't touched since my Nexus5). I think the best approach is not to change what works.
I hate minimalistic, sterile, flat UI design with a burning passion. We need skeuomorphism and affordances back, and we need it all yesterday.
I don’t care about a solution that copies video from an Android phone to an Android tablet… I need one that works with every computing device and OS.
Used to run flagship phones, replaced them on the yearly, ran various Android builds on current phone and/or older phones....
At some point I simply stopped caring, started to get the pixel-A phones, and lived happily ever after. I think my Nexus 6p was the last flagship phone I owned, and I probably swapped the battery in that like ~5 times before I got the boot-loop of death. These days I won't be bothered to replace a battery, unless there is a compelling reason. Just get another phone, and move on.
Generating less e-waste seems compelling enough.
Has the team changed substantially? Has Google basically "won" in marketshare and has thrown in the towel? Is there something big coming where the resources are going to?
iOS continues to improve and refine the "total user experience", especially if you're in Apple's multi-device ecosystem but Android feels like it is stagnating in a significant way for the last 2-3 years.
A few months ago I was reading some article which mentioned a common feature on iOS that I didn't even know existed and realized I had been away from the Apple ecosystem for too long. Given iOS's market share and influence, I decided I better catch up and bought an iPhone 13 for my next upgrade, complete with Apple Watch.
I hope this isn't too much of a cop-out, but there are pros and cons to each platform, but both are pretty amazing. We're at the point where we're really comparing subtleties, habits and personal preference. I miss some things on Android and wish Android had some things from iOS. You get a bunch of paper cuts on each platform. I won't list out my personal pet peeves, because they're just that.
After I've absorbed what there is to learn from Apple (I'll probably get an iPad to complete the set), I'll definitely be going back to my Samsung. I personally prefer Android.
I also own a Pixel Pro for testing, and that thing is a buggy disaster, but that's a different conversation.
The published Material Design 3 spec is missing several basic components, it doesn't even have a checkbox. Google is inviting developers to migrate to the latest version of the design system, while their own teams at Angular and Flutter are now mixing M2 and M3 components and design concepts, and hitting roadblocks because of incompatible elevation and typography changes in certain components.
Veritasium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE
DW (mostly about phone) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aYJPonRJd8
I agree about information density. Manufacturer makes the screen larger to fit more content, Android makes elements larger to fit fewer controls (this is not just a "ppi problem", the layouts all seem to be designed for 3" screens, yet none of them exist).
iOS/Apple has mostly been good about density, but they too keep being tempted by their large screens to make UI elements unnecessarily large.
The bugs were massive and glaring in the early days. Things as simple as getting a notification would sometimes completely blank the rest of the screen. Since then, random slowdowns and slow animations have only gotten worse.
Beyond the core platform, Google's apps (which feel like an extension of the core) are just getting worse too. Android Auto for phones has been replaced with a terrible driving mode implementation. I recently used voice search to open an audio app in driving mode. It helpfully opened the app on my tv at home instead of the phone that was in driving mode miles away from home.
Everything is more disjointed and less functional than before. The little helpful four icons at the top of the app drawer? That was an amazing feature a few years ago. It'd always highlight one of the ones that I was about to use. Now, it fails 100% of the time, no matter how obvious it should be.
Things that used to be easy to do with the notification shade are now more confusing and take more steps than ever before. Its an awful mess, and this is literally the first time that I've preferred ios on my ipad over the Android UI.
Overall, I think it's a nice guide, especially for people like me who are design-inclined but not designers. However it shouldn't be taken as gospel.
There are many corporate TLDs, including Amazon (took a while to be approved due to protest from the Amazon region of the world). They also have many sites on the .aws TLD.
https://global.toyota/ is a real site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
Stock Android really peaked around version 10. Ever since they have just been messing with things that weren't broken, like the notifications or lock screen.
I thought I never would say this but thankfully Samsung doesn't automatically go along with Google's yearly inflation of whitespace [1] and other UX "improvements".
[1] Example of how ridiculous it has become: https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/qbljd0/the_margins...
Really looking forward to going back to the Pixel phones and not touching Samsung again.
LineageOS is pretty good and non-American Samsungs are easily unlocked.
A custom ROM is probably the most (only?) reasonable way of using an Android phone.
Xiaomi and other Chinese brands seem to be the way to go for flashing ROM's. There is still a huge community for those.
Can't they, like, add new APIs, but not touch the damn UI without a clearly defined rationale? By "clearly defined" I mean substantiated by something besides calls to emotions.
And I'm getting tired of every OS needing a major update every year because reasons. Software products need to have a finished state like every other engineering project does.
I wonder if it sell more phones, convincing people to upgrade to get the new Android experience?
My phone is still using an older Android version - unable to upgrade any further, or receive security updates. Before you recoil in horror, consider the following: the phone is in perfectly working order, it has an excellent screen and camera, it's fast for my needs. The real horror is that millions of perfectly fine smartphones are sent to landfill because these little pocket super-computers with amazing hardware can no longer be upgraded by software. Is this a embarrassing wasteful state of affairs? Or the price of "progress" on the hardware upgrade treadmill?
Despite getting a lot of crap online, it looks like iPhones actually do better when it comes to shipping security updates to old phones? [1]
I am not sure but if that is really the case, I think I'll switch to one for my next phone.
The iPhone X, released in 2017, still gets new versions of iOS. Even phones that have long been dropped from new iOS releases still get security fixes for a long, long time.
I hate Apple for some things and even they could probably do better, but they're incredibly far ahead here (now if only the devices were more repairable).
It's absolutely not the price of progress, it's the price manufacturers not caring (why would they? people have already bought the device and they'll buy more short-lived devices) and there being no legislation to make them care.
With mainline kernels many phones that are a decade old would be perfectly usable today.
Still, this situation makes me quite sad. Why I can't easily update my phone OS like I do with my Linux desktops and servers? Things like the /e/ foundation or Lineage OS are great but still have a lot of limitations. Mostly due to closed source drivers that mobile phone makers use.
Even if both of them have hundreds or thousands of CVEs there is nothing I can do since security fixes won't be backported. I use AOSP with the minimal applications required for their "job", that means, mostly F-Droid applications and no gapps/vendor apps.
Until their batteries die, I will keep them around. I won't throw away a perfectly working device.
Most mobile applications still target Android 7 and work perfectly. My phone has a good camera, battery still lasts 3 days, Internet browsing is fast enough and WiFi, LTE/4G reception work great too. Still, watching the mayhem Android 12 and beyond (Material You) has become, maybe my next phone will be an iOS device.
Right now I'd like Google Translate/Assistant that would translate everything it hears and simply show the language next to the translation on screen.
Would make my talks with several coworkers so much easier.
There was a device that did exactly this, and it also seemed to do voice-to-voice pretty well but I can't remember the name.
I laugh every time Google's multibillion dollar AI shows me the same ads for already installed apps, still shows me ads for women's products (they 100% know I'm male) and can't understand I'm on an anime songs binge (or rock, or a certain band) this evening.
On that note, I can't update my OnePlus anymore. I know they stopped releasing updates, but I thought they'd keep the OTA update servers online. Guess AWS is too expensive.
Uh... Google Assistant Interpreter mode exists for years now?
This exists. There is also a live transcription tool for deaf people that works really good (in german tested, i was very suprised) since android 12.
https://support.google.com/accessibility/android/answer/9158...
So much this! I see 10 Google Fiber ads a day on YouTube even though I'm on their service and have an IP address they've assigned, lol.
10. Android 13 adopts Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio, a new Bluetooth audio standard that results in lower latency than classic audio. This allows you to hear audio that’s in better sync with the sound’s source, reducing delay. With Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio, you can also enjoy enhanced audio quality and broadcast audio to multiple devices at the same time.
You likely don't even have a phone that supports it: Only high-end chipsets with Bluetooth 5.2 capability support it (check for an explicit mention of LE Audio in the SoC's data sheet; per my understanding the isochronous channels needed for LE Audio are optional in the standard).
Oh yeah, and it is huge, mostly in one way I care about: The audio quality might not suck so badly anymore when making phone calls because the standard finally allows more than 16kHz audio recording (the need for an extra profile has been removed).
https://launchstudio.bluetooth.com/ListingDetails/154534
There's also this Bluetooth transmitter called the NEXUM VOCE that supports LE Audio, including Broadcast Audio:
It's crazy that we're almost 14 years out from that and with these huge screens you have to reach to the top of the screen.
Though I dislike the back gesture on android, ios has it better due to not having it in the first place.
Even on IOS, until recently, every app, as long as you allowed media viewing permissions, had access to EVERY PHOTO in your library.
To be honest it can be annoying sometimes. I was happy with the all-in photo library access restriction we've had since 2014. Any app that would do something nefarious with my pictures would have to be something photography related, in which case they can still trick me into giving full library access even with the fine-grained policies. I'd much prefer a short-lived one-time access permission instead, for those times when you need to upload something.
What Photo Picker adds is a much nicer, more intuitive UI and the ability to grant read-only access to user-selected media files. URIs obtained through Photo Picker can be persisted, but unlike with documents picker, they don't grant write access as well.
If you're curious about how the photo picker works under the hood, I wrote an article that goes into that: https://blog.esper.io/android-photo-picker-backport/
Don’t get me wrong, these are very welcome capabilities, but phones are still eons ahead of desktop OSs.
To me, limiting which folders/pieces of media an app can access seems like a win.
There are still situations where the setting in Android won't cut it though, namely if Android doesn't know the language at all. For example, Android doesn't know Romansh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhaeto-Romance_languages) is a thing, so if an app wants to add a translation for it, it needs to be an in-app switch.
- Samsung's One UI https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/one-ui/
- Xiaomi's MIUI https://global.miui.com/en
- OnePlus's OxygenOS https://www.oneplus.com/uk/oxygenos
- (Stock) Google's Material Design/You https://material.io/design
Yes, new Android versions bring new features for all of them. Many took ideas from Google's vision, and small manufacturers just use stock with a few tweaks. Also Google for his Pixels does exclusive stuff that do not goes to the Stock Android that every manufacturer can use as a base.
The point that I'm trying to make is that today is not much accurate to talk about "The Android Experience" (usually to compare it to iOS).
This summary is just for user-facing features and doesn't mention any of the new APIs, app-facing behavioral changes, or most of the platform changes. My ongoing Android 13 changelog (currently at >32k words, ~170 min estimated read time lol) covers all of that and then some: https://blog.esper.io/android-13-deep-dive/
Unfortunately, it looks like the patches were never merged: https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/topic:InputDeviceR...
In fact they were abandoned in August 2021. I haven't heard anything since.
- A shortcut to turn on the flashlight
(The "Quick Tap" gesture can now turn on/off the flashlight)
And this concludes all the features I was looking forward to in Android 13.
Thankfully 3-button navigation is still here. The day they remove it is the day I stop using Android.
Just saying, I guess. It's cool to be reminded what increasingly crazy bullshit it saves you to not be too tightly inside some walled garden.
Play Protect is a scare tactic for installing software that doesn't pay Google a 30% cut. Probably the only functional thing it actually does.
Android is quite good as it is. Compared to iOS that seem to be stuck some ten years ago.
I am talking about UI style. It has never been so boring, for me at least.
Compared to recent Android, Microsoft is looking sexy and innovative.
No more log access either, so that also means no more automation apps. And dns over https is hard-coded to cloudflare or Google with no way to chose another provider.
I'm so confused about Google's strategy here. File access has always been one of Android's most attractive feature versus iOS. At this point it seems like I'll be using an iPhone very soon, for the first time of my life. Losing features that you rely on every single update is such a pain. At least with iOS the platform is stable, and updates never really remove any core feature.
Third-party file managers never had full filesystem access. Without superuser, they've only ever had access to external storage (what you may know of as /sdcard, /storage/emulated, or /data/media). When Google started enforcing Scoped Storage in Android 11, they disallowed apps from accessing files in external private storage directories, ie. the /storage/emulated/{user}/Android/data and /storage/emulated/{user}/Android/obb directories. Each app you install can create its own directory here, and they're only intended to be used by the app that owns them, not by other apps.
The MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission introduced in Android 11 gave apps like file managers access to all of external shared storage, which excludes the /Android/data and /Android/obb directories since those are deemed external private storage. However, file manager devs figured out a loophole using Storage Access Framework that let them ask the user to grant them access to those external private storage dirs anyway.
Said loophole has been closed in Android 13.
>No more log access either, so that also means no more automation apps.
This one is a bummer. Apps can still read the logcat, but they have to ask for permission every time. So yes that definitely kills any kind of automation you can do.
>And dns over https is hard-coded to cloudflare or Google with no way to chose another provider.
For now. Google never said they'd keep those two as the only DNS-over-HTTP/3 providers.
However, you can disable it. But now, you have a giant blank page that says click to reactivate. It's personalization alright, but not the way you think. Kinda like how turning off wifi is a suggestion, not a guarantee.
Long press on background -> "Home Settings" -> "Swipe to Google app" disables that panel on Pixels (for which this 13 is rolling out for).
The page is then fully gone.
Hallelujah!
I now run Android with animations completely off because even setting them to .5x duration was too slow.
They discontinued chrome apps but PWAs aren't really ready as a replacement and it seems like google is continuing to use stuff like PNACL in various places which now nobody else is able to use, plus they are now just adding functionality like this that really should just be provided by apps directly to the OS to avoid the limitations of not having native apps and not have to compete with developers.
Instead of chromebooks being a neutral platform where all developers have the same capabilities since it's just chrome, it looks like its turning into a situation more like the original release of the iphone where Google is just the only company that is allowed to make native apps, and they are using that to add features that can only be used with android.
It kind of feels like they just invoked switching to PWAs as an excuse and instead simply closed down the os.
Personally, I would only upgrade my phone if there's significant hardware improvement, e.g. camera sensors.
I'm a life long (unenthusiastic) Android user, coming up at around 13 years now.
Still 0% interested in what new features they bring, for some reasons even iOS previews excite me more (which doesn't mean a lot, but definitely not zero percent).
Guess it's because I only use 5 apps on my phone and prefer a computer for basically every task, but I couldn't even tell you any meaningful change I've witnessed over the years. It somehow works and they've not yet driven me to buy an iPhone, but their (Google and vendors) messed up policy on not providing updates for older phone models might just do that for my next purchase.
anecdotal but i get so many annoying issues with older family members "where di that button go" or "i cant find x" after upgrading...
And Android Tablets? I thought they were dead. I used to have a Nexus 7 but now I'm all iPad.
Turned out he just upgraded Android to the next version and when swiping down the top bar all the icons were completely different (I imagine it's Android 12?). Can't wait for him to upgrade to 13 or 14 and see what else they can uselessly rework
