The notification shade design is still terrible with comically huge paddings all over the place. Nothing fits. Everything is truncated. My ticket on the subject got closed with bullshittest of excuses: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/232821168
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.
Your ticket comes across as very confrontational. This puts the developer(s) into a position where they feel the need to defend themselves instead of acting collaboratively with the user to solve their problem.
Agreed, it's not very constructive feedback. Google does respond to feedback on the Issue Tracker, but I've found posts that sound like rants tend to get ignored (unless there's some critical issue at play).
It's also not a very constructive UI change, and the Pixel 6 doesn't allow rolling back to Android 12, so if you do update, your premium-priced phone suffers a UI downgrade. I don't think anger is unreasonable when all is said and done, it's a phone. It doesn't need constant screwing around with the UI, just make it secure, reliable, and optimize it.
Consider, maybe, the psycology of the interaction. You may well be used to direct feedback, but when driving change in another organisation -- especiallly one where it's really cheap for them to simply ignore you -- it can help to consider how people will react and make it as easy as possible for them to take the action you want them to.
We can assume that they made these changes deliberately. Therefore it's going to take a lot of conviincing to get them to undo the changes.
For what it's worth, too, I disagree with you: I'm quite happy with the asethetic they've built. Although, in case it's not clear to you, no-one outside of Google can see the screenshots you supplied. So I've not seen the specific notifications you're complaining about.
Imagine you bought a house you like. A year later a team of exterior painters knocks on your door and tells you they are going to repaint your house to keep it up to date with thr latest trends. With some effort you manage to kick them out. This situation repeats a few times until a few months later they show up at night and paint your house without your permission, partially painting over some of the windows and even your car. They also replace your dog with a cat. They do it because they are full time painters employed by the city council and they cant just sit and do nothing.
I don't know why Google has declare a "War on Contrast", but since Android 7 it's only become uglier with each release. It's certainly hell for writing durable tutorials, what with each release shuffling the settings and icons randomly.
I wonder if it sell more phones, convincing people to upgrade to get the new Android experience?
Something strange has happened to Android... the UI/UX had pulled ahead prior to iOS 7, strengthened it's lead due to the buggy shitshow that persisted through iOS 9, but has recently taken huge steps back in terms of information density and hiding things behind notches for no apparent reason.
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.
With Android 12 they introduced Material Design 3, the latest iteration of the design system used by Android and other Google products. Their designers haven't even bothered to publish a proper and usable spec this time, but Google marketed it as production ready in blog posts, Google I/O talks and press releases.
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.
We need to find a way to move on, once something is perfected. Because if we don't we kinda ruin what we have already perfected. It's called planned obsolescence and below are some resources on the same. It is widely used across industries for over a century and kinda plays a huge role in climate change.
The problem lies deeper. There's only so much work that the humanity legitimately needs done, but the economy is built upon the assumption that everyone can get a job. So we end up creating jobs the society at large doesn't actually benefit from to make sure every person has to do some work to earn money to live. This includes ballooning IT companies about which you can't help but keep asking "where does enough work even come from to occupy all these people, in a product that's essentially finished".
And because universal basic income is so nuanced and socially complex, I feel like this problem is here to stay until we reach post-scarcity, if we ever do.
I used both and am baffled by your experience. In my experience Android has been a complete glitch hell only being somewhat fixed since Android 12 (still flawed but it's a huge push) while iOS has always managed to at least be half decent in that regard. iOS7 was a few steps back but they managed to come back pretty quickly.
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.
I've been on Pixel devices since the 2 XL and other Androids since the Nexus one. For me, Android 12 was the biggest regression that I've ever seen in one major Android update.
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.
Fascinating how different experiences can be. The changes of Android 12 are what kept me from switching to iOS (even if I disagree with some of the paradigms, transitions are finally only glitchy something like 20% of the time instead of approximately every time).
yeah I really can't fathom how the material design won out. it's so.... gimmicky. like when you click a button, and it radiates out a ripple across the button surface.
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.
This is huge! Now I wonder if I have any Bluetooth devices which support the new standard, or if I will be forced to buy new headphones (again!)
This happens to be my area of expertise (somewhat). You don't and none are planned to be released until later this year.
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).
Hey, nice, new releases! There's a chance that many devices are in the pipeline and have been held back until now with Android 13 just being released and the LE Audio spec just being finished/the marketing push just starting (it might be hard to believe how long I've had to search for basic information beyond years-old regurgitated press releases a few months ago).
For everyone playing along at home: Look out for "Basic Audio Profile" support.
I don't know specifically what Samsung does, but a lot of OEMs who offer similar features licensed tech from a company called Tempow. Tempow offered its own BT stack and profile called Tempow Audio Profile (TAP) that enabled streaming audio to multiple Bluetooth audio outputs simultaneously. Motorola and TCL deployed phones with this tech.
I don't know exactly, but my educated guess is that they form multiple normal Bluetooth audio connections to multiple devices. The standard allows this and the bandwidth should be fine too, so I suppose they just added a little bit of software to control it.
Its BS. The low latency part doesnt come from LE, but from adopting yet another proprietary blob Audio codec. Instead of standardizing on OPUS they went with LC3. 20 more years of royalties for fraunhofer.
Is hard to rate UI/UX of Android as a whole this days. In the last few years, each big manufacturer has created their own design language on top of stock Android and evolved in its own way.
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).
Google's official blog posts on new Android releases usually leave out a ton of info. If you're curious about what many of the other features introduced in Android 13 are, I wrote a summary over on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/wp0skh/50_features...
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/
Aw man, that sucks. Not having rumble is a disadvantage for GeForce NOW and Xbox Game Pass on Nvidia Shield TV. I thought that built-in Android support would lead to support in Shield TV's firmware.
I fondly remember waiting for new Android releases years ago. I'd jump to the landing page, get excited for new features, plan ahead on getting a new phone. I never noticed when, but at some point this stopped.
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?
Mobile OS's have far passed peak change. I think iOS 7 was peak change. Where it went to the transparent UI, swipe up bar etc. Everything since has been a tweak. The next future of "big change" will come in VR/AR || carOS when each OS update dramatically makes the experience better and more efficient. I doubt we will see much in phone OS space in the new few years as VR/AR/ CarOS ramps up.
I think the inevitability of AR/VR is oversold. We have been hearing about the Apple VR project for years now. Hitting the sweet spot between utility and innovation (like iPhone) is an extremely rare occurrence and might not happen for years to come.
They've arguably already hit it. Apple has been testing overengineered features that are suspiciously well suited for AR in broad daylight for a few years now. If they can't pull it off, I don't think anyone can.
I am constantly tickled by some new advances in almost each iOS release. When the base UI and interaction works well enough, I don't want major changes for the sake of change.
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.
No, iOS 7 was when the downwards trend started. I remember seeing the screenshots of the beta and couldn't believe it's the real thing that's going to actually ship for real. I saw those icons that looked as if they're drawn by kids, and assumed they're placeholders, that the real ones were just not ready yet.
I hate minimalistic, sterile, flat UI design with a burning passion. We need skeuomorphism and affordances back, and we need it all yesterday.
I thought it seemed that iOS 7 was too long ago, but I looked at the major changes since then and none of them contain nearly as many major changes as iOS 7. I do appreciate the many iterative changes since such as improving notifications.
Wouldn't this be a sign of a mature or maturing product that's moved closer to maintenance or addressing the longer term health of the platform? I'd argue that most technologies should expect to lose their excitement factor because they've conquered most of their battles and are more like utilities or tools. From an outsider perspective it seems like that is part of the reason it's significant news when there's changes like Google increasing the API level requirements on the store requiring new rework on apps as it shows the platform can't be considered fully stable yet, highlighting a difference in viewpoints.
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.
In some earlier versions, I found there were bit of "must have" improvements over the previous version, but as Android matures, I think it is less so as many of improvements offered by a new version these days are either already possible using an app, or just some nice to have. Occasionally, I do see features that I really want to have but I find they are far from dealbreaker...
I’d be perfectly happy keeping my old phone with Android 9 until the battery became useless, except for security upgrades. Old Android versions have some scary vulnerabilities. Doesn’t that concern you?
There's an Xposed Mod/Custom ROM feature enabling you to map a long press of the power button to toggling the flash light and I miss it everywhere it's not available.
I think the localization preferences will be a big hit in European countries. Translations can be really hit or miss depending on how technical an app gets. For some apps, you might feel the developer did a good job with localization and want to view it in your native language, for other apps you'd rather use the English version because the translations are really bad.
Absolutely. I generally use English (not my native language) as default language for my Android phone, but there are some apps where the English translation is pretty awful and that I prefer to use in the original language. For these use cases app developers needed to add in-app language switchers, which can be a bit of a pain to implement.
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.
I also sometimes use the English version because it’s easier to find documentation. That’s also why I always use Linux in English, localized error messages are useless.
I was honestly massively disappointed with the introduction of Android 12 and its "bubbles" UI; with it came some new pretty animations, and from my experience, the interface was more fluid, but less responsive.
I now run Android with animations completely off because even setting them to .5x duration was too slow.
Who else has a smartphone "stuck" on a older Android OS?
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?
On top of your point, I think people should also understand that smartphones aren't exactly a small purchase for a non-trivial population. Even tech-literate are stuck with the stock ROM if they need to use banking apps, snapchat etc. because of SafetyNet.
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.
Apple does a much better job. My Note 10, released in 2019, is officially close to its EOL (last year of life support, i.e. security fixes) - and it was a big step forward for Samsung to ever even give such guarantees.
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 terrible. Even on custom ROMs, which can extend the life of a phone quite a lot, the latest wave of obsolescence comes from Android dropping support for old, of course un-updatable kernels.
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.
I still run an old tablet with 5.1, and a phone with 7.1. I've seen 10 year old iPads running on the wild, albeit for basic tasks.
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.
Yeah, my Galaxy Note 8 is the pinnacle of usability and design for me but it's been left behind by updates. Remapping the Bixby button + MacroDroid + Nova home screen is just a perfect balance of usability and customizability. Samsung Dex is a pretty useful Android desktop environment for on the go work. I would have loved if the if the same form factor just got upgraded hardware (the camera is now outdated). It's a bit of a zombie phone for me at this point (a true ship of theseus - I'm not sure if I can say I have the same phone anymore). I've since picked up an iPhone as a replacement but am really missing the old features -- so much so that I've been running them both concurrently. It would be such a waste to get rid of an incredibly capable phone with a still-amazing screen.
I just switched from a Pixel 3 to a Pixel 6 and I don't like it. I am just an average user, I don't use many apps, and the UI in the newer versions of Android is just atrocious. Everything is now "gestures" that don't really work that well, especially when you hold the device in one hand. I had to specially enable the old-school 3-button nav at the bottom of the screen (luckily that still exists) to be able to have some form of non-frustrating interaction with the device. I don't want to be super negative, just ranting I guess. Thanks for listening...
What's crazy is that this problem was solved a long time ago. The Palm Pre had gesture-based navigation and while some of it had to do with the screen size being smaller, there was a focus on navigation from the bottom in applications. Notifications would pop up from the bottom.
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.
Yeah, I think that was my biggest gripe, they moved the back button to the top-left of the screen... why??? One handed operation used to work okayish, but not anymore...
Enabling the three navigation buttons is the first thing I do on every new phone I get. You can navigate a lot faster with the buttons compared to the gestures.
Can we just take a moment and applaud the Android team for evolving the Android UI to a point where it actually looks fresher and more modern than iOS? Android looked like a dumpsterfire and a poor-man's iOS for 10 years but now... who would've thought Google would outmuscle Apple in the design arena? It was unthinkable a couple of years ago. Apple got complacent and Google pounced.
Spotted the Google employee! No seriously though this couldn't be farther from the truth. My wife has the latest galaxy phone running android and the experience is just abysmal compared to iOS. I am a long time android user that recently converted to iOS and I'll never go back. It's leagues better. I am no Apple fan either, but even less of a Google fan at this point.
My wife got a high-end Android phone for work (she just put the SIM card in her iPhone, which her employer allows). Of course, I couldn't resist playing with it. Besides what you say, I was also surprised how laggy rending of animations, etc. was. I kinda expected that they'd have solved it by now.
Which animations? Personally, I just think the default transitions are always too slow. I enable debug tools and crank them up to half speed. The phone ends up feeling much faster even though its just animation speed.
Samsung phones have customised UI which is significantly different than what this Android 13 Pixel rollout looks like. You and the OP aren't talking about the same thing.
My last samsung phone would randomly disconnect from the mobile network, without any warning, and would keep showing it had signal available.
Of course that meant I would lose calls and texts, because it showed no indication of being effectively offline.
The only fix would be a full reboot.
Which is completely moronic for a brand new and expensive phone. More so if you think that receiving and making calls is the flipping basic purpose of a phone.
I have since then switched to an iphone, using the same sim card and provider, and having no issues so far.
I might go back to android in the future, but surely not to samsung.
This was probably the case in the past, but I was surprised by how similar Samsung's Android 12 is to Lineage OS 12 on the Note 10. They've kind of converged.
Regardless of customizations, they use same animations. Even high end galaxies are nowhere near iPhones, and I say that as an Android developer and user for 8 years. Framedrops, jank, inconsistent styles, it’s just impossible to fix, it seems. Or Google doesn’t care.
And no, it’s not different on Pixels, it also drops frames and has nowhere near as fluid animations as iOS.
Real question for people who use it, do you like it?
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)
> Real question for people who use it, do you like it?
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.
I dislike the huge padding in the UI and the loss of transparency but more than that I'm annoyed that they removed things I used frequently like the separate wifi and mobile data toggles in the quick settings pulldown. Now it's an extra tap and a long animation to use functionality I frequently need because I don't live in a place where I get an ideal signal.
A big part of android 12 and now 13 is "Material You", which is their name for the design language + color customization throughout the OS. I agree that the yellow color is awful but that's not the standard. You can also disable the color-theming on the icons entirely if you want to and it will default to the full color originals.
Personally I disagree. I've been using iPhone for 13 years, I have complaints sure, but it works. I got an Android Samsung Galaxy thing earlier this year as a work device - primarily to offload Teams, email etc of my personal device. The phone itself is good, hardware feels modern, but the Android 12 OS is just poor from top to bottom. It took far too long to work out some of the most basic features. Even today I find myself getting slightly lost or confused when looking for some hidden setting. Windows 10, OSX, iOS, you can search battery and go into the battery menu... my galaxy doesn't do that. I'm sure someone will tell me the Samsung version of Android isn't the real Android or some bollocks, but really, Android needs some serious work and little UI/UX tweaks wont cut it. The experience has shown me that my 4 year old iPhone is far more modern than a latest Android.
My anecdotal experience is that the things you are talking about have way more to do with what you are used to then what is "better".
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)
Oh I appreciate its different, that's not my complaint, the UX is just a heavy learning curve that sours the entire experience for something that is actually a decent device. It feels like its built by engineers where having things a certain way makes sense to geeks, where as iOS is built by designers to work for the masses.
I suppose this is where I get the feel that iOS is more modern.
Pulling the app draw and searching battery doesn't work. I've tried it again. Not sure what I've done wrong. I can search in settings itself, but given I'm already half way there, I don't really need to search from there.
> I'm sure someone will tell me the Samsung version of Android isn't the real Android or some bollocks, but really, Android needs some serious work and little UI/UX tweaks wont cut it
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?
Samsung radically changes the UI on their phones. They're significantly different from every other Android phone out there. Lots of other manufacturers don't make massive changes to the UI.
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?
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.
Samsung S10 lite. This device went from Android 10 to 12. At each version what parent said works just like you said it does on your phone. (Maybe not the autocomplete)
I usually go to Settings and search there but searching from the top search thing on the App drawer works fine too.
Personally I think iOS design is garbage and patronizing to the user, and finds every possible way to hide what you actually want to do. It's absurd how hard it is to find out how to do something on an Apple built OS, especially as they used to be so easy to function and navigate in the early iOS days, to help everyone get onto smartphones.
Android doesn't baby me like that but has millions of other giant problems.
You can now set Private DNS on Android, that's at least handy, and I think you can achieve the same thing on iOS through VPN settings or "Encrypted DNS".
I had my app drawer on the swipe right screen. I updated to android 12, now that's the Google screen. You can't remove it. You cant replace it through the settings.
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.
That's Play Protect's sole purpose. It isn't actually a useful piece of software in any meaningful capacity (and remains, several years in, the industry worst in independent testing[1]). Play Protect is there to provide the "green checkmark" people expect to see on their PCs that tell them they are safe, even if it's kinda a joke because they're running Norton or something that doesn't do jack to protect them. Speaking of, Norton's mobile antivirus rates better than Play Protect.
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.
I'm a little concerned with where google is going with all these proprietary chromeos phone integration features.
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.
I don't know if the bloatware is worse in the USA or something, but as a former TouchWiz hater I have to hard disagree on this. I would take One UI any time over whatever Fisher Price crap Google's designers have been peddling since Android 12.
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".
Personally I expand that out to generally be avoiding Samsung anything.
The only positive experience I've had with Samsung devices was dumpster diving their TVs as they had a stupid high failure rate of their capacitors. A couple of dollar order from Mouser or DigiKey and the TV would be better than new.
The fact that the only positives I've had with Samsung in the last decade or so is fixing their broken devices to score nearly free TVs says a lot about Samsung. I used to really like Samsung. I bought a lot of Samsung electronics, either as the original device or with their equipment in things (they used to make a ton of PC power supplies for OEMs, their CRT monitors and TVs were often re-badged in the US). I avoid it like the plague these days.
They aren't in my country, yet I have my second one (Pixel 3 and now Pixel 4).
There are ways depending on your country, e.g. Amazon sends phones further than Google. Sometimes you can get overpriced Pixels in your own country (this way I got my replacement Pixel 4, Amazon didn't have them in stock after my warranty claim, so they gave me my money back and I bot Pixel 4 again for similar price).
Pixel series is my favorite. Even the second tier Pixels are better than the Samsung Galaxy I got last year. The builtin Samsung apps suck and can't be installed, true. But also the keyboard or screen size isn't a fit for me so it's constantly inserting periods/upper case words into my stream of words when I type quickly. And worst of all the USB-C port has gotten so bad only 2 of my 8 USB-C cables work with the phone anymore (though they still work with other USB-C devices I need to charge).
Really looking forward to going back to the Pixel phones and not touching Samsung again.
The media sharing tools (allowing all of your photos to be shared with an app) are the largest silent invasion of privacy on both Apple and Android phones, which is not much discussed.
Even on IOS, until recently, every app, as long as you allowed media viewing permissions, had access to EVERY PHOTO in your library.
I'm confused by your comment. The new permission tools address the fact that apps have access to your entire library. It's an evolutionary improvement in security, since in every computing device since the 80s, all your apps had access to your entire filesystem.
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 does was (mostly) already available since Android 4.4 KitKat with the documents picker (Files app) and the ACTION_GET_CONTENT or ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT intents.
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.
Cool, I guess? I don't see anything actually useful.
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.
> 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.
Uh... Google Assistant Interpreter mode exists for years now?
> 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.
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.
I just installed android 12, and I am surprisd how enormous everything has become. Volume picker is like 1cm thick now. It scares me if it becomes even bigger with the new version.
this is why I don't care that much about OS updates anymore (even though my phone still gets them)...its usually just pointless UI tweaks. security updates and app updates are now handled separately from OS updates
When you get to version 13 of an OS, it's natural that the changes are more minor, but the permissions/privacy changes (though wonky, and harder to explain to the average user) are good and important.
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.
Wait, so basically no more filesystem access? So it's the end for third party file managers? Wow...
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.
>Wait, so basically no more filesystem access? So it's the end for third party file managers? Wow...
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.
I never use this "only the photos you want to share" shit. In the event that I do it and then want to add more photos to the list, the process is arcane. So I just share all photos.
And Android Tablets? I thought they were dead. I used to have a Nexus 7 but now I'm all iPad.
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.
Tip: You can search the term `site:ext` on DuckDuckGo to see sites using that domain extension (TLD). It's not very helpful for .com for example, but it's useful for queries like `site:aws` to see what sites are using the .aws TLD.
Owning your own TLD is pretty cost prohibitive. I take it that many companies simply don't have the technical skillset and have determined it isn't worth the costs.
I was at a phone repair shop and a guy came in saying he got hacked because when he did "something" a new thing popped up that was different from the one he wanted.
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
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.