This is just shit, a horrible redesign. I'd much rather "truly express" myself by keeping high information density in the user interface instead of picking color palettes for this trendy "bouba" bullshit. It's as bad a redesign as the recent Bluetooth option, which went from a single click to turn it off (and respecting airplane mode) to multiple clicks and staying on between Android 14 and 15. Of course Google wants BT scanning to work even if you're in airplane mode, they didn't do it for my convenience. I've had enough and am not updating anymore, outside of security updates. Now I use Rethink as on-device VPN and every app, system or not, has no access to the network unless I explicitly enable it, no more nagging to update.
Android and Wear OS are getting a redesign
121–130 of 144 posts
Re: Android and Wear OS are getting a redesign
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't have to, you can still use headphones with a USB-C adapter.
I can’t believe, after so many YEARS, that people are still so hurt about the damn headphone jack. Even given the existence of adapters, some just won’t let it go and are willing to die on such a ridiculous hill. It’s like still being upset about computers not coming with CDROM drives anymore.
If so many people are still complaining about it after all this time, perhaps it's not because they're luddites but because many still use it despite you thinking it's obsolete.
And no, it's not comparable with CD drives at all, those are obsolete and gone even from desktops where space is not really a concern. It's more like complaining about the Macbook Pro 2016 not having USB-A ports. And Apple actually put those back, and I don't need to explain why they are incentivized to not do the same for headphones.
Re: Android and Wear OS are getting a redesign
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand your frustration but I think the reality is that the vast majority of people simply do not use wired headphones, so it doesn't make financial sense for them to keep it.
Then why do they keep it in Macbooks if it makes no sense? To repeat excuses in this thread, people could just use an external DAC if they like cables so much. Comparisons with CD drives I see here are absurd, those drives actually take up a massive amount of space, are obsolete and used by almost no one anymore. Meanwhile headphone jacks are still very widely used. To the people saying "just use an adapter" I would…
Macbooks get used for pro audio and video things that phones generally don't, and the much larger form factor means that the 3.5mm jack is far less of a design tradeoff.
Re: Android and Wear OS are getting a redesign
#124This is just shit, a horrible redesign. I'd much rather "truly express" myself by keeping high information density in the user interface instead of picking color palettes for this trendy "bouba" bullshit. It's as bad a redesign as the recent Bluetooth option, which went from a single click to turn it off (and respecting airplane mode) to multiple clicks and staying on between Android 14 and 15. Of course Google wants…
The shenanigans Google pull in order to harvest location data (and prevent you from easily opting out!) really piss me off. I have a second phone that's got Graphene on it as a result, it's pretty much just the location service spycrap I can't stand.
Re: Android and Wear OS are getting a redesign
#125Given how much of a downgrade the last visual refresh was (Android 12 I think?), this is news I do not welcome. Anyone else remember the lock screen being a giant two line clock with no way to customize it, or the way the settings buttons got way bigger for no good reason? It was awful. I don't look forward to seeing what they will screw up this time.
Related to that lock screen "quirk", the latest UI/UX "feature" that bugs me no end is the fact that on Pixel phones you can't remove the Google search bar on the home screen... yet there is now a Gemini widget available that does much more useful things, so in order to use it, you'd have two full width horizontal bars on your home screen. I assume this is going to evolve with Android 16 releases, but it's a really d…
Use a custom launcher. I run Nova, and have for my last three phones, which means my interface stays consistent, and I never have to see the search bar.
My home page is a calendar that takes up 75% of the screen, and two rows of icons below.
Re: Android and Wear OS are getting a redesign
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've been copying iOS for years, time to bring some of that Windows "consistency" into the mix.
It's astonishing that anyone can say this with a straight face. Just unbelievable the effect Apple has on some people. Gruber finally getting disenfranchised. Eeven my most annoying/obsessive iOS-fan friends have admitted that they are jealous of my camera, my ability to do real multi-tasking, upload photos with the screen off, have the audio and BT audio work reliably. It's just stunning what some iOS users don't kn…
My iPhone is the only device I ever used where BT audio actually works without any issues or limitations. I think I've had a single half-second interruption in two years.
I've used Android since version 2.3, it was far ahead for a while but got unbearably annoying. I'm not using iOS because of Apple but because of Google.
Both Android and iOS still lag behind Windows Phone 8.1 in UX despite it being dead for 8 years now, and sadly that likely will never change. Too bad Microsoft didn't learn from it either.
Re: Android and Wear OS are getting a redesign
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment seems out of date. There's no $200-300 iPhone anymore. iPhone 16e is the cheapest model I think? That's $600usd? But there are in fact $200-300 Moto phones still and new ones every year, with decent specs for the price and fairly close to stock Android OS. No, they dont have 6 or 7 year of OS upgrades, but that was never a realistic option in the budget Android phone market anyway. It would be unfair and…
The Samsung A5x line usually goes towards 300 dollar/euro pretty quickly and e.g. the A56 get 6 years of updates. The Pixel 8a is currently 369 Euro in my country and has a long update cycle.
I bought an a25 in 200$
Re: Android and Wear OS are getting a redesign
#128We keep making the screens bigger to make the interfaces even more dumbed down and stupid. Are we in Idiocracy at this point or what, Google? Some of you fuckers need to go pick back up The Zen of Palm and re-read it because y'all have no idea what you're shipping these days in comparison. https://archive.org/details/zen-of-palm
(I would suggest to review the fruitful language of your comment...)
I always owned an older smart phone, and looking at that new UI I have no idea what some of that stuff does, because it doesn't tell me and the icons have been smoothed and abstracted so much that I can barely tell what they are for.
I think the reason why the UI's are dumbing down is because they people using them are changing. We're talking about people doom scrolling for hours watching less than 60 second clips of ADHD cocaine. We're talking about people who use an LLM and TTS to explain a paragraph of text they didn't want to read.
It feels like there needs to be a split somehow, an Android front-end for those people and a boring consistent front-end for others. Failing that, I would accept a serious Linux smart phone, but it would need decent development to actually get somewhere.
Re: Android and Wear OS are getting a redesign
#129I would like to hear how that fluid UI works on that circular display, that looks like an absolute pain to get right. I think I could boil my brain just thinking about how they might have begun to tackle that and all the challenges they had. Just dealing with Unicode and nothing else for dynamically resizing shapes is a headache in the making.
Re: Android and Wear OS are getting a redesign
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Current "material design" is the anthesis of what "material design" was originally supposed to be.
Which was what exactly? I always felt they had a nebulous definition
I havent daily driven android with material 3, so I cant comment on what current state is, but original material was basically a heavy emphasis on "real world" z-index, thinking of your UI like a stack of documents on a table, + a "kinetic" feel.
EDIT: also, I have to say as someone who did a lot of app dev on both iOS and android, I really appreciate the design system that google came up with in terms of codifying and simplifying especially the colors. They came up with a system that was able to distill your themes to something like 6 colors total (in the beginning, things have grown since) and that effectively served a vast majority of use cases and UI paradigms. And the way they categorized them made it really simple as an app dev to understand how and when to use them (also their grid was a much more 'engineering' way to think about things, and so that clicked with me as well)