Android and Wear OS are getting a redesign

61 pointsposted 9 months ago
by whatever3
(blog.google)

143 Comments

ndneighbor

9 months ago

The number one issue I have with Android is that while this looks cool, because of the fragmentation of the OS delivery between vendors- I have no idea which phone or timeframe when I could see the rollout of Material 3 Expressive.

More than 10 years later, shopping for an Android phone with the latest OS is a nightmare. Android leadership keeps on getting shuffled around, Google changes priorities every 6 months it seems. Despite Apple flubbing the ball on AI, at least I know that the phone will be supported for at least 4 years.

They will need to improve on their ecosystem commitments if they'd like people like me to switch back.

Ajedi32

9 months ago

If you care about always having the latest software with the latest Google features just get a Pixel. 7 years of OS and security updates: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en

Google doesn't control what other vendors do; that's the beauty of open source. (You can argue how open Android really is these days but it's still more open than iOS.)

aucisson_masque

9 months ago

Pixel have other issue, quality control and run on Samsung exynos hardware with bad performance and connectivity.

I'd argue that Android is technically more open than iOS but in practice it isn't. Google have dark pattern and elaborated ways to get Android user to stay in the 'walled Google play service garden'.

Like when you install a third party store and Google play protect warns you it may be insecure.

Or having to press install for every app installed outside of the store, over and over.

The fact you can't get push notification without enabling the Google play services, which is the core framework of the Google data collection happening on every Android.

int0x29

9 months ago

I have fdroid installed on a pixel and I didn't hit any warnings beyond needing to enable side loading. As for push notifications, if you are developing an app, you can build your own infrastructure for that or rent it from someone else. If you are concerned about google software you can, with effort, reflash with another OS.

All of the above either don't exist on iOS or only exists in the EU.

Personally I've never had issues with Samsung modems and I am honestly confused what people are doing with their phones that require high power CPUs.

aucisson_masque

9 months ago

The issue with push notification isn't for the app you build yourself but all the other like your bank app, it won't be able to send you a message when you got to validate something or when my Xiaomi cleaning robot is done cleaning for instance. They all require Google play services.

Reflashing another os ? What issue does it solves ? It's less secure, they still need the Google play services to push notifications.

Grapheneos may be a bit better but it locks you to only one Android device : pixel. They are overpriced, have quality control issue and run poorly.

900€ for a pixel 9 that use Samsung hardware, overheat when I can get a s25 for the same price, that funnily enough don't use Samsung hardware but Qualcomm :)

I believe 900€ is enough even for an iphone that will run much better than pixel.

> Personally I've never had issues with Samsung modems and I am honestly confused what people are doing with their phones that require high power CPUs.

I couldn't care less too about CPU power, but cpu energy usage and the phone being able to make and receive call is what's been the issue with pixel since the 6.

II2II

9 months ago

> Pixel have other issue

Every product is going to have issues in one form or another. The question is which issues affect your personal use of the product. I'm too new to Pixel to comment on whether switching to it is a good or a bad thing in my case, but I have been happy with the trade-offs so far. Ironically, one of the reasons why I went with a Pixel was to avoid much of the Google software ecosystem.

attendant3446

9 months ago

I switched to a Pixel for the same reason. I'm on my second Pixel and the GrapheneOS is fantastic

microtonal

9 months ago

People have been very positive about the Pixel 9's modem. The Tensor G4 is fast enough for most people. Maybe not for heavy gaming, but it's great for all daily use.

kcb

9 months ago

It's been years since the performance of any high-end phone SoC has felt like a bottleneck and the Pixel 9 modem has been very good.

ranger_danger

9 months ago

> that's the beauty of open source

Many would argue that that kind of fragmentation is also its biggest downfall.

malfist

9 months ago

What happens when one of those updates bricks your battery so it only lasts an hour or so off charger?

tbihl

9 months ago

Hate to say it, but everyone does this. My dad replaced his iPhone back in December when an update killed it. No acknowledgment of the problem from Apple.

Hell, my car has a stupid system that shakes motor mounts apart and burns through ignition coils and spark plugs. Honda won't admit fault because, among other things, it was a fuel-saving boondoggle and they won't back down from lying to customers if it means stepping into the path of an oncoming EPA train.

FreakyT

9 months ago

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, considering that this actually happened:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/01/google-pixel-4as-rui...

microtonal

9 months ago

Yes, and Google offers a free battery replacement for affected users:

https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/15701861

Last time Apple pushed a battery-related software update that avoided shutdowns (good), people had to sue them to get a compensation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

malfist

9 months ago

You had to pick battery or strings attached cash, before the update arrived. And the battery replacement required you to send your phone off for repair leaving you without one, and Google didn't offer an sla for turn around.

And let's be honest, inconveniencing me is hardly acceptable, even if the company makes a token effort to put things back to before they inconvenienced me.

alright2565

9 months ago

They replaced my battery free of charge when they did that.

mvdtnz

9 months ago

It's also not offered in my country, so your advice is worthless to me.

Grimblewald

9 months ago

My problem was that all the modern Samsung watches have a battery life that wont get you through the day without removing half it's features, and charging solutions that are unreliable. If half the time you want to use the watch it's dead, it stops being a product you place value on or even rely on. I found myself checking time on my phone, despite the watch being on the same hand I'd grab the phone with, because I could rely on my phone to show my something other than a dark mirror.

I used to have a gear sport, it was fine, held charge for 2-3 days, had more sensors, and was all around a good device, but all watches after were a massive step down, even if they moved from tizen to wear os.

I'll give wearables one more try if someone has a good device to recommend, but as it stands I'd prefer to just spend the extra second to pull out my phone, and for health metrics, wear a more discrete and longer battery life device.

Kivern7

9 months ago

That's odd. I have a Watch 6 Classic (I think?), it's my first smart watch, I have just about everything enabled, and on the rare occasion that I forget to charge it overnight it still just about gets through the next day too. In that situation, if I know I'll be sitting for a little while I can always top it up using my phone too (which, admittedly, is extremely fussy with charging placement). Initially I had a lot of frustration getting it to wake up to show me the time (rather than that "dark mirror") but I suppose I must have learned how to twist my wrist more recognisably for it now because it's very rare that I have that issue any more. I really like it.

microtonal

9 months ago

Same experience with the Watch 6 Classic. No issue of getting through the day with all features enabled. I stopped using it because I don't really like One UI (the Pixel Watch is so much cleaner).

_mlbt

9 months ago

Garmin has the best smartwatches if you’re looking for battery life.

karlgkk

9 months ago

> I have no idea which phone or timeframe when I could see the rollout of Material 3 Expressive.

Not a problem with a pixel

> More than 10 years later, shopping for an Android phone with the latest OS is a nightmare

Not a problem with a pixel

> They will need to improve on their ecosystem commitments

Not a problem with a pixel

bigstrat2003

9 months ago

A headphone jack is unfortunately a problem with a pixel. Otherwise I would still own one. I had a Pixel 1, then a pixel 3a, then Google decided to get rid of a basic feature that every phone should have. So I stopped buying them.

vvillena

9 months ago

For everyday use, wireless headphones offer a superior experience simply due to the lack of a cable, and for the cases where an audio output is desired, it should be easy to connect the phone to an audio interface. Is any of this a problem in the Android ecosystem?

ngangaga

9 months ago

> For everyday use, wireless headphones offer a superior experience simply due to the lack of a cable

Surely this is offset by a) having to charge it and b) not being able to replace the battery when it dies

Not to mention a cable can be debugged easily; i don't even know which device my bluetooth headphones is connected to let alone why it's not working as expected.

microtonal

9 months ago

So? Get the 10 Euro/Dollar Apple USB-C to stereo connector? Works with other phones as well and supposedly has an acceptable DAC. If you really want to charge at the same time and wireless charging is not acceptable, there are also some companies that make small connectors with USB-C power in and stereo out.

The reason the jack is gone is that the vast majority of people use wireless buds or headphones. It's the smartphone equivalent of complaining that MacBooks do not have DVD drives anymore.

(I like the stereo jack, but I have accepted that I'm a small minority.)

ngangaga

9 months ago

Nah, I've broken like three of those things and I just resent having another thing to carry around. I've just given up on using wired headphones for the most part with my phone. I just don't know why they thought it was desired to remove in the first place; I've had other waterproof headphones with a jack.

But, I also don't generally expect apple to make consumer-friendly decisions. The headphone jack invokes about 1/100th the rage that using the app store does.

yjftsjthsd-h

9 months ago

Also no microSD slot. Decent internal storage, but the ability to expand, swap, and pull from a dead phone shouldn't be underestimated.

microtonal

9 months ago

Being able to pull it from a dead phone seems like a huge security issue? Shouldn't storage be encrypted using private material from a secure element? I understand that people here are tech-savvy enough to only store music, etc. on an SD card. But I think a lot of less technically-inclined users would set themselves up for losing private data.

yjftsjthsd-h

9 months ago

Depends on your threat model and priorities. Historically the biggest thing I wanted to pull off the SD card was encrypted backups, which were in fact encrypted enough that an attacker getting them wouldn't be a serious problem, but which were rather handy to have. (And yes, I can completely push those off-device, but an SD card is a handy middle ground of local, fast, easy, safe from the things I tend to be worried about (mostly, bricking the device), and big enough that dumping 10s of GB on there is fine.)

AndrewDucker

9 months ago

Same here. Would still have a Pixel, but I'm not giving up my choice of headphones.

ranger_danger

9 months ago

You don't have to, you can still use headphones with a USB-C adapter.

ryandrake

9 months ago

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.

alpaca128

9 months ago

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.

AndrewDucker

9 months ago

Can I buy headphones without headphone jacks that cost $5, can be transferred between devices near instantly with no registration, and allow me to charge my phone at the same time?

If not, then that is why I'm not shifting off of them.

O-stevns

9 months ago

It's not my hill to die on but I will say use wireless in-ear monitors myself to avoid ever having to deal with adapters because... Adapters are terrible, often wonky in one way or another, incredibly inconvenient for anything but having them lie on a desk. It's also something you easily forget to carry around, or you lose or break because of shoddy build quality.

It's a bad alternative to something that wasn't a problem except it took up space and people still talk about it because there's still a need for something better

wstrange

9 months ago

It all went to shit when they removed the floppy drive.

doright

9 months ago

I've gone through like 3 of those for one of my other devices. They're way too easy to lose and sometimes they outright don't work. It's a product that should not have to exist in 2025.

I use my built-in headphone jack daily and would buy another phone if it went out.

ranger_danger

9 months ago

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.

alpaca128

9 months ago

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 suggest trying your own advice every day for a month, you'll see why it's not comparable.

And saying the vast majority of people don't use wired headphones when wired headphones are actively made inconvenient and incompatible is not a very convincing argument.

The removal was simply unnecessary, comes with no noticeable upside in return and is suspiciously convenient for those companies considering they also sell wireless headphones as the solution.

If so many people are still complaining about it, perhaps it's not because they're dumb but because there is still a real need for it.

0_____0

9 months ago

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.

ranger_danger

9 months ago

I was referring to phones not having headphone jacks, there are still other uses for it on laptop/desktop that I think are more widely used.

> not a very convincing argument

I still believe it either way, but you don't have to.

> If so many people are still complaining about it

I don't think they are, at least not so many relative to the majority of phone users in the world. Tech savvy users are a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.

jsheard

9 months ago

The problem with a Pixel is the hardware is always a step or two behind what other vendors are doing at the same price point, and they tend to be weirdly buggy for a first-party device. For example the bug where Pixel phones are randomly unable to call emergency services has been happening for years and keeps regressing again and again.

2021 https://www.vice.com/en/article/google-pixel-bug-prevented-u...

2022 https://old.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/y039zn/i_compi...

2023 https://www.androidauthority.com/psa-google-pixel-911-emerge...

2024 https://old.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1ano09x/pixel_...

chris_pie

9 months ago

I've been using Pixel 8 for nearly a year now and I agree that it's surprisingly buggy. Also, the chip is excessively power-hungry, especially for the performance it offers. In addition: the modem is bad and very power-hungry as well. And the cherry on top for me was the subpar fingerprint scanner. Can't recommend.

microtonal

9 months ago

Agree with Pixel < 9. Pixel 9 has an ultrasonic fingerprint reader. The modem is also upgraded to an Exynos 5400, which is much better. Even Pixel fans were complaining about the modems in Pixels, but pretty much everyone is positive about the modem in the Pixel 9.

Beware though that the Pixel 9a still uses the old modem and an optical fingerprint reader.

Until the 9a prices drop it probably doesn't make sense to get a 9a anyway, since the 9 is barely more expensive on a discount.

karlgkk

9 months ago

Not a problem with an iphone

mrcsharp

9 months ago

The walled garden is a problem with an iPhone. The OS treating me like a toddler is another.

skybrian

9 months ago

Buying a Pixel phone seems pretty easy? I rarely upgrade and stopped looking at the others.

theandrewbailey

9 months ago

Buy a phone with an unlocked/unlockable bootloader, and use custom ROMs to stay up to date long after the manufacturer has stopped caring about support. Unlocked phones seem few and far between nowadays, but there's still some. Here's another not-so-subtle recommendation for the Google Pixel line.

I've been using a Moto X4 (8 years old!) with LineageOS for 6-7 years. I'll probably get an open box (for a discount) Pixel soon, and probably put GrapheneOS on it.

mattlondon

9 months ago

Just get the Google Pixel phones?

If you buy something from some other random manufacturer that is using the open source android code then yes you are going to have a different experience since they want to add their "special touch" which invariably is shite.

saubeidl

9 months ago

I wish Google would stick with a design paradigm for a bit for once.

It's not just their own apps that need updating, it's everyone else's, too. Most of which will never happen, so users are stuck in a hodgepodge of several generations of different design paradigms.

Material was fine. So was Material 2. So was Material 3. So is Material 3 Expressive, I guess. Just stick with something!

wiseowise

9 months ago

They've been copying iOS for years, time to bring some of that Windows "consistency" into the mix.

idontcareatall

9 months ago

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 know.

ngangaga

9 months ago

Do you think that audio (or bluetooth) doesn't work reliably on ios? Why?

lawgimenez

9 months ago

I worked on a couple of Internet of Things projects 5-6 years ago, working on Android was a breeze with BLE, and other IoT protocols. iOS on the other hand, you’re lucky you can get a pairing even. But I’m sure this has been improved today.

ngangaga

9 months ago

Interesting. I don't think I've ever tried to use this.

alpaca128

9 months ago

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.

hulitu

9 months ago

> It's astonishing that anyone can say this with a straight face

I thought it was a joke. Consistency in Windows is long gone.

saubeidl

9 months ago

To be fair, as of late, iOS has been copying Android more than the other way around - think notifications and widgets.

kridsdale3

9 months ago

Those were both more than 10 years ago.

bydo

9 months ago

And both from WebOS.

echoangle

9 months ago

Not really, the proper widgets people mean were introduced in iOS 14 which was 5 years ago.

krackers

9 months ago

Current "material design" is the anthesis of what "material design" was originally supposed to be.

no_wizard

9 months ago

Which was what exactly? I always felt they had a nebulous definition

JamesSwift

9 months ago

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)

saubeidl

9 months ago

As another android dev, I miss OG material. The shadow elevation thing was really cool.

jsnell

9 months ago

> You can now customize Quick Settings to squeeze in more of your favorite actions like Flashlight and Do Not Disturb.

I feel I'm missing something. Hasn't customizing the quick settings been possible forever?

In fact the only thing preventing me from having the single tap Do Not Disturb in the quick settings is that these same UX people removed the option in the latest version of Android, and buried it in a "Modes" menu for no reason at all.

Super happy to have that back, but good grief, trying to pitch a rollback as an innovative new feature is pretty audacious.

skiman10

9 months ago

You can expand or shrink every tile now instead of only being able to swap position of the tiles. So more tiles per page.

jsheard

9 months ago

An article that's not even 600 words long immediately offering to use AI to make itself even shorter has to be up there on the useless-AI-shit-for-the-sake-of-it leaderboard.

orthecreedence

9 months ago

"This article describes yet another infuriating redesign by the Android design team who cannot seem to stick with a paradigm and improve it for more than a year before trashing it and doing something entirely new for no reason other than boredom."

bigstrat2003

9 months ago

Given 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.

eitally

9 months ago

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 dumb feature.

0_____0

9 months ago

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.

hulitu

9 months ago

> Anyone else remember the lock screen being a giant two line clock with no way to customize it,

"We presume you don't like clocks but, we asked Gemini and the majority loves it". Sincerely, your Google Design Team

codethief

9 months ago

Agreed. I'm still incredibly annoyed by the fact that in airplane mode I can no longer change my SIM settings (in particular: disable roaming before I disable airplane mode again and potentially get charged :rage.jpg:) and they subsumed all network-related settings under "Internet". (Because clearly WiFi networks are pointless if they don't offer internet. /s)

ivm

9 months ago

Android Kiki to Android Bouba evolution:

From square icons and sharp Roboto to blobby amoeba-shaped designs and rounded fonts.

Also, Chile mentioned!

Ajedi32

9 months ago

"Big refresh" seems like an exaggeration compared to the overhauls Android has gotten in the past. These are pretty subtle design tweaks. Which is fine; I don't think Android particularly needs a huge overhaul at this point.

the_sleaze_

9 months ago

Am I the only one who -hates- these springy animations? I feel it introduces an artificial lag. When I tap I want instant response, I don't want to have to wait a half second for the boxes to complete their scale transforms.

My canonical example is deleting message threads out of iOS Messages app. For every row in the list you need to swipe allll the way over to the left, wait for the stupid animation, click delete, wait for the stupid animation, click the confirm. Maybe it would improve if the component was responsive during its animation cycle. But ugh.

pirates

9 months ago

You can use the three dots menu in the top right corner to Select Messages, drag or tap the buttons that appear, then Delete in the bottom right. That said you are definitely correct that in general this is a thing in the OS and sometimes there’s nothing you can do but wait.

ulfw

9 months ago

Looks seriously ugly but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that's only my personal opinion. Thankfully I won't ever get to see it anyway as majority Android vendors aren't using any of Google's UI stuff (my Oppo Find N5 basically looks iPhoney with ColorOS). So really this should be titled "Google Pixel phones will be getting..."

brap

9 months ago

Looks good. I’m happy. Now if they can please change their apps icons to not all look the same, that would be really nice.

eternityforest

9 months ago

It looks nice visually, I just hope they don't add more gesture shortcuts I can't disable

hulitu

9 months ago

> It looks nice visually, I just hope they don't add more gesture shortcuts I can't disable

"Thank you for your feedback. We see that you don't like disabling features so disabling will be disabled in the next version" Cheers, Google (torture) UI Team

modeless

9 months ago

Differently-shaped buttons and more swoopy animations are not what Wear OS needs. Wear OS needs better information density and more attention to detail in interaction design and implementation rather than appearance. The whole thing feels like it was designed in After Effects and implemented to spec with no user feedback in the process at all.

I continue to strongly prefer the Pebble UI after all these years. It just does a much better job with the basics like notifications and alarms. it's not even close.

nullpoint420

9 months ago

I actually thinks this looks great as a current iOS user. Apple's latest software quality (or lack of it) has made me want to try out Android again.

bArray

9 months ago

I 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.

mvdtnz

9 months ago

Good lord I do not need my phone to be "expressive". I need the camera to open without janking out my podcasts, I need my browser to not have to reload pages if I switch to another app, I need my password manager to be able to reliably autofill apps. I do not need "expressive".

footlose_3815

9 months ago

Google is allergic to normal interfaces nowadays. Everything about Material when it rolled out rubbed me the wrong way, Rounded edges? Extra real estate? Everything is bubbles.

I'll take cold, basic, and data-full interfaces instead of the wasted real estate in the era of CSS-ifying every user interaction to death.

2OEH8eoCRo0

9 months ago

data-full interfaces on my small ass phone screen? no thanks!

jcalx

9 months ago

Another "big refresh". I've already disabled animations because of the faintly ridiculous system-wide overscroll effect [0] which makes every menu and webpage bounce like the viewport is made of gelatin, so I'm a little bemused to see them doubling down on "natural, springy animations". I know this is "old man yelling at cloud" of me, but I don't care for my notifications to "subtly respond" to adjacent ones being dragged.

[0] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/83355

malfist

9 months ago

That's one of the first things I do with a new phone. Want to make a phone feel sluggish? Wait on all the stupid transition animations designers made

thecrumb

9 months ago

This will be my last Pixel phone. I had the original and it was perfect. No fluff. Simple. Each version gets worse and worse. 7 is horrible. Still can't remove the stupid date from the home screen.

ErrorNoBrain

9 months ago

that annoyed me as well (pixel 8a)

but i just switched to my go-to launcher, Nova. I've used it quite a bit over the last years.

brunoqc

9 months ago

Wasn't Nova sold to some advertising company?

microtonal

9 months ago

Apparently LawnChair is a popular Pixel Launcher replacement now:

https://lawnchair.app/

Haven't tried it, because the Pixel Launcher is fine for me (but yes, I'm in camp "they should make the search bar removable.)

awill

9 months ago

So many people I work with (in tech) were on Android for years, and all eventually switched to iOS.

My biggest issue with Google is they aren't convicted in anything they do. They just guess, or try 5 different things, and see what sticks. That makes it a mess for users, as the UX constantly changes.

I also can't understand why Google decided a circular face made sense for Wear. It's good for analogue watches, and garbage for everything else. Try reading a message where words are either cut off, or you're stuck basically using a square inside the circle. It makes no sense other than because Google didn't want to 'copy' Apple with the rectangular shape.

pjmlp

9 months ago

Still on Android.

All the Apple gear I use belongs to my employer.

You should listen to some Apple development podcasts, grass is not so green on the other side.

There are also plenty of unfinished things, some of them have turned into memes by now.

bsimpson

9 months ago

Google gave out the HTC Evo at I/O in 2010, which was what got me to switch to Android.

At the time, it had a much bigger screen than an iPhone and gave you more control over the device. It could play Flash games/apps, and let you use the apps/keyboards/etc you wanted without a company's blessing.

Apple is a lot more open now than they used to be, in ways that might have driven power users to Android before.

gumby271

9 months ago

I'm curious, how would you say they're more open these days? I've always resisted iOS since I can't do the most basic thing on it which is install software independent of the manufacturer saying I can. If that changes I'd be interested, but do you think Apple is moving in that direction?

spencerflem

9 months ago

They are, but I'll not be fully convinced until there's a Graphene OS equivalent for iOS.

user

9 months ago

[deleted]

mnkypete

9 months ago

Funnily enough the first smartwatch that was interesting to me was a round watch, so I got the Pixel watch. I don't mind having the UI not being as usable (debatable), but I much rather have a nice looking watch, more like a classic watch. That's like, your and my opinion, everyone has their preferences.

ivm

9 months ago

I like circular face on my Garmin Venu. Almost all their watches are round and circle'ish UI flow is used a lot in their OS.

apocalyptic0n3

9 months ago

Yeah, I agree. I have a Pixel Watch 3 and generally like the circular form factor. I wish they did more with it at times, but I feel like that's kinda what I'm seeing from the previews in the OP blog post

fidotron

9 months ago

> So many people I work with (in tech) were on Android for years, and all eventually switched to iOS.

There is a curious demographic of people that worked closely on/with Android in the early years that have a particularly extreme allergy to it today.

Sundar gets a lot of deserved stick, but Andy Rubin was no saint when it came to guiding development either, as demonstrated by the memory holed Skyhook fiasco. ( https://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/536913/google-android-sk... ) JBQ resigning from the AOSP really was the sign that true believers in the Android ecosystem are simply suckers.

It is such a missed opportunity it's unbelievable. iOS shouldn't be in contention at all.

JamesSwift

9 months ago

The thing that made me switch, funny enough, is the 'budget phone' category. The Moto G line and low-end Pixel line completely abandoned the "small, 200-300 dollar phone" segment. And so I got a brand new iphone SE for $200. Havent gone back, and probably wont at this point now that I've moved over and use the family plan for apple one etc.

frfl

9 months ago

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 inaccurate to Moto "abandoned" that low end market.

microtonal

9 months ago

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.

JamesSwift

9 months ago

These show as $270 new https://swappa.com/listings/apple-iphone-se-3rd-gen-2022?car...

frfl

9 months ago

The catch being that's a phone from 2022. Sure, if that's acceptable. I was just referring to current models rather than models from multiple years ago

dmitrygr

9 months ago

It outperforms samsung A5x series handily, has better battery life, better carrier support, has full warranty from apple, including same-day in-store service. Who cares what year it is from?

hulitu

9 months ago

> and all eventually switched to iOS

Maybe because the bugs were known from Android.

Yesterday i had to search, why the photos i took 1 minute ago are only visible on the (i)phone but not on the folder shared with the PC.

tifik

9 months ago

Storytime: my partner used to be a long time Samsung fan. She had the phone, tablet, headphones and watch and probably more gear that I don't even know about. Then she moved to Canada with me. Because of how poor the QA in their ecosystem is, after an update her latest-model Samsung watch couldn't pair with her one-year-old model Samsung phone, which severely diminished its usefulness (this was a heavily reported issue at the time). So we went to a mall and entered a store with big SAMSUNG logos everywhere, and were told to go skip rocks. They would not even touch the devices with the same logos they had on their shirts, because both the phone and the watch were bought in a different country.

There was an Apple store in that mall as well, so we walked in and asked "if we buy an apple product here, and there is an issue with it while we are in a different country, would they help us in an Apple store there". The answer was "well yeah of course why wouldn't they" with a "what's the catch" tone and raised eyebrow.

Needless to say she is now fully switched over. Even after two years, she gets delighted every now and then by how smooth the experience is. I recall many "LOL Samsung could never" events.

My current Pixel 6 is my last android phone due to the UX issues that keep piling up with every single update. Last one I noticed: Turning on bedtime mode is now double (2) the clicks it used to be.

Padlock4543

9 months ago

I purchased a phone in a European country without an official Apple Store, so I bought it from a "Premium Authorized Apple Retailer." After one year, the phone broke. While in a different country, I visited an Apple Store to have it repaired under warranty. However, they informed me that I needed to return to the original store where I purchased it to activate the warranty.

My experience with Apple doesn't sound so different from yours.

tifik

9 months ago

Yes, in some European countries Apple doesn't have physical stores and relies on official partners for retail for physical stores. In some of these countries, you can still shop online on the official Apple store for that country. Major down side is you can't get Apple care at all.

The difference is my partner didn't buy her gadgets from a retailer. It was all from physical Samsung stores and under extended warranty. It sounds like an oversight on the retailers side that they didn't 'activate' your warranty for some reason.

But yeah, official stores and Apple Care not being available is a major downside, which is why I'm waiting until Im back to Canada to get an iPhone (it's also quite a bit cheaper on that side of the Atlantic).

One limitation I know of with Apple Care is that if you need to replace your device under warranty, they will need to mail it to you from the country of purchase, but you will get a temporary device while you wait for that. Samsung would never...

homebrewer

9 months ago

Here's a counterpoint: Apple has no official presence in my country and if you have any problems with their products, you will be told to go pound sand. This is in spite of them being significantly more expensive than in countries like the US (where they already cost at a premium).

On the other hand, a guy I know well bought a mid-tier consumer Samsung SSD in China a few years ago (970 Evo IIRC), run it into the ground doing video encoding pretty much non-stop, contacted the official Samsung retailer in our country asking for a replacement, and they seemed happy to accommodate him.

YMMV. From my point of view, Korean companies seem much more customer-oriented overall.

bravoetch

9 months ago

My fave issue is Android as the moment is when I try the Gemini app is automatically changes the default assistant app to Gemini. And since Gemini isn't an assistant app, it doesn't work for that :/

But on your topic, my partner has an iPhone and they disable all kinds of features and then wonder why nothing works smoothly. They have a Mac, and airpods, and still don't have anything working together effectively. Just through simple self sabotage

jadbox

9 months ago

The Wear OS looks the most exciting here. I'm looking forward to a Pixel 4 Watch with a better battery life, having google maps and android app support.

brunoqc

9 months ago

I wish Google would sponsor or create incentives to motivate devs to support wearos. There is very little useful apps on it.

wiseowise

9 months ago

> Man, I wish my Android had 'better' UI

Is what I have never, ever heard. I don't what to shit on designers, who also need to justify their job, but it would be cool to see some ACTUAL improvements to important things. Like battery life.

kotaKat

9 months ago

We 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

bArray

9 months ago

(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.

hulitu

9 months ago

> I think the reason why the UI's are dumbing down is because they people using them are changing.

No. We are not changing. But it seems that there are people paid to make changes. Not to improve, just to change. Why does the Messages app needs a new, much worse UI, every couple of months ?

dns_snek

9 months ago

Wear OS needs core development and an army of QA testers, not another redesign. The design is fine, but overall the functionality of the product feels like a beta test (and I think that's being generous), even on their own hardware.

I answer a call on my phone and the audio is routed to my watch, or vice versa, the official weather app claims it can't get my location even though it has access to the GPS (and it's actively being used by Fitbit to track exercise) and wifi positioning. Google Maps on the watch doesn't load results half the time, the other half the time it'll get stuck on "starting navigation" - sometimes unstuck by launching Maps on the phone (despite having offline maps downloaded to the watch) and other times it's just stuck forever. Fitbit will display some static/mock/fake exercise values until the display is woken up when OS-level always on display is disabled but AOD is enabled in Fitbit during exercise. I could go on.

zecg

9 months ago

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.

0_____0

9 months ago

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.

brailsafe

9 months ago

Wew, this is great and all, but when am I going to be able to disable the list of trending topics or search history in my search bar, or at least hide it entirely? Never? I have to learn about the spirit airlines emergency landing and some bs about the NFL even though I'm not even in that country? Idk that customization feels paramount if I can't control what I see as I'm using the device.

garylkz

9 months ago

Whoever designed the email archive dismissable, what the heck

ErrorNoBrain

9 months ago

i like the changes are coming but i wish they didn't remove the old look

I mean... what if i prefer the older version of the UI? my only option is a different launcher or not updating

surgical_fire

9 months ago

Looks like shit. It seems that on every UI/UX update, Google products become shittier.

I'll keep using Android anyway because I find Apple UI/UX even more disgusting.

Smartphones don't matter anyway. What most people do in high end devices can be done in mid-tier or even shit-tier devices too.

bravoetch

9 months ago

I kinda want to know what you do for a living.

Calwestjobs

9 months ago

Great job! for shipping this and Great job! for presentation.

bhouston

9 months ago

As an iOS user so many of the headline effects this Android update mentions seem to be already part of my iOS experience. Thus this seems to be catch ups to iOS.

dr_kiszonka

9 months ago

In human–computer interaction, baby duck syndrome denotes the tendency for computer users to "imprint" on the first system they learn, then judge other systems by their similarity to that first system. The result is that "users generally prefer systems similar to those they learned on and dislike unfamiliar systems". The issue may present itself relatively early in a computer user's experience, and it has been observed to impede education of students in new software systems or user interfaces.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)#Baby...

throwaway127482

9 months ago

Are you gonna clarify at all how this is relevant to the original article...?

bravoetch

9 months ago

No, because their first experience in online discussion was slashdot. They are forever bound to that now.

dr_kiszonka

9 months ago

When I posted it, a lot of replies were from people disliking the changes. I thought my reply would be interesting for those who noticed it too.