I like their Material Expressive design a lot more now after Apple's big reveal. While it's still a bit too colorful and whimsical for my liking, it does stay much closer to what I think should be the top UX design ideal - be clear, legible, and get out of the way. On the new iOS every screen feels like some UX designer is shouting "look how amazing I am at this!!" at me.
bandoti · 13h ago
I find as time goes on I am less-and-less excited about mobile releases. I’ve had a smartphone since the Google Nexus 1. The desktop experience is always better, and a good book is even more inviting.
Curious what other folks are feeling. A lot of these tools seem like useless frivolity.
Meanwhile, I have family who constantly get confused whether the iOS phone icon is FaceTime or the “real” phone; and I have to do multiple taps instead of one to make a FaceTime call—and Apple is busy making Liquid Glass, for what?
SchemaLoad · 12h ago
The old mobile OSs used to be hilariously lacking so every update was genuinely game changing. I remember getting really excited when Android Ice Cream Sandwich was adding screenshot functionality to tablets. And hearing people talk about folders getting added to iOS.
Now all the low hanging fruit is gone they are less exciting. The photogrammetry api stuff added to iOS probably took 100x the dev effort of adding folders and copy/paste, but gets far less excitement.
nashashmi · 7h ago
The remaining low hanging fruits seem to be in porting to desktop docks.
xattt · 2h ago
It feels like Apple’s announcements for iPad OS are telegraphing that docking might be supported in yet-to-be-released iPhones.
nashashmi · 57m ago
There is only one purpose for the iPhone to have a usb c connection. Just one. The dock.
Like all things apple, watch them muzzle it to keep sales of the IPAD high.
spankibalt · 11h ago
> A lot of these tools seem like useless frivolity.
That's me on a good day; I fuckin' hate smartphones (hardware and software-wise), lol. I have pretty much given up on a slab-style pocket computer (6-7 inch, essentially a deshittified, Samsung XCover-series smartphone on steroids, e. g. S-Pen, exchangeable batteries, audio jack, 1-2 USB-C ports, mSD card slot, lotsa memory, phone-functionality is second fiddle) or a small detachable (8-9 inch, also EMR-penabled, essentially an updated, miniaturized HP ZBook x2 G4 with Nintendo Switch-like capabilities for docking and attachments for a variety of controller options and the keyboard). :(
vladms · 8h ago
Why hate them though? They can be great for some things, like messaging, maps, shopping lists and taking pictures. I never consider them "the ultimate computer", and I wouldn't want them to be, mostly because mobile stuff can break/get lost/get stolen.
strix_varius · 9h ago
So there are at least two of us! I'd be truly excited and willing to pay laptop-tier prices for either:
1) a bare (ala Pixel) foldable with S-pen and without large external displays to get cracked and complicate things
2) a rooted linux-computer-in-your-pocket that can be plugged into a usb-c hub and happens to have a SIM card/cell modem to work as a phone.
...but until then I just get by for years and years on whatever mid-tier phone happened to be the smallest form-factor and best-camera-for-$ at the time my last one became unusable.
The issue with Planet Computer's Linux support is the lack of it. They all rely on custom kernels using Android drivers and libhybris to function. For both the Cosmo Communicator and Gemini PDA they glue together a bootable version of Debian, tick the checkbox for "it runs Linux" and then call it a day.
or, even better: a rooted pocket linux computer that happens to not have a built-in baseband.
ItsBob · 1h ago
> Curious what other folks are feeling. A lot of these tools seem like useless frivolity.
Something I have long said when talking about operating systems is that I consider them tool boxes. The same kind of tool box a carpenter would have.
I don't "use" the OS per se. I use the OS to hold my tools in a manner that makes it easy for me to access them.
So, it's like a carpenter's toolbox where he carries around his saw, hammer etc. and can easily grab them when he needs them. He doesn't need to hear about Hammer v2.0 AI-edition or any of that shit!
I don't need my toolbox doing anything other than holding my tools and fucking right off out of my way!
anal_reactor · 9h ago
Honestly, I'm happy my phone won't get an update. This way I won't be exposed to new bugs. I'm on Android 13 and the only thing I observed when updating from 12 was that now when I switch apps, the screen blinks for split-second, which is incredibly annoying. Functionality-wise, there's very little that can be improved anyway. It's mostly just fiddling with details of the UI here and there.
I think we grew up with technology advancing rapidly and expensive tech from previous year being outdated, but now we came back to baseline where technological advancement is just small fixes stretched over a long period of time.
mad182 · 7h ago
> Functionality-wise, there's very little that can be improved
Yep. Honestly can't name a single major new smartphone feature that I would consider a dealbreaker that wasn't available 10 years ago.
The last things that made me excited about a new phone was contactless payments and Android auto, but both are pretty old now.
Now it's just a slightly different ui and maybe a bit better camera when I got a new phone.
StopDisinfo910 · 3h ago
> both are pretty old now
They are not that old and we still don’t have proper dashboard integration. I would like directions there rather than on the central console.
Plus there has been nice features trickling to user from release to release.
I like that you can easily use your phone as a clock with a magnetic dock. Translation and text selection in screenshot were nice. Search from picture highlight is great.
Phone screening is nice. Hold for me is nice too. Chat apps have improved by leaps and bounds since Covid. Productivity is now okay-ish at least for joining meetings and reading things.
As someone that plug his phone to a dock from time to time, convergence is nearly there but some things still need polish. I really wish we could get a better version of Office for example.
It’s not ground breaking but meaningful incremental improvements have been there.
mcny · 8h ago
Android 12 made it possible to have unattended updates possible on fdroid. I sincerely will not recommend an Android version less than 12 at this point.
At some point, we will have something similar on a newer version of Android that we will want and that we can't have with an older version. I don't know what it is yet but i am sure there will be something at some point.
The layer separation on Material has been really not good for me. The floating action button is so hard to notice sometimes; I've reached out for IT help or support sometimes because I just didn't notice it.
I haven't used it yet but the refraction effect on Liquid Glass feels like it could be amazingly good at creating a sense of layer separation. Static content it's maybe not going to be awesome at, but as soon as the there's motion, the non-linear motion around the bend of the glass, for me, seems to create a very easy perturbance of regular motion that it feels like eyes, in their radar like way, instantly know of, without having to look closely and interpret.
cosmic_cheese · 16h ago
In my view the dramatic reduction of depth in Material 2 and beyond was a real mistake. That was the one redeeming thing it had over other flat UI design systems.
SchemaLoad · 13h ago
Material is fine, but it feels pretty uninspired to me. Like the corporate art version of UI. Big flat inoffensive blobs, washed out pastel colours, etc. The new iOS demo kinda makes me feel excited to try the new update, once they iron out a few of the poor contrast spots.
lmm · 13h ago
Bland and inoffensive is what I want from my OS. The stage manager should be facilitating the show, not trying out their own material on the crowd.
derefr · 10h ago
The OS is less the stage manager, and more the venue itself. Imagine if the Sydney Opera House or Carnegie Hall looked "inoffensive" rather than majestic.
M95D · 5h ago
A very good example!
Opera House had (possibly still have, I heard they did a redecoration [1]) very big issues with acoustics. It's bad functionality directly caused by aesthetics.
It's definitely the stage manager for me as a Linux guy who likes to rip the WM out of whatever DE is running and replace it with i3. Different strokes!
thedevilslawyer · 10h ago
Opera house is an app. Sydney is the OS; that needs taste, not majesty.
lmm · 9h ago
> Imagine if the Sydney Opera House or Carnegie Hall looked "inoffensive" rather than majestic.
Doesn't sound like a big problem. Some of the best plays and operas I've seen have been in bland concrete boxes, portakabins, round the back of pubs.... Of course all else being equal I'd prefer a building to look good, but good stage visibility and acoustics beats a flashy building every time.
IgorPartola · 13h ago
I agree. It is clear, functional, and reminds me of staged doctor’s offices in commercials for prescription drugs.
Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Once things get too gaudy they will introduce Flat Glass or pretend like they invented straight lines and sharp corners. But at least that seems to have a personality.
The thing with [Microsoft's] dictated GUIs is that they all end up on the trash heap.
Some people have affinity for a GUI aesthetic. I liked Motif and CDE. Ripping them away for the garbage pile is a supremely foolish thing to do, as it can drive users away.
Apple, and Microsoft, will surely add more to this pile shortly.
Doohickey-d · 8h ago
There's also another version of the story of why they removed it:
> So basically, Microsoft's claim of Aero being "cheesy" "and "dated" are just lies to cover up the fact where the original Surface RT is not powerful enough to handle them.
> Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era.
Is Windows XP universally understood to be bad design? I remember it as somewhere between blandly unremarkable and slightly pleasant.
coredog64 · 11h ago
The "Fisher-Price" design language was unpopular, but ISTR you could turn off most of the eye candy and get a the Windows 2000 design language. Pretty sure that was like the first or second thing I did with both XP and Vista.
derefr · 10h ago
And even then, people were never against most of it. Scrollbar thumbs with grip stipple? Checkboxes that fill in with a roundrect rather than a checkmark? Buttons and tabs that have an inline ring-highlight "intent" color to them, akin to the fill color on modern Bootstrap theme buttons? These were all parts of the Luna theme as well — and people liked them. (And, IIRC, they were often sad that these parts got deactivated when reverting to the Windows Classic theme, and often asked if there was some hybrid theme that kept these.)
With Luna, I think people were mainly just reacting negatively to two things:
1. the start button being big and green and a weird blob shape; the start menu it opens having a huge, very rounded forehead and chin — and both of these having a certain "pre-baked custom PNG image 8-way sliced in Photoshop and drawn by parts" look that you'd see used on web pages in this era. This made the whole UI feel very "non-brutalist" — form not following function, the way it did in Windows Classic (where the theme was in part designed to optimize for as few line-draw GDI calls as possible.)
2. both the taskbar and window title bars being vertically thicker, and having a vaguely-plastic-looking sheen to them to "add dimensionality."
And my hypothesis is that, of these, it was mainly the "vertically thicker" taskbar+window decorations that upset so many people.
This was an era where many screens were still largely 1024x768, even as monitor sizes were growing; so "small was cool" [and legible!] Websites baked their text into images using 8x5 pixel fonts; Linux users used tiny fonts and narrow themes in fvwm/blackbox/fluxbox, etc. In that era, a title bar stealing thirty whole pixels was almost blasphemy. (Same problem with the Office XP ribbon. Microsoft's visual designers must have been too far ahead-of-the-curve in what kind of resolutions their graphics cards supported, I think.)
I think, if there was an alternate version of Luna that also shipped with XP, that just narrowed the taskbar and window caption bar to the Windows Classic dimensions... then Luna would have been universally acclaimed.
IgorPartola · 3h ago
I think any Windows GUI is going to be perceived with bias so I am not going to say that it was bad design, let alone universally bad. But it was bold, controversial, and short lived.
LorenDB · 18h ago
My main complaint with Material Expressive is that every other button seems to be 85% padding and 15% actual content. What happened to reasonable information density?
legitster · 18h ago
For control surfaces, padding prevents misclicks. It's actually very important part of perceived interface quality when dealing with a handheld touchscreen device.
jay_kyburz · 18h ago
Yeah, but the icons and labels could use more of that padding and be larger so old folks like me can see them.
tkzed49 · 17h ago
There's literally a setting for this. There are separate sliders for "display size" and "font size", the latter of which just makes the font larger
jay_kyburz · 16h ago
haha yes, I tried to use my kids phone the other day and I had forgotten how much larger I had set the fonts on my own phone. It was impossible to read anything.
It's actually a credit to google that you can scale the fonts up so much and then forget you had done it. In the old days, the UI would be broken in various places.
andrewshadura · 7h ago
It is still often broken, especially when a non-English locale is set. A family member uses larger fonts in Android, and most labels are barely readable (barel… readab…), UI widgets often don't fit on the screen etc.
robocat · 18h ago
Different topic: CSS doesn't have a good way to manage nearby clicks? A tap just a few px outside a button should click the button? <Input>s can steal focus from nearby taps on Mobile Safari (which can also be a fuckup). I hate iPhone taps that slip a little and scrollable areas having queer interactions (causing usability/accessibility issues).
crazygringo · 17h ago
You could, but you don't want it to. Buttons are e.g. often floating above content, or adjacent to other buttons.
It's just as bad to click a button you don't want to, when you're merely trying to scroll, or highlight text, or click another button.
Making a button's clickable area larger than the button itself can be desirable in limited circumstances, but it's not a general-purpose solution.
robocat · 17h ago
> You could, but you don't want it to.
Argue with Apple because Mobile Safari makes a tap close to a button click the button (and it causes exactly the problems you've predicted, and workarounds are difficult). Do you do a lot of close testing?? Because the feature is quite noticeable.
I recall that similar features are more obvious on Android because you can make taps visible.
Virtual keyboards also have interesting responses to close taps on key buttons.
downsplat · 14h ago
Some positive padding, offset by the same negative margin, will do just that, i.e capture clicks near the link or button. It has some problems, but I've seen it used to make footnote links easier to click on mobile.
What's wrong with increasing the size of the button?
You can set a (pseudo) element as an invisible enlargement of that button but then you will get accidental taps.
xboxnolifes · 17h ago
Buttons are whatever for me, but the padding on things like notifications and other information text is getting ridiculous. The notifications are taking up 1/4 of the screen and managing to only show 3 words of an email or text on my phone.
pier25 · 19h ago
Couldn't agree more. Quite a fall from grace by Apple.
nextos · 18h ago
Apple did skeuomorphism really well, which is hard and requires a lot of design work.
I cannot understand why they gradually abandoned that, as it was clearly a competitive moat in terms of usability.
I've seen how computer illiterate or elderly people were able to navigate skeuomorphic designs with relative ease. Right now, they can't tell what is a button or a field and what isn't.
While the technology to create 'alive' skeuomorphic elements now exists, that wasn't the case a few years ago.
Older skeuomorphic designs were static/rasters which were clunky to either mix these static elements with animated elements (for example the iOS 7 menu title transitions) or to have transparency (how can you have transparent leather/velvet?).
Liquid Glass is actually an extension of the foundation laid by iOS 7.
Many parts of the iOS 7 transition guide might as well have been written for Liquid Glass:
- "Make sure that app content is discernible through translucent UI elements—such as bars and keyboards—and the transparent status bar"
- "Examine your app for hard-coded UI values—such as sizes and positions—and replace them with those you derive dynamically from system-provided values."
Not gonna lie, I've been using (and programming) GUIs since the Amiga and even I get thrown askew by "click here to enter your name" (expecting a subsequent GUI element to focus, or worse - a popup) vs. "click here to enter your name" (haha! the prompt text disappears now and this is just where you write it I guess!).
You'd think this is just a little thing, but it can really mess with you if you need to change focus and - of course - every application will 'haha!' you in a different way.
It has nothing to do with skeuomorphism really, but at least skeuomorphism seemed to give everyone an idea of what they were shooting for at least.
kstrauser · 17h ago
It was primarily because skeuomorphic UIs don't scale well with user experience levels. They're easier for novices but don't lend themselves well to expert use, unless you add a bunch of extra affordances that would seem really out of place in a UI meant to look like a real thing. And what does a skeuomorphic web browser or email app look ike? We don't have those in meatspace.
jazzyjackson · 17h ago
inbox/outbox is a holdover from bins setting on your desk. but yeah there's not much more to the interface of a blank sheet of paper.
I disagree that skeuomorphic can't be used by power users. Just throw a bunch of keyboard shortcuts in there.
rudedogg · 18h ago
I thought it looks nice, and gives more focus to the content like they intended :/.
The space around a block style tab-bar/navbar is wasted anyway, might as well show some of the content. Most apps were doing it anyway. Seeing a system tabbar/navbar was getting rare in “good” apps.
dmix · 14h ago
Have you tried the beta on iPhone? 75% of the time it seems much nicer with 25% degraded. It's a weird mix but I see why they went in that direction. The only real problem is the religious adherence to the glass design language that is hurting it... because there are very good UX/design improvements via the glass, just not everywhere.
I wouldn't judge the new Android until I tried it on a phone either.
rickdeckard · 7h ago
> The only real problem is the religious adherence to the glass design language that is hurting it
That's also my impression, iOS 26 looks like some UI's were peer-reviewed and thrown back with the note "Not gaudy enough, it's not enough glass! Remember, the theme is 'Liquid Glass', Management wants to see traces of this on every screen!"
dmix · 6m ago
100%, I do love Safari though. I'd almost say it's a good release if the icons weren't so funky
saubeidl · 18h ago
I agree, but that being said, I still think it peaked at the OG Material. I miss elevation shadows.
kevin_thibedeau · 12h ago
More like shouting "Watch me drain your battery all day long".
autoexec · 4h ago
you sell more phones that way.
SebastianKra · 18h ago
I'm also disappointed in Apple right now, but the screenshots of the Calendar and Gmail Apps in this post are even worse. Content in Gmail is separated by kilometers of whitespace with not a divider in sight. The calendar reserves 10% of horizontal whitespace for this crucial 2014 low-poly wallpaper…
andrepd · 18h ago
Superfluous animations, cryptic icons and UI elements with no indication of function and capabilities, and ungodly amounts of whitespace that make my 5.8" screen have less information density than my 2009 Nokia. That's not what "legible and gets out my my way" means to me.
aaomidi · 18h ago
I decided to install the beta to get a more informed opinion. I think the UI looks better when you’re holding it vs seeing it in the pictures.
Control center, however, sucks.
danieldk · 18h ago
I installed the iOS beta and thought it was as bad, if not worse than the WWDC demos. In a lot of cases, text becomes outright unreadable. Control Center looks like a mess with all the transparency.
Like the grandparent I'm much more excited by Material Design 3 Expressive.
int_19h · 13h ago
In Vista/Win7, they mostly used glass background for parts of the window that didn't have any text on them. And for the few exceptions where that wasn't the case (like e.g. window titles) they added a kind of halo so that black text would always contrast with that regardless of what was below the window, or else just significantly darken the glass and use white text. All for obvious reasons.
Looking at the new iOS screenshots, I'm surprised that those reasons apparently aren't obvious to Apple designers.
argsnd · 18h ago
There's some instances of text illegibility that seems to be caused by buggy contrast detection and I think they'll probably fix that pretty easily since this is only the first beta. I think the readability concerns are really overblown.
MisterBiggs · 17h ago
Same experience. I hopped on the beta because I thought the current version was going to be really bad and I wanted to watch them move towards something more functional. Its definitely not perfect but the way that the UI reacts in real time to holding the phone and elements moving makes it work really well and isn't something you can capture in a screenshot or video.
mrcwinn · 14h ago
Whatever the hot takes... nothing is more "dangerous" than a sound design philosophy. Sure, there are tweaks to make and I don't love everything about Apple's new design, but what I see is a team with an opinion on how to unify design across a full suite of products. That sounds quite durable to me.
tail_exchange · 13h ago
The opposite for me. I'm so tired of the boring and uninspiring flat design, that Apple may have convinced me to get an iPhone next time I upgrade. I don't even notice Android updates anymore, the past 3 or 4 just look and feel the same.
bitwize · 17h ago
Indeed, but Apple still wins when it comes to "wow factor". In a year's time Android will look old and busted, and Google will have to respond with a similar UI refresh. Of course it won't be as pretty, responsive, or slick but it will keep Android in the running.
Turns out "pretty" matters -- a lot -- in UI. Sucks for those of us who found Windows 9x, NEXTSTEP, or AmigaOS as the pinnacle of usability, but users find themselves more comfortable with a UI that looks modern even if said UI has other detriments like lack of affordance.
paulryanrogers · 15h ago
"Pretty" is subjective and changes every 6 months or so. I prefer no animations, no translucency, info density, and an accurate calculator no matter how fast I type. But for fashion reasons we cannot have nice things.
jajuuka · 4m ago
Hey, I got that reference! Completely agree though.
rickdeckard · 7h ago
The great thing about Material Design is that it lays a solid foundation to put such gaudy elements on top, because if the design-language is properly followed it can also be globally adjusted.
So expect Android Device Vendors to expand their theme engines to support more excessive GUI eyecandy than even before, "liquid glass" will be the minimum
The odd thing about this journey is, that once you're used to the simplicity of Material Design, adding such liquid/glass/leather/concrete/... elements to the rendering just degrades readability.
My guess is that Apple now cranked up the eyecandy again for everyone to follow, to then tone it down in the coming years, again appearing more "mature" than others. And in the end we will settle on something close to Material Design again, with more z-axis separation (more shadows, floating,...) and liquid state-transitions (changing elements affecting other nearby elements)
But hey, it's everyone's individual journey.
Larrikin · 13h ago
Material Design does not get updated very often. The only reason M3 is a big deal, is because it's the first major change in years.
hulitu · 8h ago
> be clear, legible, and get out of the way.
Which none of the current OSs do (except Linux without SystemD or BSDs, with a custom WM)
hackyhacky · 8h ago
Huh? What does systemd have to do with UX? If you want a bare bones Linux GUI, there are plenty of options, e.g. i3, which are completely independent of your preferred process 1.
benchly · 6h ago
Not the user you asked, but systemd has been controversial for a long time, long enough that I see the topic come up about once a month on various forums. There's a few folks who even consider it a bit fascist, I guess.
I fully understand the controversy about systemd, but the comment I replied to seemed to imply that systems was related to the Linux GUI, which it is not.
octo888 · 9h ago
"Unfortunately, Android has made changes which will make it much harder for us to port to Android 16 and future releases. It will also make adding support for new Pixels much more difficult. We're likely going to need to focus on making GrapheneOS devices sooner than we expected."
I can not love this development project enough its the peak of Android custom ROM. I am curious though as to what they have changed so much that it is going to be more difficult.
kyrra · 8h ago
Sounds like there are lots of causes: the project losing a senior dev who got conscripted to fight in a war. Not getting access to an OEM rom early on. Google changing a lot of the code around lock screen and other features (which makes porting over their custom changes on top of it take more time).
octo888 · 8h ago
Oh, they also had the issue that one of the leading devs got forcibly conscripted.
Quickly scanning GrapheneOS's posts I couldn't find any detail about the technical challenges. They'll probably post about it in the coming months
cenamus · 7h ago
I mean, conscription is per definition forced, isn't it?
octo888 · 5h ago
Is such nitpicking necessary? It derails the conversation
thyristan · 5h ago
Yes and no. In some countries and depending on peace or war times, you are forced into service, but you can choose to do military service or be a conscientious objector and work as a hospital aide.
lightdot · 2h ago
Even if it is mandatory in some form, there is plenty of nuance in the actual meaning before we come to calling "forced", isn't it?
jaoane · 6h ago
Okay, but what are the changes that made porting more difficult?
andrelaszlo · 6h ago
> Clearer, simpler calling with hearing devices
This is really important for me. Currently, hearing aids will turn to full duplex during calls, and be used as both input and output.
- Audio quality will be much worse, since the bandwidth is split between the two channels. This is obviously bad if you're already struggling to hear.
- Listening to music, for example, the volume controls on the hearing aids simultaneously turn surrounding sounds down and the music up, or vice versa. In "phone-call" mode, however, the phone hijacks the volume control so if you're struggling to hear on a call in a noisy environment there's no way to increase the volume without simultaneously amplifying the surrounding noise to painfully loud levels.
- As mentioned in the article, the microphones are designed to make me hear other people but not myself, making other people complain about my sound a lot. The best I can do is to say "sorry - either you'll hear me like this or I won't hear you at all"
This was designed for people using BT headsets of course, but hearing aids are not headsets.
On Linux I can just pick which microphone I want to use and which mode to use for Bluetooth. It's worked flawlessly for the last decade. To me, that's being "user friendly", good UX, or whatever you want to call it.
On Windows, you can go deep into some ancient, almost hidden, settings and disable the microphone on the BT device. On macOS, you can do the same using the old Audio MIDI Setup tool. It will periodically reset itself of course, like anything related to a11y on macOS. Not sure about iOS, would be interesting to know.
skybrian · 2h ago
It seems LE Audio is required for this feature and there aren’t many hearing aids that support it. Maybe I’ll check again in a year.
cAtte_ · 44m ago
> With Android 16, you can now activate Advanced Protection, Google’s strongest mobile device protection. It enables an array of robust device security features that protect you from online attacks, harmful apps, unsafe websites, scam calls and more. blah blah
let me guess: Advanced Protection will continue to gain features that restrict the freedom of users in the name of security and some time from now it will be mandatorily enabled for everyone. classic google!
nipperkinfeet · 13h ago
The release of Apple's new glass design has made Material Expressive appear aesthetically pleasing. Apple has declined so much, it's unfortunate.
thecupisblue · 4h ago
Unfortunately, yes.
Even tho I find both abhorrent abominations of design.
Glass is a pain in itself and "preparing for a future in spatial computing" is such a bullshit line when the spatial computing future is still 5-10 years away at minimum, and will not be achieved with Apple Vision, at least not in the current shape and form.
Meanwhile, Material Expressive is trying to force a 2020 graphic design trend onto mobile apps. It literally feels like designers at google just wanted to do something new and modern, so they went with a bland corporate "modern design" aesthetic, that reduces UX in name of UI - even tho they are like oooooh users found this button 30% faster, it would be well fucking expected, since highly-paid designers have just redesigned the thing.
Meanwhile, apps will continue to be made in their own style.
Apple will release liquid glass support with 26 and we'll see it appear in new apps. At the same time, Google will probably do a partial release of the new material components for developers, where a giant part of components will lack features described by the design spec, a bunch will be missing, and a bunch will be utterly unusable because Google can't create a good DX to save their lives.
awakeasleep · 10h ago
The first developer-only beta release?
visarga · 10h ago
Maybe Apple thought they need to make a desperate move to deflect from their lack of AI?
anticrymactic · 6h ago
Call me old, but I don't think users want AI. Apple summary's turned out barely helpful and that was the big, simple and easy AI application. Instead of a working voice assistant, what uses does AI (LLM) have on a smartphone?
thecupisblue · 4h ago
It's just that the implementations are shitty and designed for an "email-calendar-zoom" lifecycle corporate humans, and everyone is trying to "create a new frontier!" while ignoring the actual user behaviour - yes, we sure want to hear an LLM describe Kim K's new instagram post instead of seeing it.
TiredOfLife · 5h ago
> Apple summary's turned out barely helpful and that was the big, simple and easy AI application. Instead of a working voice assistant
That's the point. Apple is years behind on that stuff
edg5000 · 9h ago
"Samsung DeX has helped maximize productivity on phones, foldables and tablets for years. In Android 16, we worked closely with Samsung to develop desktop windowing, a new way to interact with your apps and content on large-screen devices." <- What does "working closely" mean for a company with infinite SW dev resources? What do they need from Samsung as far as software goes?
PS Let me make a guess for the future. Android Desktop mode will improve and people will ditch Windows and instead plug their phone into a USB-C dock that connects it to keyboard, mouse and display. (I'm on Linux myself, but I see people moving to Android from Windows)
rickdeckard · 6h ago
> What does "working closely" mean for a company with infinite SW dev resources? What do they need from Samsung as far as software goes?
Samsung already learned lessons from that journey, Google did not.
Also, the Android strategy is to not compete with Android vendors on OS features, they rather collaborate to make them contribute improvements back to the OS.
This strategy makes the project faster, cheaper, reduces fragmentation, removes a competitor (!), and most of all reduces brand-stickiness within the Android ecosystem (--> if Samsung DeX gets merged into Android, Samsung users can switch brands easier).
colorman · 6h ago
> most of all reduces brand-stickiness within the Android ecosystem (--> if Samsung DeX gets merged into Android, Samsung users can switch brands easier).
Why would Samsung want this? Why would they actively reduce their own competitiveness by giving away distinguished features?
rickdeckard · 4h ago
Because this strategy is not sustainable in the Android ecosystem, not even for Samsung.
Google applies different levers here:
1. Google is making your feature a commodity: Samsung is aware that Google plans to implement a native version of the feature, with or without Samsung. Google will make the feature available to ALL competitors of Samsung. Samsung get's the chance to shape it WITH Google or will later be forced to ensure compatibility with it (because it's not sustainable for Samsung to coexist with AND compete against an ecosystem used by ALL other Android vendors)
2. Google offers to take over some tasks: Google creates media attention for OS-Upgrades, creating pressure for Device-Vendors to adopt the new OS-version as soon as possible. The more a vendor deviates from the generic implementation, the more time & resources (and money) will be needed to adopt a new OS-version. So it's in the interest of Samsung to contribute as much of their fundamentals back upstream, so Google themselves takes care of maintaining it.
3. Google may make it mandatory at some point: The Android Compatibility Definition Document (CDD) defines the mandatory requirements for a device to be granted into the Android Ecosystem. Google is in control of this document and may at some point add specific behavior or features as a condition for Android compliance. This "Desktop Mode" has the potential to become the default behavior for Tablets, so Samsung may be required to adopt it for devices classified as Tablet by the CDD [0]
4. Google returns the favor: Samsung can trade collaboration on this feature for business opportunities with Google in other areas (i.e. Mixed Reality, B2B, Chromebooks,...), which potentially allows Samsung to be first in an entirely new market...
To reduce disparency between the Samsung fork and the upstream. Google will implement this feature anyway, then why not agree on implementation details to have less merge conflicts in the future?
RamRodification · 2h ago
> a guess for the future. Android Desktop mode will improve and people will ditch Windows and instead plug their phone into a USB-C dock that connects it to keyboard, mouse and display
This seems like such a killer feature to me. And every time I watch a video of someone trying out DeX it seems to work so well.
Yet it never seems to take off. I don't understand why. What am I missing? App ecosystem not good enough for business use?
"This is the year of mobile docking replacing workstations" has kind of become my "This is the year of Linux on the desktop.
nashashmi · 7h ago
This is the future that can’t be more ignored. It is like finally bringing call interrupt feature in internet dial up modems but only after everyone migrated to DSL. Windows Lumia was the first device to bring this functionality from an OS developer. Samsung had this for premium hardware. Apple came up with stage manager for iPad but left it out of iPhone. And no one really cares about this feature enough.
What is this feature in reality? It is just a projected screen with a certain resolution. And then it has apps that appear and open as resizable windows. Android had a downloadable app called something like Sense that did this but the app developers didn’t make apps with resizable windows at the time.
I guess part of the working closely is to cause developers to display apps that can be resized. And resize it for them in the event they refuse.
leakycap · 3h ago
> for a company with infinite SW dev resources
No such thing.
> Android Desktop mode will improve and people will ditch Windows
I agree; I would have switched from a desktop PC to my tablet in 2017 using DeX on my Samsung Tab S3 if enough websites would have worked with the DeX browser. I bet it's fine now, nearly a decade later.
Good on Google for not just stealing Samsung's work.
nikanj · 7h ago
My guess for the future is that no app maker dares to put efforts into Android Desktop mode because they worry Google will leave them high and dry, and in two-three releases the desktop mode will be abandoned because it has no app support
Was between submitting this and the link I did, but opted for the latter because the redesign is coming later. Thanks for adding this!
mrweasel · 19h ago
The notification feature looks nice. I've pretty much exclusively used iOS, but honestly notifications is a weak point for iOS, in my opinion. I frequently have the 1 notification on my home screen, but once unlocked notifications are pretty much impossible to find again.
Groxx · 19h ago
I'm certainly happy to see "force grouping". Grouping is a great opt-in enhancement, but it never should've been wholly in apps' control to begin with - apps in general cannot be trusted to not be dumb, gotta have user control to override them.
gorbypark · 5h ago
Yeah, I've not quite figured out what I'm doing wrong, but sometimes iOS notifications just disappear after clicking on them. I think it's when iOS decides my face isn't good enough (I have an iPhone 11 where the FaceID isn't as good as the newer phones), and then it tries three times and fails...then the notification is dismissed because I clicked on it but I haven't actually unlocked the phone? Then it's gone forever seemingly.
argsnd · 18h ago
I agree that Android notifications are broadly better than iOS but the live activities feature was a good idea and I’m quite glad that’s been added to Android now
throwaway314155 · 14h ago
From my perspective they merely added features Apple has had in notifications for years.
azinman2 · 9h ago
Agreed. I was surprised to see this, given the constant meme that iOS notifications are just copying Android.
robertoandred · 18h ago
Once unlocked, swipe down from the top of the screen to open Notification Center.
walthamstow · 5h ago
With a case on the phone, my success rate of swiping downwards like that is about 60%
int_19h · 13h ago
On iOS the annoying thing about this gesture is that it only does that if you swipe down from the center. If you do it from top right corner (which is rather generously defined), you get shortcuts instead.
p_j_w · 12h ago
It works if you swipe down from the left side of the screen.
sudomateo · 9h ago
The more I compare Material 3 Expressive to Liquid Glass the more I'm excited to switch back to a Pixel. I'm a fan of the use of color, motions, and different shapes versus transparency, minimal contrast, and little color.
I'm on a iPhone 13 Pro Max right now that's still doing well but starting to show battery capacity age. Plus, it's the only non-USB-C device I own so I'd be happy to get rid of it.
villedespommes · 18h ago
I'm really excited about the Desktop mode, now I can finally break free of Samsung!
ZuLuuuuuu · 15h ago
I was also very excited about it and that's why I immediately upgraded to Android 16. But it turns out that it is not part of this update. The same with the new Material design, it doesn't come with Android 16 update. So weird that they announced both of these features as if they are part of Android 16.
villedespommes · 7h ago
They actually say in the announcement, it's supposed to be rolled out "later this year."
Shame, I liked it very much since Samsung phones are expensive
nfriedly · 1h ago
Wow, they are terrible at naming things!
culopatin · 15h ago
I remember my Atrix had a desktop mode back in… 2011? Something like that.
nashashmi · 7h ago
Is this something windows phone app can’t do?
graemep · 5h ago
Its irrelevant. Windows phone does not have the apps most people need.
Phones are a duopoly reinforced by networks effects. Only Google and Apple matter.
nashashmi · 59m ago
I meant the phone link app for windows.
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 17h ago
As am I though it's not in this release.
wilkinsonsmooth · 1h ago
With the discussion specifically the last few days of UI themes on iOS and Android, I haven't really seen any one point out the biggest difference between the two. On Android you can change basically everything you want. You don't like the way the new theme makes your apps looks? Then find something you do like instead. You can change all your app icons, the colours of all your buttons, you can change out your home app altogether. There are certain things you are stuck with depending on your device manufacturer and their own brew of Android, but you can customize the device way more than any Apple device.
That's one of the things that has kept me away from Apple devices, is that you can't change basic things about how they look or operate. It's all on Apple's terms. I also dislike how they add the most basic things, like changing the background on your chats, and act like they just invented it.
wilkinsonsmooth · 1h ago
One thing about the Apple Liquid Glass announcement from the other day is neither here nor there is how it was worded. They kept referring to it as a 'new material' and I thought at first it was a joke or something because to me it looked like a UI update. I thought it was all tongue-in-cheek maybe but they just kept up the idea that it was a real physical material for a lot of the post about it.
flyinghamster · 19h ago
Oh great, I get to learn how to use my phone all over again. We need a "leave this the $EXPLETIVE alone" setting for our user interfaces.
demosthanos · 19h ago
This knee-jerk reaction is correct more often than not (see the terrible iOS redesign announced earlier), but in this case it seems like it might be incorrect?
I looked through the highlights linked here and the full "What's New" page [0] and am pleasantly surprised to see a few new features but no major overhauls of existing ones.
But thats also just what they're trying to advertise. They always make more changes than listed.
And its the sneaky ones that get through...like when I upgraded to 15 my home button no longer exists when the screen is locked, which effectively makes google maps navigation stuck on the screen unless you stop navigation by pressing back repeatedly
demosthanos · 12h ago
This is never how the marketing around the big UI overhauls that OP is worried about works. A sneaky UI overhaul that's launched with no fanfare doesn't get anyone promoted, so why bother?
> like when I upgraded to 15 my home button no longer exists when the screen is locked, which effectively makes google maps navigation stuck on the screen unless you stop navigation by pressing back repeatedly
Smaller things like this, sure.
FYI, swiping up from the bottom will get into the lock screen and then once unlocked into the home screen.
petee · 4h ago
Its actually a big change, as swiping up just opens the Google Maps bottom menu. The home row replaces gesture nav (which I can't stand...another UI feature they've been slowing pushing)
My current workaround is to trampoline off another program, like Spotify, or the BT settings, that has a constant notification then i can click that which opens the lock screen.
But even a small sounding change can be significant. After the last Gemini push, the alarm clock now would "stop" on voice command, but it would activate for random noises you made, cancelling my alarm for work; the settings were hidden in another app, not the alarm. It wasn't even promoted so nobody knew. This release mentions even more Gemini integrations...
demosthanos · 56s ago
> Its actually a big change, as swiping up just opens the Google Maps bottom menu.
On my phone there are two swipe zones at the bottom. The one that's actually on the screen opens the Google Maps menu. But if I swipe from off screen up it works as I described. Maybe your phone doesn't have enough surface area below the screen to distinguish the two?
danieldk · 18h ago
Yep, I just installed on my Pixel 9 and it looks barely different from Android 15. Most of the changes seem to be in the plumbing. Material Design Expressive will only arrive in the next quarterly release.
nsriv · 18h ago
Yeah I think this is being lost in this rollout (and a little bit in these comments). Expressive is in the next update, since this year is a big hike up in the calendar for phone release.
butlike · 18h ago
The issue is this reaction never sticks. Everyone's up in arms, but would you really want to go back to Android KitKat or iOS 2? Probably not for more than novelty, right?
layer8 · 18h ago
I would really want to go back to something like the look of iOS 1-6, with clearly discernible UI controls vs. content and labels. Not the real-world-mimicry skeuomorphism, but the look of the standard UI controls.
Pxtl · 18h ago
Web ruined everything. Got everybody thinking that flag rectangles were cool and consistent ui frameworks were old fashioned.
bigstrat2003 · 18h ago
Yes, of course I would. Android UI has been horrible ever since 12.
AndroidKitKat · 13h ago
If it was usable with the apps I need today, I would switch back to Android 4.4.2 or iOS 6.1.3 in a heartbeat. Not sure how long I would stay before the rose tint in my glasses returns to normal, but I would certainly love to try.
pas · 17h ago
yes, who cares, let me launch apps and put widgets on the screen, what else?
I like a lot of the new features, but the visual (mis)communication language is terrible.
dzikimarian · 17h ago
While I like new notification management or control buttons on top of the drawer, I really wouldn't have problem using them in Holo design.
justsomehnguy · 17h ago
I can live another decade without an app what groups three options (one of it is "About") under a hamburger menu on a completely blank screen.
The interface of Kitkat and the UI design is fine! It looks like what Apple is moving to.
Of course I want accessibility, security and technical improvements.
voidfunc · 19h ago
UI engineers need to justify their existence.
hadlock · 18h ago
I genuinely think this is the case, and why products don't have a LTS interface, even though they ought to. Sign me right up for the 10 year LTS interface. I can't recall any features in gmail that were added that I actually use besides labels, which was an early launch feature. But it's been redesigned about 9 times in the last 20 years, each time with increasing white space and/or a slightly different font.
lupire · 18h ago
LTS interface is expensive for minimal benefit.
kasabali · 3h ago
More expensive than re-designing it every 2 years?
SchemaLoad · 13h ago
If you need an LTS interface you might be best with one of those old people smartphones with the big numberpad.
rvba · 8h ago
If you need change for the sake of change, then maybe your time is worthless.
Lerc · 18h ago
UI engineers should be like vaccines. If they do their job well, you should never see why they were needed.
jrgaston · 17h ago
That so many do not see why vaccines are needed is a serious problem.
DannyBee · 17h ago
Sure, but what is happening here is basically the equivalent of us engineering current-vaccine resistant viruses, along with new vaccines, and releasing them all together, so that people know vaccines are important and are forced to get new vaccines to be safe.
We shouldn't do that, in the same way we shouldn't make sure people know UI is important by changing it completely every n years.
nawgz · 18h ago
Definitely. Those pesky UI engineers are always rewriting and refactoring and reworking stuff. Me, a talented backend engineer? I would never. My code was perfect initially and there's no pressure to show deliverables from my manager since they know I'm the best.
stackskipton · 18h ago
Huh? Sure, UI code can change, no one is arguing that but API changes, just like for backend, need to be extremely thought out and slow. For UI Engineers, UI is API to the user and for some reason, when they blow up their API, they get praised for it. Most backend engineers are change API at much much slower rate.
rezonant · 18h ago
Are you speaking in general, or is there anything specific about this update that has you upset?
eurekin · 19h ago
I think this topic returns with some regularity... It often ends with justification about the need for a promotion of a particular executive that is involved with that inevitably undeniable success
legitster · 18h ago
None of the changes have actually been that crazy. And at least on my Pixel Google has made new features opt-in after major updates.
johannes1234321 · 17h ago
Bo worries, Gemini AI will take care of that! The phone will now what you want (and show more ads)
echelon · 19h ago
I wish we had a dozen phone companies instead of just two.
Please write your legislators and demand antitrust action against Apple and Google for the following:
- Lack of One-Tap Web Installs (without scare walls or buried settings menus). This is the biggest stranglehold they have. Web installs can be done safely and securely via app signing, permissions, and signature blacklists.
- First-party defaults for all the platform pieces: Messaging, Payments, Photos, Music, Media, Navigation, etc. Every single one of these lets Apple and Google squeeze another industry and forces us into a pit of no-innovation.
- Default search, in the case of Google, which ropes you into their search / ads funnel. They've also bought it out on Apple's end.
- Default browser tech, in the case of Apple. It prevents innovation on app runtimes and deployment and forces you to develop using Apple technologies.
Winning the mobile rights battle will not only liberate us from the "promo cycle" plague, it'll stop the tax on innovation and introduce healthy competition.
If American legislators and the DOJ / FTC won't act, then every other country should. If enough countries put pressure on Apple and Google, we'll start to see competition reemerge. Right now it's impossible to develop a new smartphone entrant. Even Meta and Microsoft with their nearly-unlimited capital couldn't fight off Apple and Google.
YCombinator would probably be happy if smartphones became open platforms. They'd see healthier margins for startups and less direct platform competition. a16z is pushing for this. Just because Apple and Google were there first twenty years ago shouldn't give them an eternity to rule the entire category.
legitster · 18h ago
As someone who owned a Symbian, a Palm OS, and a Windows phone - I kind of refuse to listen to this argument anymore. I voted with my wallet and all I have to show for it were years of mockery from my peers and a drawerful of bricked devices.
rawling · 19h ago
> - First-party defaults for all the platform pieces: Messaging, Payments, Photos, Music, Media, Navigation, etc. Every single one of these lets Apple and Google squeeze another industry and forces us into a pit of no-innovation.
Don't/can't Android manufacturers provide alternative defaults here?
jsight · 18h ago
Yes, and most people hate it when they do that.
echelon · 18h ago
Probably the biggest case for a full-on Google breakup. Android being split from the platform components.
A new company probably still couldn't develop platform pieces if that chink in the armor was made available by the DOJ. But if Google were split along those lines into two or more companies, it would provide nice and healthy gradients on both the hardware/OS and the platform/software sides of the market.
We really do need a Google breakup.
isaacaggrey · 18h ago
I agree with your parent post but why would a breakup not equally apply to Apple?
echelon · 18h ago
It should! But the parent was referring to Android manufacturers.
warkdarrior · 18h ago
> Probably the biggest case for a full-on Google breakup. Android being split from the platform components.
Isn't core Android open source? As long as you do not need Google apps and Google services, you can use Android OSS right now without Google's platform components.
diffeomorphism · 17h ago
Wasn't that what all the 2015 antitrust stuff was about?
Manufacturers were contractually forbidden from doing that.
rawling · 16h ago
Thanks, that helped me find this which does sound like it:
Samsung literally provides their own alternative for all of these.
diffeomorphism · 5h ago
No, they provide them in addition but not as replacements/defaults. That is what the discussion was about.
crazygringo · 17h ago
> I wish we had a dozen phone companies instead of just two.
Counterpoint: the resources currently dedicated to Apple and Android would then be spread across a dozen operating systems, assuming constant consumer spending.
Maybe you think stasis is a good thing, but I (mostly) appreciate the progress iOS and Android have made over the past nearly two decades. I wouldn't want to currently be stuck at iOS 3 or 4 as opposed to iOS 18.
Assuming you actually mean a dozen phone operating systems. Because we already do have lots of phone companies, but they mostly all use Android.
rjsw · 18h ago
You can buy phones now that are not from Apple or Google, I have a Nokia KaiOS one.
lupire · 18h ago
What you want is a government sponsored phone OS. We had competition but software has economy of scale. No one wants to pay the cost of developing a phone OS used by a small fraction of users. Windows and Palm proved that.
And Samsung does sell phones with customized UI and apps.
charcircuit · 15h ago
There are more than a dozen phone companies: Google, Samsung, Motorola, Apple, HTC, Xiaomi, Huawei, LG, etc.
delfinom · 13h ago
HTC is dead. LG has exited the phone market.
Motorola is barely hanging out.
Turns out people tend to gravitate to a few choices....
Xioami/Huawei are in essence banned from the US.
prmoustache · 9h ago
That is probably a US only viewpoint. Everywhere else in the world apart from Samsung, Xiaomi is super big as well as brands such as Oppo, Realme, Honor, Pocophone, TCL, Oneplus, Huawei, Motorola and many others I just can't remember from the top of my head.
i have the feeling that for anything in the US, everything has to end up in monopolies or bipartisan approach. People just seem to buy what their neighbors/coworkers/siblings buy without trying to do a bit of research. Some kind of deep vulnerability to virality. My mate has an iphone, I need an iphone, my neighbor beagged about their Thermomix, I need a Thermomix too immediately.
benchly · 6h ago
To be fair, in the US we can still walk into a Best Buy* and purchase a Motorola (my choice), Nokia, or OnePlus. In that environment, however, you will also notice that Samsung and Apple are the dominant device manufacturers, with consumers looking at Google phones as the stable alternative (for some reason).
There's also Amazon, which is often cheaper, but I am a bit old school in the regard that I like to physically use the device before I purchase it.
Either way, the perceived restrictions are more of a self-imposed thing rooted in our consumer conditioning here, which is this weird blend of "customer choice" and "all choices are basically the same" that gets muddy very, very quickly. Most people I talk to, especially the non-technical ones, do not realize that my $150US Moto is serving me just as well as an $600US Samsung would, with my needs being all the common types of communications, reliable 5G, a decent camera and run specific apps I use to control some cloud infrastructure while on the go. It's difficult to feel sympathy when I hear people complain about paying Apple $1000US just to look at TikTok or use Discord. We are guided on what to buy via the marketing machine instead of examining our use-cases and researching a suitable product before purchasing.
It's all silly bullshit, really.
kabdib · 19h ago
bring back the Windows phone! (srsly, they were pretty nice to develop for)
ozim · 17h ago
It is good for your brain, it is an excellent exercise. /s
SchemaLoad · 10h ago
Unironically think a lot of HN users brains have hardened up after using the same shitty linux DE from the 90s for too long, to the point a slightly changed border radius or color leaves them unable to function.
smusamashah · 17h ago
Not available for Pixel/XL, Pixel 2/XL, Pixel 3/XL, Pixel 3a/XL, Pixel 4/XL, Pixel 4a, Pixel 4a 5G, Pixel 5, or Pixel 5a.
I have Pixel 4a and I wanted to get Android 16 to get the smaller notification tile buttons back.
sambf · 6h ago
Is the 4a still supported with security updates? What OS are you running? GrapheneOS stopped support so I scored a cheap 8a but I really dislike it. Had to boot my 4a again for some reason the other day and I realized I really missed it, it's so small and lightweight compared to the 8a.
pulkitanand · 11h ago
Nice to see someone still using a 4a. I'm still rocking a 3a XL with lineage (massively resisting the urge to upgrade to a Pixel 9). I'm quite certain they'll do a lineage release for our phones for Android 16, hoping to use my phone for as much longer as possible!
walthamstow · 5h ago
How's the battery? Have you ever replaced it?
smusamashah · 1h ago
I am using second-hand 4a which I bought more than year ago off eBay. On low to medium use, it still manages ~1-1.5 day on average. Battery is solid. My wife has Pixel 4, I like camera result of that one slightly better. 4a is a bit blurry in comparison.
pradn · 12h ago
It's easier to keep doing something incremental than to fundamentally change things.
One avenue these phone OS, and any consumer OS, can pursue is making it easy to string together app sub-steps. An app can be "cracked open" into sub-step a) either by developers themselves b) or by a backend process at app submission time. The backend process could look at the screens, and see what the user journeys are - this is within reach for current LLMs. An "sub-step" here is like taking a flights app and turning it into different types of search functions - search by date, location, points etc. So an app becomes a bunch of interfaces.
Once you have these "sub-steps" a local LLM can string them together, because it can understand their inputs, outputs, and behaviors.
Actually executing the sub-steps would require the OS to execute the app in the background and run the sub-steps for the user. This would be akin to what browser agents do right now
So this is a way of semantically extracting the "verbs" in existing apps.
With a library of these "sub-steps" in apps, combined with similar ones extracted from the internet - you could chain together the web and native worlds, in the service of the user.
It's easier on phone OSs because phone apps are usually already logged in. It's realistic for iOS to just do a bunch of stuff for you in the background. You really can probably get finance info from all your finance apps, for example.
I'm not saying this is necessarily the answer - but re-thinking the OS in this sort of what is what would be an actually ambitious thing for Apple or Google to do. All these small tweaks are opiates.
thecupisblue · 4h ago
This is already supported by intent system on Android and partially by the new intents in iOS.
It is now up to developers to expose this.
hwc · 18h ago
If Android is getting desktop windowing, how long until I can just plug my phone into a monitor and keyboard and have a usable computer?
no_carrier · 13h ago
It feels like we're getting very close. The recent addition of a Debian VM into Android (I believe it's even in AOSP) leads me to believe we'll be getting Linux apps on Android in the same way ChromeOS gets them. Imagine being able to run VSCode off your phone anywhere you can plug into a monitor.
I also think we'll get a more desktop ready version of Chrome. If we get these things I think it'll be a gamechanger.
cbm-vic-20 · 18h ago
You can plug a keyboard and mouse into your Andriod phone for many years. I haven't had one work with a monitor yet, though.
hwc · 17h ago
It almost works. But the monitor just mirrors the phone, including its weird aspect ratio and font size.
It's almost usable for playing movies on a TV, but that's about it.
izacus · 16h ago
You could do that for years with Samsung phones already.
fsflover · 16h ago
No, you can't. There's no usable desktop software that you can run there. Artificial restrictions will stay, although might be slightly relaxed. In contrast with Librem 5 running GNU/Linux (my daily driver) this is already a reality.
izacus · 16h ago
This is just weird goal post moving.
const_cast · 11h ago
I don't think so, this has always been the limitation and why things like Windows ARM and Windows Phone fail over and over again. The interface part is easy, I guess, the application part is not. If you can figure out the application part, then you have a real shot at disrupting the market.
So far, only Apple has figured out the applications part on MacOS, and only partially. They still have wierdo iPadOS. Microsoft is doing Windows on ARM... again. We'll see how long that lasts.
And the promised WebGPU for Java and Kotlin, discussed at Vulkanised 2025 apparently didn't made the cut to Android 16.
AbuAssar · 16h ago
I'll take Material Expressive over iOS's liquid glass any day.
tail_exchange · 13h ago
I'm on the other camp. I'm so tired of the boring flat design, I'm actually considering switching to an iPhone.
bitpush · 12h ago
Are you not worried about accessibility issues?
tail_exchange · 11h ago
No. Like always, there will be visual accessibility features such as high contrast, reducing screen motion, dark mode, and reduced transparency. I never had to use them, but according to a family member who is blind, Apple is excellent in terms of accessibility.
Warning: The May 2025 update for Pixel 6 (6, 6 Pro, 6a) and Pixel 8 (8, 8 Pro, 8a) devices contains a bootloader update that increments the anti-roll back version for the bootloader. This prevents the device from rolling back to previous vulnerable versions of the bootloader. After flashing the May 2025 update on these devices you won't be able to flash and boot older Android 15 builds.
rkagerer · 18h ago
What's with the AI-generated "Key Takeaways" crap on the right column of that page? No thanks, the content is short enough I can easily skim it on my own.
autoexec · 4h ago
>What's with the AI-generated "Key Takeaways" crap on the right column of that page?
Desperation
swah · 14h ago
Also a bit sick of the iOS update...
Whats the MVP (minimum viable pixel) nowadays? Google lineup is super expensive in my country, probably zero support, so I'm afraid of investing.
I tried a (used) 6a, it was lovely (compared to my Samsung) until it wouldn't scroll while charging (a known issue) so I returned it.
fcpk · 17h ago
One extremely disappointing thing that Android has been getting under the hood with Google images is ... Play integrity.
This used to be a relatively simplistic system with three tiers:
0 - you are not certified for anything
1 - basic integrity, you need to have a genuine android device running google play services
2 - device integrity, you need to have a genuine android device with core requirements on play and no rooting
3 - strong integrity, you need a locked bootloader and signed image with recent security update
This API/requirements set was uniquely put by pressure from various vendors(think banks and various "security-certification" obsessed parties), and was already quite unpleasant, as it excludes any form of rooting, even if your root-access is adb only. But it gets worse as now non-official images are getting excluded not only from strong integrity[0] but also device integrity. Numerous apps are now requiring device integrity and hence won't be usable even on a locked, signed android image if it's not google or vendor-official.
It actually gets worse. Google has been silently restricting the api results(as of may):
- basic requires a certified device with an android platform key attestation
- device now requires a hardware verified boot, with locked bootloader and recent security patch. This excludes lots of devices
- strong requires security patch on all partitions
And it gets even worse. On recent play stores & android versions, as apps have to be installed or updated by google play to get a full integirty response. no more sideloading APKs or alternative stores.
This is nothing but a clear move to a full lock-in to play store, where the majority of vendors live, to end up with a fully locked a-la-apple ecosystem. This doesn't improve security, people that know still have ways to bypass those restrictions when needed. All it does is give the illusion of safety.
I would personally feel like:
1 - rooting should be allowed on a certified device with most apps still working. This could be done with a locked bootloader too if they provided such an image for debug.
2 - alternative os, like graphene, should be given a way to pass all attestations, as well as alternative stores, provided they follow a set of constraints.
With this in mind, I can't be positive about android 16 and new versions going down a grim locked future.
I'm going to trial/move to iOS because of this. If I'm going to live in a walled garden, might as well live in the better one.
Hopefully I can live with the shittier notifications/keyboard/lack of back button; I think the rest of iOS is overall better than a degoogled android experience.
I also don't really understand the point of all these strong integrity checks being enforced e.g. with banking apps or the alike. You can already just go to the corresponding website (and do the same actions) on a compromised device, how does restricting the app version provide any benefit?
spaqin · 9h ago
> rooting should be allowed on a certified device
i don't think this is enough - rooting should be allowed on any device that you own, rather than the device owning you.
fcpk · 5h ago
I do agree, but I understand that we live in an imperfect world with people needing some level of reassurance even if it's pointless...
charcircuit · 14h ago
>rooting should be allowed on a certified device
I don't think this should be allowed because rooting breaks the Android security model. Devices that don't follow at least Android's security model should not be allowed that way apps understand the security model of Android.
>grapheneos should be given a way to pass all attestations
There already is the Android attestation API that can be used to attest grapheneos. But I do think it would be nice if Play Integrity would expand beyond just Play Protect Certified devices, to devices which can prove they offer a similar or greater level of security.
fcpk · 5h ago
I think it's a bit disingenuous to mix together the security model and the ability to do things on a device you own.
Should the default android be locked, with no root, play store verifying apps, etc, absolutely. This is great for the average user that desires nothing more than just running play store apps.
Should you have the ability to run what you want on your phone, and copy the data from the app that you installed, after accepting the risks? absolutely.
It is already non trivial to install root, and adb locked root for example makes things vastly more secure even in that case(that is, you can only adb su into your phone, you can't grant the permission to an app directly). Especially with locked adb having fingerprint verification.
Play integrity by locking everything to the Google/Main vendors is making it less and less possible to run non-primary images/oses. And it's not for users security, it's for apps security, so this is purely to reassure the industry, and yet it is just another security theater. Running with strong integrity on a rooted device is possible with semi-significant effort, and that's good. It means that we're not relying on security by obscurity, and we can look at what's running on the phones.
sagarpatil · 10h ago
The worst part is I’m so deep in Apple ecosystem that it’s impossible to move to Android.
anticrymactic · 4h ago
I'm genuinely so interested what this ecosystem is? Where do you use it? How does it help you?
I have asked every apple user around me and they just tell me about photo sync and iCloud.
wilkinsonsmooth · 2h ago
I worked for Apple Support over the phone for a while and had to deal with people's photos issues. And let me tell you that the way iCloud photo syncing works is basically only to lock people in. It's just convoluted enough that the average user won't have a good idea of where exactly their photos are stored. Especially when they run out of space on their phone (very easy to do when 128gb is still the base storage space). The UI makes it seem like the only option is to buy iCloud storage and once you're paying for storage then it really makes it unclear how you could access your photos on anything other than an Apple device.
That alone is enough to lock most users in to the ecosystem. The idea of figuring out how to transfer all your photos to an Android device is too much work for most people.
unixhero · 5h ago
People say that to themselves.
clearleaf · 14h ago
I wonder what method they've employed to make SD cards even more useless this time around.
I'm surprised they didn't have live notifications or desktop windowing. I guess features like that go from Android OEMs, to iOS, then to Android itself. Do Google have their own Pixel versions of things like that before they make it to Android though?
ptx · 17h ago
I'm pretty sure notifications could always be updated after being created. The actual change seems to be not that they now support "live updates" (as the article says) but that the UI now supports a customizable progress bar:
https://developer.android.com/about/versions/16/features/pro...
t1234s · 18h ago
Can you use an external monitor with a usb-c hub and a bluetooth mouse/keyboard in desktop mode?
nfriedly · 18h ago
It sounds like the new features are coming later this year.
But, some Samsung and Motorola phones already support that (DeX and "Ready For"), and there's a kind of janky version that you can unlock in developer settings for phones (including Pixel 8 & 9) that have video output but no built-in desktop mode.
jakub_g · 18h ago
On Pixel 8 + Android 15, I can already connect an external monitor via "screen mirroring" feature. My keyboard and mouse, which are plugged into USB ports in the monitor, do work.
However the annoying thing is that many apps which display video (official TV streaming apps from my ISP etc.) detect the presence of an external display, and prevent video playback there. Sigh.
Rebelgecko · 15h ago
You already can if you're not picky about window manager features
ge96 · 17h ago
Funny my phone is cheap usually a version behind. Eventually I notice the performance and get another one or the screen was destroyed. Sucks how the version is capped too by the company ahh well pro/con.
throw_m239339 · 19h ago
I remember my first android device, it had like 512MO of RAM (and storage), and it was blazing fast, it could be used as a WIFI repeater too (which is why I still have it, although it 2.5G...). Fast forward 13 year later or so, if your android device doesn't have at least 8gig of RAM and 64gigs of storage, then it's pretty much useless given how bloated the OS (and the apps) have become...
So basically, Android low end has become useless, I remember 10+ years ago having to search for something very fast because of the context, like something on a map or surf the web for info. It was still super responsive with 512MO...
I tried a few cheap Android phones recently... they are simply unresponsive, google apps will suddenly shut down because the device is out of memory or something... or you try to make a call, you make a mistake so you try to hang up, the phone will refuse to hang up because it's stuck! you'd have to remove the battery to quickly cancel the call! What the hell happened with that OS?
esseph · 19h ago
The same thing that happens to every OS, features and bloat.
That said, Pixel devices all the way. No gross UI reskin, no having multiple copies of the same type of app (Samsung camera vs android camera, dialers, keyboards, etc.).
Fast, stable, good features.
If it's not a pixel device, you're probably going to have a "mid" experience.
surgical_fire · 18h ago
I had 2 OnePlus devices in the past 7 years, and I had a great experience with both.
Very stable, nice UI, no hardware/batery issues, very responsive.
I don't know if I trust Google to make decent hardware. I am highly suspicious of Pixel phones.
MostlyStable · 19h ago
Which is unfortunate, because one of the strengths of Android was the diversity of the hardware ecosystem (although that strength has been lessening as manufacturers have all begun to converge on a common set of hardware features). You could get a phone that had the features you in particular wanted. Needing to buy a particular phone to get a good experience is a bummer.
I say that as someone who has had several Pixel phones (and Nexus before that) and been happy with them. But yeah, my most recent phone is a low-end Motorola that I picked specifically for a set of hardware features, but unfortunately, as the parent commenter describes, it has been a _terrible_ experience for a variety of reasons. I got the hardware features I wanted (mostly, no one makes the full set I want anymore, see above), and it turns out that I had to give up a halfway-decent software experience.
Eavolution · 6h ago
I was hoping over time the hardware beginning to get more similar would make the hardware more standardised and open like it is on PC allowing easier rom development, but that seems to be a pipe dream.
chasil · 18h ago
Can you unlock the bootloader on your Motorola and install LineageOS or something else?
If not, are you able to buy another Motorola phone where this is possible?
No comments yet
dzonga · 18h ago
pixel devices are nice when they work. but damn hardware quality is shoddy in terms of aging. my pixel 6a battery got swollen with less than 3 years. I have a first gen iphone se still in use. I also had a pixel 3a that I couldn't find a screen replacement for luckily for me -- google accepted a trade in when the 6a got released.
the pixels have a overheating problem -- this you can google for.
oh yeah, when automatic android updates happen a bunch of your settings are reset even something simple as UI-theme.
rstat1 · 17h ago
>> the pixels have a overheating problem -- this you can google for.
People keep saying this, but that's been every phone I've ever had. They all get hot in hot weather and under heavy use.
thaumasiotes · 18h ago
My Pixel 6a (my current phone) has no battery swelling.
On the other hand, it takes over a minute to decide that it's confirmed a GPS location. The Pixel 3a will do the same thing in more like one second. The utter failure of the GPS on the Pixel 6a (and possibly other related phones?) seems to be a known, common issue.
I do have overheating problems. The phone won't work outdoors in climates that are less nice than California. Which surprises me, since that's most of the world.
TiredOfLife · 5h ago
> No gross UI reskin
Pixel experience is literally same thing as Samsung One UI - a gross UI reskin
> no having multiple copies of the same type of app (Samsung camera vs android camera, dialers, keyboards, etc
Google is the one that forces the multiple copies of same app thing
cptskippy · 18h ago
My last 2 phones were Motorola and my most recent is a Pixel. Meh...
The Motos came with very little bloatware that was easy enough to uninstall or disable. There are just as many new Google Apps that just weren't available on Moto phones that I've been uninstalling from my Pixel:
Google One, Google Tasks, Google News, Google Lens, Google Support Services, Google PDF Viewer, Google Play Books, Google Pixel Watch, Pixel Buds, Pixel Studio, Gemini, Safety, Find Hub, Google Home
It's not 3rd party, but it's still bloatware.
silisili · 19h ago
> I tried a few Android cheap phones recently
IMO that's the big 'problem' with Android - any fly by night company can make a phone with it, which sours those people on Android as a whole and rightfully so. They may not understand that it's not Android itself that is awful, but the low spec'd phone or 'enhancements' some company added.
Higher end Android phones generally don't have any of these problems at all. I can't even remember the last time mine had something crash or had to restart. I generally stick to high end Moto, Pixel, or Oneplus(current). Some people like Samsung but their skin/os is too heavy handed for me.
paxys · 19h ago
It's a problem that 95% of the world can afford to purchase a smartphone with a modern OS?
wijwp · 17h ago
That's why "problem" is in quotes. It's a self-inflicted and purposeful problem that trades a unified perception of Android through flagship devices for broad reach.
Ray20 · 10h ago
Disgusting. The EU asap needs to pass some law or something to force the monopolists to fix that.
Dylan16807 · 14h ago
The problem is that 2GB is considered low spec in the first place.
Force phone devs to use worse phones.
nicoburns · 18h ago
> I remember my first android device, it had like 512MO of RAM (and storage), and it was blazing fast,
Which device was that? My memory of early Android devices is that they were anything but fast. It's only relatively recently that they've caught up to iPhones in terms of responsiveness.
goodburb · 18h ago
$400 for a 3GB RAM is a "budget" phone?
I paid $200 for a Moto G85 5G with 12GB RAM, 256GB storage last year.
Alternatives in the same range: CMF Phone 1/2 and OnePlus Nord CE4 Lite 5G
jauntywundrkind · 18h ago
The new(er) mid range chipsets indeed are so so nice now. Pretty/fully modern process nodes, battery efficient, still very respectable cores.
Really glad to see we've finally landed at a place where finding an old refurbished flagship is not the only logical choice, where the mid-range has a lot going on for it.
Just wish we had some mainline kernel support, could put Debian on these things! I've had a OnePlus 6T (2018) that supposedly does pretty ok that I've been meaning to try Mobian on, and it felt like for a bit Snapdragons were getting better and better Linux support. But that motion seems to have really tapered off in the last ~2 years?
chihuahua · 13h ago
I had a Moto X4 which was quite cheap for $200 or $250. It did everything perfectly. No discernable lag for any operation. Plenty of storage. Great battery life. I can't imagine "needing" more phone than this.
Unfortunately it reached the end of its (security) updates so I figured it would be unsafe to keep using it since I have banking apps on the phone. Sad.
goodburb · 13h ago
Yes, $1k phones have the same issue.
resource_waste · 19h ago
>I tried a few Android cheap phones recently... they are simply unresponsive
I got $100 motorolas and outside of snapchat and the keyboard being responsive, it did the job for months.
I was a bit impressed.
I no longer am afraid to break my expensive phone because those worked in the short term.
ferguess_k · 18h ago
Let me guess -- they revamped the UI again.
tootie · 18h ago
As a long time Android user, I scarcely even notice OS updates. My last 3 phones have felt like they were about the same device.
melodyogonna · 18h ago
Interesting that these are no longer tied to latest Pixel phone releases
nsriv · 17h ago
They're bringing up the phone release to a late August unveil and shipping this year, and the Material Expressive update will ship after that, so it seems a big one time shift to attempt to time it with hardware.
zb3 · 18h ago
Ah, so the "Linux Terminal" app is not yet ready for any announcements. This app with 3D acceleration enabling running graphical linux systems is what I'm waiting for, but it looks like we'll wait another year..
fhcbix · 10h ago
Right? It would be the single most useful feature for me. Unfortunately my device doesn't have libavf which seems to be needed for this to work. I don't even need 3d acceleration, a simple debian VM with docker would make me happy already.
chasil · 18h ago
Connectbot has a local terminal that I have always used for this purpose.
zb3 · 17h ago
But what I was talking about was kernel virtualization where the guest OS performs at native speed and without any hacks.
adhamsalama · 17h ago
How does it enable graphical Linux systems? I mean, I did already do this by running KDE Plasma on Termux, but why would Google allow this?
zb3 · 17h ago
They did with "VmLauncherApp" and I was able to run Fedora, however GPU acceleration didn't work.
Now, of course they removed the app :)
But there's a "linux terminal" app which at least in theory should allow something similar since GPU acceleration was mentioned, but the app is limited "on user builds"..
Note this uses kernel virtualization, so it's faster and more properly separated.
ChrisArchitect · 19h ago
Remember when these launches used to revolve around the codenames. This one is Baklava. As much as Material-era numbered releases have a style, I miss the personality of the confectionary-themed marketing.
nsriv · 18h ago
I liked the unveils of the confectionary themed Androids on the campus!
old_bayes · 18h ago
I love the detailed security features. Exactly what I want in my OS.
eth0up · 11h ago
Yay! Less control, more limitations and background shenanigans.
Anyone ever stop to notice how skillful google is at putting lipstick on pigs?
To watch their artisans in action, simply do:
Settings/System/DeveloperOptions/RunningServices and tick Show Cached Processes after absorbing that in your immediate view, which will have included the 23 running processes under Play Services.
Yeah yeah. There has to be lots of stuff in such a glorious suite. Of course it's crawling with things completely irrelevant to the user. We all know this. But can it ever go too far?
I honestly don't feel more secure since that amazing update that blocks access to directories even through USB. Blocking Ghost Commander is one thing, but USB?
I won't make a scathing list of complaints here. Each update tends to beg the task though.
Edit: It's really complex, right? Google is honest and forthright. So they'd never lie about absolutely needing Precise Location to use Maps. Clearly it's necessary. While using pure GPS appears for all practical purposes to do everything I need, in truth, not having Scanning activated threatens much destruction and a subconsciously worse navigation experience. I've read the arguments for why the End will come if Scanning access isn't given, but I stopped using Maps, and Scanning too, and things seem fine. Try to figure this one out. And how the F do I get my files out of the Audio Recorder directory? I must Share them, via email. No access unless Shared, over the Internet. If this isn't an upgrade, I'm lost. I'm just going to guess this new version has an embedded uninterruptible LLM that tells the user what they want and how to use the device. Because that's something Google doesn't believe the user is capable of.
hnpolicestate · 9h ago
Downvoted because it's true as is typical for HN. Safety!!!! Because the adult user is a child or something.
idle_zealot · 18h ago
It's deeply disappointing to see that the multitasking solution for tablets that Google and Apple have settled on is... desktop-style floating windows, but without workspaces or window snapping.
There's so much space here to experiment with tiling views, scrolling columns of windows, whatever. Floating windows are cumbersome enough when you have a mouse and big display to spread things out on. I've tried this floating window thing in beta on my Pixel Tablet and iPad's windowing on the iPadOS 26 beta and they're basically worthless. A straight downgrade compared to the existing split views. They'd have done better to just let me add more apps to a split view.
__aru · 3h ago
I think that it could be a case of "if it ain't broke don't fix it".
The desktop paradigm is decades old, and deviating from it would probably elicit negative feedback (as seen in previous attempts by Apple in iPadOS).
> desktop-style floating windows, but without workspaces or window snapping.
In the new Desktop mode on Android, it supports snapping windows as well as multiple desktops/workspaces.
In iPadOS you can snap windows to halves or quadrants.
dagmx · 13h ago
iPadOs has window tiling if that’s what you mean by snapping and has had it for longer than floating windows.
And stage manager is basically workspaces by another name.
Rediscover · 14h ago
Or maybe like when the virtual desktop is larger than the viewport? OLVWM-ish.
There's quite the panic discussion in GrapheneOS matrix chat
absurdo · 18h ago
Did they fix the localhost tracking issue?
whalesalad · 18h ago
material design + "Google Sans" is probably the most nauseating combo imaginable.
taurusnoises · 19h ago
As someone who's very much on the outside of the Apple / Android debate (though I've never owned an iPhone, I do use a Mac and an iPad), and as someone who's relatively tech illiterate, how does this announcement read in light of Apple's latest liquid glass stuff, and the pushback I'm seeing from almost every angle. Is this Google announcement at all in response to the negative reaction Apple is getting? Does what Google is saying here get anyone excited? Maybe even excited enough to switch over?
beezlebroxxxxxx · 19h ago
I've used an Android and Apple phone on and off since the first phones were available with the respective OSs. In general, I've found the Android UI to be more intuitive (although they've both had their boondoggles).
But lately it does seem like spinning wheels on the UI front for both. Without a distinct new feature to build the UI around, most UI changes just seem like change for the sake of change (ie. resume/executive driven design). Both OS seem to be approaching a very similar paradigm (Apple becoming more androidy IMO lately). Minor changes aren't going to cause major changes in popularity. "Liquid Glass" does seem to be uniquely disliked, and probably for good reasons, but Apple generally has ecosystem and brand lock-in that will put the brakes on much ship jumping.
chihuahua · 13h ago
Imagine how difficult it must be for the PM whose job it is to create a long term road map or strategy for phone UIs. Everything is already done.
The only strategy is to create work so the team isn't disbanded. Add gradients, and then remove them in a few years. But write high-brow text to explain the changes, like an artist who describes their solid gray oil on canvas so it can sell for a million dollars.
mosdl · 19h ago
Android is a different beast since OEMs highly customize the UX. Samsung could easily make a horrible liquid glass ripoff and stick it on Android without Google doing anything.
Most of Google's work on Android seems to be around making smaller changes for the UX and bigger internal changes (splitting up the OS so individual parts can be updated without the OEM involvement, security changes, etc).
sylens · 19h ago
Google announced Material 3 Expressive a month or two ago, way before WWDC
skiman10 · 18h ago
And just to clarify, Material 3 Expressive is not shipping in these builds, that will be in a quarterly release build in probably in the first week of September.
rvba · 8h ago
I read that IOS will pepvide the battery percentage pn screen (e.g. your battery is 75% charged) and also estimated time to reach 100% capacity when charging
Curious what other folks are feeling. A lot of these tools seem like useless frivolity.
Meanwhile, I have family who constantly get confused whether the iOS phone icon is FaceTime or the “real” phone; and I have to do multiple taps instead of one to make a FaceTime call—and Apple is busy making Liquid Glass, for what?
Now all the low hanging fruit is gone they are less exciting. The photogrammetry api stuff added to iOS probably took 100x the dev effort of adding folders and copy/paste, but gets far less excitement.
Like all things apple, watch them muzzle it to keep sales of the IPAD high.
That's me on a good day; I fuckin' hate smartphones (hardware and software-wise), lol. I have pretty much given up on a slab-style pocket computer (6-7 inch, essentially a deshittified, Samsung XCover-series smartphone on steroids, e. g. S-Pen, exchangeable batteries, audio jack, 1-2 USB-C ports, mSD card slot, lotsa memory, phone-functionality is second fiddle) or a small detachable (8-9 inch, also EMR-penabled, essentially an updated, miniaturized HP ZBook x2 G4 with Nintendo Switch-like capabilities for docking and attachments for a variety of controller options and the keyboard). :(
1) a bare (ala Pixel) foldable with S-pen and without large external displays to get cracked and complicate things
2) a rooted linux-computer-in-your-pocket that can be plugged into a usb-c hub and happens to have a SIM card/cell modem to work as a phone.
...but until then I just get by for years and years on whatever mid-tier phone happened to be the smallest form-factor and best-camera-for-$ at the time my last one became unusable.
https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php more of a historical collection of stories than an active forum about Planet Computer's devices.
Something I have long said when talking about operating systems is that I consider them tool boxes. The same kind of tool box a carpenter would have.
I don't "use" the OS per se. I use the OS to hold my tools in a manner that makes it easy for me to access them.
So, it's like a carpenter's toolbox where he carries around his saw, hammer etc. and can easily grab them when he needs them. He doesn't need to hear about Hammer v2.0 AI-edition or any of that shit!
I don't need my toolbox doing anything other than holding my tools and fucking right off out of my way!
I think we grew up with technology advancing rapidly and expensive tech from previous year being outdated, but now we came back to baseline where technological advancement is just small fixes stretched over a long period of time.
Yep. Honestly can't name a single major new smartphone feature that I would consider a dealbreaker that wasn't available 10 years ago.
The last things that made me excited about a new phone was contactless payments and Android auto, but both are pretty old now.
Now it's just a slightly different ui and maybe a bit better camera when I got a new phone.
They are not that old and we still don’t have proper dashboard integration. I would like directions there rather than on the central console.
Plus there has been nice features trickling to user from release to release.
I like that you can easily use your phone as a clock with a magnetic dock. Translation and text selection in screenshot were nice. Search from picture highlight is great.
Phone screening is nice. Hold for me is nice too. Chat apps have improved by leaps and bounds since Covid. Productivity is now okay-ish at least for joining meetings and reading things.
As someone that plug his phone to a dock from time to time, convergence is nearly there but some things still need polish. I really wish we could get a better version of Office for example.
It’s not ground breaking but meaningful incremental improvements have been there.
At some point, we will have something similar on a newer version of Android that we will want and that we can't have with an older version. I don't know what it is yet but i am sure there will be something at some point.
https://f-droid.org/2024/02/01/twif.html
I haven't used it yet but the refraction effect on Liquid Glass feels like it could be amazingly good at creating a sense of layer separation. Static content it's maybe not going to be awesome at, but as soon as the there's motion, the non-linear motion around the bend of the glass, for me, seems to create a very easy perturbance of regular motion that it feels like eyes, in their radar like way, instantly know of, without having to look closely and interpret.
Opera House had (possibly still have, I heard they did a redecoration [1]) very big issues with acoustics. It's bad functionality directly caused by aesthetics.
[1] https://thespaces.com/sydney-opera-house-emerges-with-a-whol...
Doesn't sound like a big problem. Some of the best plays and operas I've seen have been in bland concrete boxes, portakabins, round the back of pubs.... Of course all else being equal I'd prefer a building to look good, but good stage visibility and acoustics beats a flashy building every time.
Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Once things get too gaudy they will introduce Flat Glass or pretend like they invented straight lines and sharp corners. But at least that seems to have a personality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero
While many express nostalgia for Aero in Windows 7, Microsoft dismissed it in fairly harsh terms:
'Microsoft called the Aero interface it once championed and poured so much love upon "dated and cheesy".'
https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/21/windows_8_aero_dead/
The thing with [Microsoft's] dictated GUIs is that they all end up on the trash heap.
Some people have affinity for a GUI aesthetic. I liked Motif and CDE. Ripping them away for the garbage pile is a supremely foolish thing to do, as it can drive users away.
Apple, and Microsoft, will surely add more to this pile shortly.
> So basically, Microsoft's claim of Aero being "cheesy" "and "dated" are just lies to cover up the fact where the original Surface RT is not powerful enough to handle them.
https://old.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/38vyn7/the_true_re...
Is Windows XP universally understood to be bad design? I remember it as somewhere between blandly unremarkable and slightly pleasant.
With Luna, I think people were mainly just reacting negatively to two things:
1. the start button being big and green and a weird blob shape; the start menu it opens having a huge, very rounded forehead and chin — and both of these having a certain "pre-baked custom PNG image 8-way sliced in Photoshop and drawn by parts" look that you'd see used on web pages in this era. This made the whole UI feel very "non-brutalist" — form not following function, the way it did in Windows Classic (where the theme was in part designed to optimize for as few line-draw GDI calls as possible.)
2. both the taskbar and window title bars being vertically thicker, and having a vaguely-plastic-looking sheen to them to "add dimensionality."
And my hypothesis is that, of these, it was mainly the "vertically thicker" taskbar+window decorations that upset so many people.
This was an era where many screens were still largely 1024x768, even as monitor sizes were growing; so "small was cool" [and legible!] Websites baked their text into images using 8x5 pixel fonts; Linux users used tiny fonts and narrow themes in fvwm/blackbox/fluxbox, etc. In that era, a title bar stealing thirty whole pixels was almost blasphemy. (Same problem with the Office XP ribbon. Microsoft's visual designers must have been too far ahead-of-the-curve in what kind of resolutions their graphics cards supported, I think.)
I think, if there was an alternate version of Luna that also shipped with XP, that just narrowed the taskbar and window caption bar to the Windows Classic dimensions... then Luna would have been universally acclaimed.
It's actually a credit to google that you can scale the fonts up so much and then forget you had done it. In the old days, the UI would be broken in various places.
It's just as bad to click a button you don't want to, when you're merely trying to scroll, or highlight text, or click another button.
Making a button's clickable area larger than the button itself can be desirable in limited circumstances, but it's not a general-purpose solution.
Argue with Apple because Mobile Safari makes a tap close to a button click the button (and it causes exactly the problems you've predicted, and workarounds are difficult). Do you do a lot of close testing?? Because the feature is quite noticeable.
Try it yourself on an iPhone (ideally use something that can do smaller taps than a finger, with zoom and without zoom): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
I recall that similar features are more obvious on Android because you can make taps visible.
Virtual keyboards also have interesting responses to close taps on key buttons.
Ex: a.fn-link { padding:10px 18px; margin:-10px -18px; }
You can set a (pseudo) element as an invisible enlargement of that button but then you will get accidental taps.
I cannot understand why they gradually abandoned that, as it was clearly a competitive moat in terms of usability.
I've seen how computer illiterate or elderly people were able to navigate skeuomorphic designs with relative ease. Right now, they can't tell what is a button or a field and what isn't.
While the technology to create 'alive' skeuomorphic elements now exists, that wasn't the case a few years ago.
Older skeuomorphic designs were static/rasters which were clunky to either mix these static elements with animated elements (for example the iOS 7 menu title transitions) or to have transparency (how can you have transparent leather/velvet?).
Liquid Glass is actually an extension of the foundation laid by iOS 7.
Many parts of the iOS 7 transition guide might as well have been written for Liquid Glass:
- "Make sure that app content is discernible through translucent UI elements—such as bars and keyboards—and the transparent status bar"
- "Examine your app for hard-coded UI values—such as sizes and positions—and replace them with those you derive dynamically from system-provided values."
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Us...
You'd think this is just a little thing, but it can really mess with you if you need to change focus and - of course - every application will 'haha!' you in a different way.
It has nothing to do with skeuomorphism really, but at least skeuomorphism seemed to give everyone an idea of what they were shooting for at least.
I disagree that skeuomorphic can't be used by power users. Just throw a bunch of keyboard shortcuts in there.
The space around a block style tab-bar/navbar is wasted anyway, might as well show some of the content. Most apps were doing it anyway. Seeing a system tabbar/navbar was getting rare in “good” apps.
I wouldn't judge the new Android until I tried it on a phone either.
That's also my impression, iOS 26 looks like some UI's were peer-reviewed and thrown back with the note "Not gaudy enough, it's not enough glass! Remember, the theme is 'Liquid Glass', Management wants to see traces of this on every screen!"
Control center, however, sucks.
Like the grandparent I'm much more excited by Material Design 3 Expressive.
Looking at the new iOS screenshots, I'm surprised that those reasons apparently aren't obvious to Apple designers.
Turns out "pretty" matters -- a lot -- in UI. Sucks for those of us who found Windows 9x, NEXTSTEP, or AmigaOS as the pinnacle of usability, but users find themselves more comfortable with a UI that looks modern even if said UI has other detriments like lack of affordance.
So expect Android Device Vendors to expand their theme engines to support more excessive GUI eyecandy than even before, "liquid glass" will be the minimum
The odd thing about this journey is, that once you're used to the simplicity of Material Design, adding such liquid/glass/leather/concrete/... elements to the rendering just degrades readability.
My guess is that Apple now cranked up the eyecandy again for everyone to follow, to then tone it down in the coming years, again appearing more "mature" than others. And in the end we will settle on something close to Material Design again, with more z-axis separation (more shadows, floating,...) and liquid state-transitions (changing elements affecting other nearby elements)
But hey, it's everyone's individual journey.
Which none of the current OSs do (except Linux without SystemD or BSDs, with a custom WM)
I don't particularly mind it myself, but I get where some power users would get irked by it. This article does a decent job of explaining why; https://www.infoworld.com/article/2251761/linux-why-do-peopl...
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114662145938666044
Quickly scanning GrapheneOS's posts I couldn't find any detail about the technical challenges. They'll probably post about it in the coming months
This is really important for me. Currently, hearing aids will turn to full duplex during calls, and be used as both input and output.
- Audio quality will be much worse, since the bandwidth is split between the two channels. This is obviously bad if you're already struggling to hear.
- Listening to music, for example, the volume controls on the hearing aids simultaneously turn surrounding sounds down and the music up, or vice versa. In "phone-call" mode, however, the phone hijacks the volume control so if you're struggling to hear on a call in a noisy environment there's no way to increase the volume without simultaneously amplifying the surrounding noise to painfully loud levels.
- As mentioned in the article, the microphones are designed to make me hear other people but not myself, making other people complain about my sound a lot. The best I can do is to say "sorry - either you'll hear me like this or I won't hear you at all"
This was designed for people using BT headsets of course, but hearing aids are not headsets.
On Linux I can just pick which microphone I want to use and which mode to use for Bluetooth. It's worked flawlessly for the last decade. To me, that's being "user friendly", good UX, or whatever you want to call it.
On Windows, you can go deep into some ancient, almost hidden, settings and disable the microphone on the BT device. On macOS, you can do the same using the old Audio MIDI Setup tool. It will periodically reset itself of course, like anything related to a11y on macOS. Not sure about iOS, would be interesting to know.
let me guess: Advanced Protection will continue to gain features that restrict the freedom of users in the name of security and some time from now it will be mandatorily enabled for everyone. classic google!
Glass is a pain in itself and "preparing for a future in spatial computing" is such a bullshit line when the spatial computing future is still 5-10 years away at minimum, and will not be achieved with Apple Vision, at least not in the current shape and form.
Meanwhile, Material Expressive is trying to force a 2020 graphic design trend onto mobile apps. It literally feels like designers at google just wanted to do something new and modern, so they went with a bland corporate "modern design" aesthetic, that reduces UX in name of UI - even tho they are like oooooh users found this button 30% faster, it would be well fucking expected, since highly-paid designers have just redesigned the thing.
Meanwhile, apps will continue to be made in their own style.
Apple will release liquid glass support with 26 and we'll see it appear in new apps. At the same time, Google will probably do a partial release of the new material components for developers, where a giant part of components will lack features described by the design spec, a bunch will be missing, and a bunch will be utterly unusable because Google can't create a good DX to save their lives.
That's the point. Apple is years behind on that stuff
PS Let me make a guess for the future. Android Desktop mode will improve and people will ditch Windows and instead plug their phone into a USB-C dock that connects it to keyboard, mouse and display. (I'm on Linux myself, but I see people moving to Android from Windows)
Samsung already learned lessons from that journey, Google did not.
Also, the Android strategy is to not compete with Android vendors on OS features, they rather collaborate to make them contribute improvements back to the OS.
This strategy makes the project faster, cheaper, reduces fragmentation, removes a competitor (!), and most of all reduces brand-stickiness within the Android ecosystem (--> if Samsung DeX gets merged into Android, Samsung users can switch brands easier).
Why would Samsung want this? Why would they actively reduce their own competitiveness by giving away distinguished features?
Google applies different levers here:
1. Google is making your feature a commodity: Samsung is aware that Google plans to implement a native version of the feature, with or without Samsung. Google will make the feature available to ALL competitors of Samsung. Samsung get's the chance to shape it WITH Google or will later be forced to ensure compatibility with it (because it's not sustainable for Samsung to coexist with AND compete against an ecosystem used by ALL other Android vendors)
2. Google offers to take over some tasks: Google creates media attention for OS-Upgrades, creating pressure for Device-Vendors to adopt the new OS-version as soon as possible. The more a vendor deviates from the generic implementation, the more time & resources (and money) will be needed to adopt a new OS-version. So it's in the interest of Samsung to contribute as much of their fundamentals back upstream, so Google themselves takes care of maintaining it.
3. Google may make it mandatory at some point: The Android Compatibility Definition Document (CDD) defines the mandatory requirements for a device to be granted into the Android Ecosystem. Google is in control of this document and may at some point add specific behavior or features as a condition for Android compliance. This "Desktop Mode" has the potential to become the default behavior for Tablets, so Samsung may be required to adopt it for devices classified as Tablet by the CDD [0]
4. Google returns the favor: Samsung can trade collaboration on this feature for business opportunities with Google in other areas (i.e. Mixed Reality, B2B, Chromebooks,...), which potentially allows Samsung to be first in an entirely new market...
[0] https://source.android.com/docs/compatibility/16/android-16-...
This seems like such a killer feature to me. And every time I watch a video of someone trying out DeX it seems to work so well.
Yet it never seems to take off. I don't understand why. What am I missing? App ecosystem not good enough for business use?
"This is the year of mobile docking replacing workstations" has kind of become my "This is the year of Linux on the desktop.
What is this feature in reality? It is just a projected screen with a certain resolution. And then it has apps that appear and open as resizable windows. Android had a downloadable app called something like Sense that did this but the app developers didn’t make apps with resizable windows at the time.
I guess part of the working closely is to cause developers to display apps that can be resized. And resize it for them in the event they refuse.
No such thing.
> Android Desktop mode will improve and people will ditch Windows
I agree; I would have switched from a desktop PC to my tablet in 2017 using DeX on my Samsung Tab S3 if enough websites would have worked with the DeX browser. I bet it's fine now, nearly a decade later.
Good on Google for not just stealing Samsung's work.
I'm on a iPhone 13 Pro Max right now that's still doing well but starting to show battery capacity age. Plus, it's the only non-USB-C device I own so I'd be happy to get rid of it.
I really hope it won't be delayed
I tried it and it works great - Dex-like experience with mouse and keyboard, on a stock Pixel phone.
That said, I'm also looking forward to the official Google version coming to the rest of the Android devices
https://en-emea.support.motorola.com/app/answers/detail/a_id...
Shame, I liked it very much since Samsung phones are expensive
Phones are a duopoly reinforced by networks effects. Only Google and Apple matter.
That's one of the things that has kept me away from Apple devices, is that you can't change basic things about how they look or operate. It's all on Apple's terms. I also dislike how they add the most basic things, like changing the background on your chats, and act like they just invented it.
I looked through the highlights linked here and the full "What's New" page [0] and am pleasantly surprised to see a few new features but no major overhauls of existing ones.
[0] https://www.android.com/16
And its the sneaky ones that get through...like when I upgraded to 15 my home button no longer exists when the screen is locked, which effectively makes google maps navigation stuck on the screen unless you stop navigation by pressing back repeatedly
> like when I upgraded to 15 my home button no longer exists when the screen is locked, which effectively makes google maps navigation stuck on the screen unless you stop navigation by pressing back repeatedly
Smaller things like this, sure.
FYI, swiping up from the bottom will get into the lock screen and then once unlocked into the home screen.
My current workaround is to trampoline off another program, like Spotify, or the BT settings, that has a constant notification then i can click that which opens the lock screen.
But even a small sounding change can be significant. After the last Gemini push, the alarm clock now would "stop" on voice command, but it would activate for random noises you made, cancelling my alarm for work; the settings were hidden in another app, not the alarm. It wasn't even promoted so nobody knew. This release mentions even more Gemini integrations...
On my phone there are two swipe zones at the bottom. The one that's actually on the screen opens the Google Maps menu. But if I swipe from off screen up it works as I described. Maybe your phone doesn't have enough surface area below the screen to distinguish the two?
I like a lot of the new features, but the visual (mis)communication language is terrible.
https://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.0-hig...
Of course I want accessibility, security and technical improvements.
We shouldn't do that, in the same way we shouldn't make sure people know UI is important by changing it completely every n years.
Please write your legislators and demand antitrust action against Apple and Google for the following:
- Lack of One-Tap Web Installs (without scare walls or buried settings menus). This is the biggest stranglehold they have. Web installs can be done safely and securely via app signing, permissions, and signature blacklists.
- First-party defaults for all the platform pieces: Messaging, Payments, Photos, Music, Media, Navigation, etc. Every single one of these lets Apple and Google squeeze another industry and forces us into a pit of no-innovation.
- Default search, in the case of Google, which ropes you into their search / ads funnel. They've also bought it out on Apple's end.
- Default browser tech, in the case of Apple. It prevents innovation on app runtimes and deployment and forces you to develop using Apple technologies.
Winning the mobile rights battle will not only liberate us from the "promo cycle" plague, it'll stop the tax on innovation and introduce healthy competition.
If American legislators and the DOJ / FTC won't act, then every other country should. If enough countries put pressure on Apple and Google, we'll start to see competition reemerge. Right now it's impossible to develop a new smartphone entrant. Even Meta and Microsoft with their nearly-unlimited capital couldn't fight off Apple and Google.
YCombinator would probably be happy if smartphones became open platforms. They'd see healthier margins for startups and less direct platform competition. a16z is pushing for this. Just because Apple and Google were there first twenty years ago shouldn't give them an eternity to rule the entire category.
Don't/can't Android manufacturers provide alternative defaults here?
A new company probably still couldn't develop platform pieces if that chink in the armor was made available by the DOJ. But if Google were split along those lines into two or more companies, it would provide nice and healthy gradients on both the hardware/OS and the platform/software sides of the market.
We really do need a Google breakup.
Isn't core Android open source? As long as you do not need Google apps and Google services, you can use Android OSS right now without Google's platform components.
Manufacturers were contractually forbidden from doing that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Google...
Counterpoint: the resources currently dedicated to Apple and Android would then be spread across a dozen operating systems, assuming constant consumer spending.
Maybe you think stasis is a good thing, but I (mostly) appreciate the progress iOS and Android have made over the past nearly two decades. I wouldn't want to currently be stuck at iOS 3 or 4 as opposed to iOS 18.
Assuming you actually mean a dozen phone operating systems. Because we already do have lots of phone companies, but they mostly all use Android.
And Samsung does sell phones with customized UI and apps.
Motorola is barely hanging out.
Turns out people tend to gravitate to a few choices....
Xioami/Huawei are in essence banned from the US.
i have the feeling that for anything in the US, everything has to end up in monopolies or bipartisan approach. People just seem to buy what their neighbors/coworkers/siblings buy without trying to do a bit of research. Some kind of deep vulnerability to virality. My mate has an iphone, I need an iphone, my neighbor beagged about their Thermomix, I need a Thermomix too immediately.
There's also Amazon, which is often cheaper, but I am a bit old school in the regard that I like to physically use the device before I purchase it.
Either way, the perceived restrictions are more of a self-imposed thing rooted in our consumer conditioning here, which is this weird blend of "customer choice" and "all choices are basically the same" that gets muddy very, very quickly. Most people I talk to, especially the non-technical ones, do not realize that my $150US Moto is serving me just as well as an $600US Samsung would, with my needs being all the common types of communications, reliable 5G, a decent camera and run specific apps I use to control some cloud infrastructure while on the go. It's difficult to feel sympathy when I hear people complain about paying Apple $1000US just to look at TikTok or use Discord. We are guided on what to buy via the marketing machine instead of examining our use-cases and researching a suitable product before purchasing.
It's all silly bullshit, really.
I have Pixel 4a and I wanted to get Android 16 to get the smaller notification tile buttons back.
One avenue these phone OS, and any consumer OS, can pursue is making it easy to string together app sub-steps. An app can be "cracked open" into sub-step a) either by developers themselves b) or by a backend process at app submission time. The backend process could look at the screens, and see what the user journeys are - this is within reach for current LLMs. An "sub-step" here is like taking a flights app and turning it into different types of search functions - search by date, location, points etc. So an app becomes a bunch of interfaces.
Once you have these "sub-steps" a local LLM can string them together, because it can understand their inputs, outputs, and behaviors.
Actually executing the sub-steps would require the OS to execute the app in the background and run the sub-steps for the user. This would be akin to what browser agents do right now
So this is a way of semantically extracting the "verbs" in existing apps.
With a library of these "sub-steps" in apps, combined with similar ones extracted from the internet - you could chain together the web and native worlds, in the service of the user.
It's easier on phone OSs because phone apps are usually already logged in. It's realistic for iOS to just do a bunch of stuff for you in the background. You really can probably get finance info from all your finance apps, for example.
I'm not saying this is necessarily the answer - but re-thinking the OS in this sort of what is what would be an actually ambitious thing for Apple or Google to do. All these small tweaks are opiates.
It is now up to developers to expose this.
I also think we'll get a more desktop ready version of Chrome. If we get these things I think it'll be a gamechanger.
It's almost usable for playing movies on a TV, but that's about it.
So far, only Apple has figured out the applications part on MacOS, and only partially. They still have wierdo iPadOS. Microsoft is doing Windows on ARM... again. We'll see how long that lasts.
I would like to trade it in for a pixel 9 pro xl, but it's kinda hard/impossible to do in Brazil.
I got a good deal from best buy but you need to have a US issued document to trade your phone in, bummer.
Any plans to ever sell it in Brazil?
Currently stuck between 12 and 14, and really there is hardly any reason to update.
For technical stuff, better check here, https://developer.android.com/about/versions/16/summary
And the promised WebGPU for Java and Kotlin, discussed at Vulkanised 2025 apparently didn't made the cut to Android 16.
Warning: The May 2025 update for Pixel 6 (6, 6 Pro, 6a) and Pixel 8 (8, 8 Pro, 8a) devices contains a bootloader update that increments the anti-roll back version for the bootloader. This prevents the device from rolling back to previous vulnerable versions of the bootloader. After flashing the May 2025 update on these devices you won't be able to flash and boot older Android 15 builds.
Desperation
Whats the MVP (minimum viable pixel) nowadays? Google lineup is super expensive in my country, probably zero support, so I'm afraid of investing.
I tried a (used) 6a, it was lovely (compared to my Samsung) until it wouldn't scroll while charging (a known issue) so I returned it.
This API/requirements set was uniquely put by pressure from various vendors(think banks and various "security-certification" obsessed parties), and was already quite unpleasant, as it excludes any form of rooting, even if your root-access is adb only. But it gets worse as now non-official images are getting excluded not only from strong integrity[0] but also device integrity. Numerous apps are now requiring device integrity and hence won't be usable even on a locked, signed android image if it's not google or vendor-official.
It actually gets worse. Google has been silently restricting the api results(as of may): - basic requires a certified device with an android platform key attestation - device now requires a hardware verified boot, with locked bootloader and recent security patch. This excludes lots of devices - strong requires security patch on all partitions
And it gets even worse. On recent play stores & android versions, as apps have to be installed or updated by google play to get a full integirty response. no more sideloading APKs or alternative stores.
This is nothing but a clear move to a full lock-in to play store, where the majority of vendors live, to end up with a fully locked a-la-apple ecosystem. This doesn't improve security, people that know still have ways to bypass those restrictions when needed. All it does is give the illusion of safety.
I would personally feel like: 1 - rooting should be allowed on a certified device with most apps still working. This could be done with a locked bootloader too if they provided such an image for debug. 2 - alternative os, like graphene, should be given a way to pass all attestations, as well as alternative stores, provided they follow a set of constraints.
With this in mind, I can't be positive about android 16 and new versions going down a grim locked future.
[0] https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/6361-play-integrity-api-and...
I'm going to trial/move to iOS because of this. If I'm going to live in a walled garden, might as well live in the better one.
Hopefully I can live with the shittier notifications/keyboard/lack of back button; I think the rest of iOS is overall better than a degoogled android experience.
I also don't really understand the point of all these strong integrity checks being enforced e.g. with banking apps or the alike. You can already just go to the corresponding website (and do the same actions) on a compromised device, how does restricting the app version provide any benefit?
i don't think this is enough - rooting should be allowed on any device that you own, rather than the device owning you.
I don't think this should be allowed because rooting breaks the Android security model. Devices that don't follow at least Android's security model should not be allowed that way apps understand the security model of Android.
>grapheneos should be given a way to pass all attestations
There already is the Android attestation API that can be used to attest grapheneos. But I do think it would be nice if Play Integrity would expand beyond just Play Protect Certified devices, to devices which can prove they offer a similar or greater level of security.
Should the default android be locked, with no root, play store verifying apps, etc, absolutely. This is great for the average user that desires nothing more than just running play store apps.
Should you have the ability to run what you want on your phone, and copy the data from the app that you installed, after accepting the risks? absolutely.
It is already non trivial to install root, and adb locked root for example makes things vastly more secure even in that case(that is, you can only adb su into your phone, you can't grant the permission to an app directly). Especially with locked adb having fingerprint verification.
On grapheneos you can get basic. You can't get device, which is now needed by a lot of applications. See another example at: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/18118-play-integrity-meets-...
Play integrity by locking everything to the Google/Main vendors is making it less and less possible to run non-primary images/oses. And it's not for users security, it's for apps security, so this is purely to reassure the industry, and yet it is just another security theater. Running with strong integrity on a rooted device is possible with semi-significant effort, and that's good. It means that we're not relying on security by obscurity, and we can look at what's running on the phones.
I have asked every apple user around me and they just tell me about photo sync and iCloud.
That alone is enough to lock most users in to the ecosystem. The idea of figuring out how to transfer all your photos to an Android device is too much work for most people.
http://android.com/16
But, some Samsung and Motorola phones already support that (DeX and "Ready For"), and there's a kind of janky version that you can unlock in developer settings for phones (including Pixel 8 & 9) that have video output but no built-in desktop mode.
However the annoying thing is that many apps which display video (official TV streaming apps from my ISP etc.) detect the presence of an external display, and prevent video playback there. Sigh.
So basically, Android low end has become useless, I remember 10+ years ago having to search for something very fast because of the context, like something on a map or surf the web for info. It was still super responsive with 512MO...
I tried a few cheap Android phones recently... they are simply unresponsive, google apps will suddenly shut down because the device is out of memory or something... or you try to make a call, you make a mistake so you try to hang up, the phone will refuse to hang up because it's stuck! you'd have to remove the battery to quickly cancel the call! What the hell happened with that OS?
That said, Pixel devices all the way. No gross UI reskin, no having multiple copies of the same type of app (Samsung camera vs android camera, dialers, keyboards, etc.).
Fast, stable, good features.
If it's not a pixel device, you're probably going to have a "mid" experience.
Very stable, nice UI, no hardware/batery issues, very responsive.
I don't know if I trust Google to make decent hardware. I am highly suspicious of Pixel phones.
I say that as someone who has had several Pixel phones (and Nexus before that) and been happy with them. But yeah, my most recent phone is a low-end Motorola that I picked specifically for a set of hardware features, but unfortunately, as the parent commenter describes, it has been a _terrible_ experience for a variety of reasons. I got the hardware features I wanted (mostly, no one makes the full set I want anymore, see above), and it turns out that I had to give up a halfway-decent software experience.
If not, are you able to buy another Motorola phone where this is possible?
No comments yet
the pixels have a overheating problem -- this you can google for.
oh yeah, when automatic android updates happen a bunch of your settings are reset even something simple as UI-theme.
People keep saying this, but that's been every phone I've ever had. They all get hot in hot weather and under heavy use.
On the other hand, it takes over a minute to decide that it's confirmed a GPS location. The Pixel 3a will do the same thing in more like one second. The utter failure of the GPS on the Pixel 6a (and possibly other related phones?) seems to be a known, common issue.
I do have overheating problems. The phone won't work outdoors in climates that are less nice than California. Which surprises me, since that's most of the world.
Pixel experience is literally same thing as Samsung One UI - a gross UI reskin
> no having multiple copies of the same type of app (Samsung camera vs android camera, dialers, keyboards, etc
Google is the one that forces the multiple copies of same app thing
The Motos came with very little bloatware that was easy enough to uninstall or disable. There are just as many new Google Apps that just weren't available on Moto phones that I've been uninstalling from my Pixel:
Google One, Google Tasks, Google News, Google Lens, Google Support Services, Google PDF Viewer, Google Play Books, Google Pixel Watch, Pixel Buds, Pixel Studio, Gemini, Safety, Find Hub, Google Home
It's not 3rd party, but it's still bloatware.
IMO that's the big 'problem' with Android - any fly by night company can make a phone with it, which sours those people on Android as a whole and rightfully so. They may not understand that it's not Android itself that is awful, but the low spec'd phone or 'enhancements' some company added.
Higher end Android phones generally don't have any of these problems at all. I can't even remember the last time mine had something crash or had to restart. I generally stick to high end Moto, Pixel, or Oneplus(current). Some people like Samsung but their skin/os is too heavy handed for me.
Force phone devs to use worse phones.
Which device was that? My memory of early Android devices is that they were anything but fast. It's only relatively recently that they've caught up to iPhones in terms of responsiveness.
I paid $200 for a Moto G85 5G with 12GB RAM, 256GB storage last year.
Alternatives in the same range: CMF Phone 1/2 and OnePlus Nord CE4 Lite 5G
Really glad to see we've finally landed at a place where finding an old refurbished flagship is not the only logical choice, where the mid-range has a lot going on for it.
Just wish we had some mainline kernel support, could put Debian on these things! I've had a OnePlus 6T (2018) that supposedly does pretty ok that I've been meaning to try Mobian on, and it felt like for a bit Snapdragons were getting better and better Linux support. But that motion seems to have really tapered off in the last ~2 years?
Unfortunately it reached the end of its (security) updates so I figured it would be unsafe to keep using it since I have banking apps on the phone. Sad.
I got $100 motorolas and outside of snapchat and the keyboard being responsive, it did the job for months.
I was a bit impressed.
I no longer am afraid to break my expensive phone because those worked in the short term.
Now, of course they removed the app :) But there's a "linux terminal" app which at least in theory should allow something similar since GPU acceleration was mentioned, but the app is limited "on user builds"..
Note this uses kernel virtualization, so it's faster and more properly separated.
Anyone ever stop to notice how skillful google is at putting lipstick on pigs?
To watch their artisans in action, simply do:
Settings/System/DeveloperOptions/RunningServices and tick Show Cached Processes after absorbing that in your immediate view, which will have included the 23 running processes under Play Services.
Yeah yeah. There has to be lots of stuff in such a glorious suite. Of course it's crawling with things completely irrelevant to the user. We all know this. But can it ever go too far?
I honestly don't feel more secure since that amazing update that blocks access to directories even through USB. Blocking Ghost Commander is one thing, but USB?
I won't make a scathing list of complaints here. Each update tends to beg the task though.
Edit: It's really complex, right? Google is honest and forthright. So they'd never lie about absolutely needing Precise Location to use Maps. Clearly it's necessary. While using pure GPS appears for all practical purposes to do everything I need, in truth, not having Scanning activated threatens much destruction and a subconsciously worse navigation experience. I've read the arguments for why the End will come if Scanning access isn't given, but I stopped using Maps, and Scanning too, and things seem fine. Try to figure this one out. And how the F do I get my files out of the Audio Recorder directory? I must Share them, via email. No access unless Shared, over the Internet. If this isn't an upgrade, I'm lost. I'm just going to guess this new version has an embedded uninterruptible LLM that tells the user what they want and how to use the device. Because that's something Google doesn't believe the user is capable of.
There's so much space here to experiment with tiling views, scrolling columns of windows, whatever. Floating windows are cumbersome enough when you have a mouse and big display to spread things out on. I've tried this floating window thing in beta on my Pixel Tablet and iPad's windowing on the iPadOS 26 beta and they're basically worthless. A straight downgrade compared to the existing split views. They'd have done better to just let me add more apps to a split view.
The desktop paradigm is decades old, and deviating from it would probably elicit negative feedback (as seen in previous attempts by Apple in iPadOS).
> desktop-style floating windows, but without workspaces or window snapping.
In the new Desktop mode on Android, it supports snapping windows as well as multiple desktops/workspaces.
In iPadOS you can snap windows to halves or quadrants.
And stage manager is basically workspaces by another name.
- Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484927
- Google will develop the Android OS in private: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43482798
It's reasonable to think Google is choking AOSP.
But lately it does seem like spinning wheels on the UI front for both. Without a distinct new feature to build the UI around, most UI changes just seem like change for the sake of change (ie. resume/executive driven design). Both OS seem to be approaching a very similar paradigm (Apple becoming more androidy IMO lately). Minor changes aren't going to cause major changes in popularity. "Liquid Glass" does seem to be uniquely disliked, and probably for good reasons, but Apple generally has ecosystem and brand lock-in that will put the brakes on much ship jumping.
The only strategy is to create work so the team isn't disbanded. Add gradients, and then remove them in a few years. But write high-brow text to explain the changes, like an artist who describes their solid gray oil on canvas so it can sell for a million dollars.
Most of Google's work on Android seems to be around making smaller changes for the UX and bigger internal changes (splitting up the OS so individual parts can be updated without the OEM involvement, security changes, etc).
Android had this for 15 years or more...