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Comment by dave2000 | Hacker News Reader

dave2000

> It's the one thing I hate about Android. The UIs of Google > apps have gotten consistently worse over the years, mainly > because they've been prioritizing aesthetics over > functionality/ease of use.

Care to elaborate on this with a few examples? I have the opposite complaint. They seem to be focussing on ease of use precisely at the expense of functionality. I'd rather stuff was a little more complicated, because it would give me more control over stuff. Note that I don't want it complicated for the sake of complexity. But I've noticed a increase in "adding features makes stuff complicated" and joke memes about "just make it an option". Well, programming - proper programming - IS hard, but it's worth it because you get a better product.

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Not an Android feature, but similar. Last year someone at Google thought it would be smart to redesign the bookmark feature in Chrome to make it more aesthetic looking. Instead it completely made Chrome bookmarks useless. They eventually changed course and updated Chrome to return to the way it was.

On Android, I really don't have any problems.

Google maps UI has gotten much worse over the last few years in terms of usability > aesthetics. It not even close to being intuitive anymore.

Also not Android, but Google has rendered the App Engine/Compute Engine dashboard completely useless. Double overlapping sidebars and a huge amount of wasted space everywhere makes simple tasks like finding a log entry difficult. The old design at appengine.google.com which Google is slowly deprecating was highly functional despite not being flat and "pretty." This is just one example. It's my personal opinion that Google is showing a tremendous lack of design ability in areas that they should be getting right at this point.

/rant

Of all the Google things that doesn't need to imitate a spare Apple design, it's APPENGINE

Here's a big example: a lot of what they release these days is for mobile first, and if the desktop-geared version is ever released, its design is just the mobile app in a bigger window. Example: Google Photos.

(Related: WTF did they have to deprecate the old Photos and Picasa, which still have much superior options? They only "advantage" the new Photos has is the so-called AI, e.g. ability to auto-categorize your pictures of dogs.)

Despite all the recent ai hype it still sucks whenever I use it. All my photo categories have wrong entries in them.

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