Android 12

As someone who grew up using 160x160 and 320x320 PDAs, the idea a smartphone now uses a 1080x1200 rectangle to only give me eight buttons makes me want to throw up.

> In 20 years only a single letter at a time on the screen?

Don't you think that a letter is a bit optimistic? What about colored buttons with icons, ala Idiocracy?

Screens keep getting bigger, while tweets stay the same size. You need something to pad the rest of the space.

> all the whitespace and even lower information density. What's the endgame?

I don't think fashion has an endgame.

What I want from a grandparent mode is for the app to not show an sign-up announcement screen with every update or at least have that X (close) prominently; Adobe Acrobat Reader is notorious in that regard as they showcase their graphics prowess with fancy 'Sign-up' screen with every update and almost invisible (X) button; Old people who are just trying to open a pdf from the email shouldn't have to put up with this.

> Looks like grandparent mode...

I almost cut my arm off with all that edge. Care to dial it back a bit?

The counterpoint is that most of the 'information' apps think are important really are wasting my time and obscuring actual signal. Putting design on a diet and making apps think about what data is priority vs noise is something that respects the user.

The ability to glance at my phone and get the most important info without parsing out noise - that's a big plus. The ability to mix and match widgets on my home and lock screen to display the data I want without crowding stuff out - also great.

It's funny that a related argument against mobile is that all apps demand full screen and it's difficult to do advanced work bc of app switch friction - well this approach of forcing apps to limit and prioritize info puts out a path of addressing that inefficiency nicely.

> what important APIs did they axe now?

Again many API turn downs improve user privacy, improve system stability, or push apps to more battery/memory efficient APIs.

Do you really want win32 level of API compatibility? As a user I don't care. As a developer I would rather work on a living and evolving platform then a fossil or legacy tarpit.

>Looks like grandparent mode is enabled by default with all the whitespace and even lower information density. What's the endgame? In 20 years only a single letter at a time on the screen?

Just playing to their customer. As time goes on, the demographics of Android users get older and less savvy as everyone else switches to iPhone. (not snark, I have a Pixel myself)

Well at first IT people complained because boomers wouldn't learn how to use computers. Now they (sorta)did and they want one letter per screen. Since they still control the majority of the market share that is what we will get by default.

Its really the getting old denial mode. All of those people need reading glasses not huge font. Seriously the in house attorney where i worked(like 70yo) had his phone font set so large it was like 2-3 words per screen on email and text.

always nice when an optimist joins the conversation. everything just lightens right up.

It now opaquely covers the entire screen when you look at a single notification.

I feel the same about it. Also now the settings it's just a bunch of text without icons.

For real.

For me smartphones are just good enough.

They all take nice pictures, they're all fast enough, they all have a nice screen, nice touch controls and nice UI.

It just doesn't matter as much anymore.

The only thing on here that made me go "oh cool" is the extra dim mode, my 4a really likes scorching my retinas at night.

I've been underwhelmed by recent mobile updates. Maybe I'm missing something but the stuff that sticks out is oh, this rectangle is rounded now. New clock face, okay.

I guess floating notifications, but even that is meh. Facebook had those annoying floating faces 5 years ago

I do remember when they were trying to push touchless gestures (e.g. changing the spotify song by waving your hand) which is a perfect example of a feature that pretty much no one wanted. I imagine google had to pay spotify to include that feature. Needless to say

I've been using Android since Éclair (2.1) and Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) was the last version I was excited about. It's kind of like Word and Excel that were "finished" with v6.0 and v5.0 respectively.

This happens a lot with established systems. I also don't know which Linux kernel versions I'm using. Was relevant once, now most changes don't impact me anymore. They are quite specialized. ...

I would like to. But the usability and quality of life improvements on each new version of Android are pretty tangible.

I went back to my trusty old OP3 running Android 9 I think, for a bit, and the overall experience took a hit. Everything felt kinda clunky now coming from Android 11, even though I always loved the clean Android implementation of the OP3.

Early on version updates were significant. Big, important changes adding nice features and noticeably improving the user experience (I remember one Android update where they put a lot of focus on improving the UI responsiveness for example).

Mobile OSes are mature these days, there aren't as many (or any) opportunities for sweeping changes that improve the experience. These days I almost dread Android updates because I don't know what they're going to change for no reason that breaks my user flow.

It becomes even more irrelevant, where UI enhancements have already been implemented by manufacturers to improve their OS. For example, Samsung OneUI with Good Lock (Multistar, Navstar,Notistar, Quickstar, Home Up, Clockface) One Hand Operation+, Sound Assistant etc. I am looking forward to how some of the features will be incorporated/improved in the new version(OneUI 4), rather than the stock features of Android 12.

Since 6.0 there were no real changes in android. It will be better if they just concentrate on fixing bugs instead of claiming something was done.

The updates are pretty boring these days. The top feature showing in the system update screen is "Personalized design that adapts to the color of your wallpaper". yawn

I routinely find my iPhone and iPad are one major version behind. Yep, just checked, I'm still on iOS 14. I don't even care about all the new features.

Yep, when updates stopped being available for my Xperia mini a few years ago. Just checked and it's android 9. Still works great. Still nice and small.

It's nice for Google to announce the new version, but it's up to the carrier to decide if I can have it, I guess. And when.

It is really good and has been like forever. You of course have to spend equal amounts as for an iPhone to get a high end experience, and it was like that back then as well. Many people failed to understand this and bought shitty underpowered handhelds, and blamed Android for being laggy.

Open developer settings and change the three "animation scale" settings to 0.5x. Modern phones rarely have responsiveness issues outside gratuitous animations.

I feel like this has been solved for a while now (at least on pixel devices in my experience)

Having been a developer for both platforms, Apple events/announcements are exciting for people working on iOS apps, while Google events are kinda just depressing.

"Oh, yeah, that's cool I guess. Be fun to get to use it in five more years when enough people have this, or a newer, version, for it to matter."

> Phone switching feature—again, I'm surprised this is new for them. Being able to do it from iPhone, too, is a nice touch though.

The feature itself is very old. I think they are implying that in previous versions it did not transfer all your "essentials" and now it does - it isn't really clear to me what exactly they improved, though. And the iPhone bit may be new.

The scrolling screenshot feature is the only thing I am semi excited about. I had it on my old Huawei Mate 10 Pro and used it a lot.

> bumps the top bar down for a second top bar that just prints the date

sounds like a privacy thing

This is a serious problem that Google has not worked nearly hard enough. Sure, you can buy a Pixel if you want no bloatware and updates on the release day. But not having that for most OEMs is, among other things, a security problem.

You need to give them your money first.

It's better if you don't know.

That feature definitely is a privacy improvement though.

Was that paragraph meant to be clickable or extendable?

Because I wanted to read what they meant by

"With new easy-to-use, powerful privacy features, you’ll have peace of mind"

but noscript blocked any link or something.

"If you see anything that you’re not comfortable with, you can manage permissions right from the dashboard."

I doubt I can remove all permissions from Google (?)

> Going with a new naming scheme for the 10th version of Android makes a bit of sense; it’s a landmark release. Still, given how difficult it is to put a common dessert to the letter Q, I noted to Google’s Sameer Samat, VP of product management for Android, that it was awfully convenient that Google picked this release to switch up the naming scheme. “We’re going to deal with that skepticism,” he says. Google’s actual reason for switching the naming, he says, isn’t that Q is hard, but rather that desserts aren’t very inclusive. “We have some good names, but in each and every case they leave a part of the world out,” he argues. Android is a global brand, used by more people in India and Brazil than in the US, so going with an English word for the dessert leaves some regions out. Pie isn’t always a dessert, “lollipop” can be hard to pronounce in some regions, and “marshmallows aren’t really a thing in a lot of places,” Samat says. Numbers, at least, are universal.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/22/20827231/android-10-q-goo...

The names were not only dessert-based, but also alphabetical. The last one to be named in this fashion was Pie. They probably couldn't find a good dessert name starting with Q, so they discontinued the practice.

OS X names used to be big cats too until they ran out of good ones. Now it's locations in California. Who knows what it will be next.

No, this one is Sno[w] Cone!

Probably because they're copying Apple's way of marketing iOS. Flat numbers.

Sad to hear it's still a problem. I had Android for a while, but device upgrades instead of being exciting, were a thing I most dreaded.

Upgrading Android phones, even with their supposedly new migration assistant via cables, still kept losing most of my apps' device-local data and settings, as if Google didn't care about anything that isn't on their servers.

What kind of stuff does iOS back up that Android doesn't?

On Android, all of my photos are backed up to Google Photos. Most games use Google Play's cloud save system. All of my notes are in Google Keep or Google Docs (or Notion) which all are backed up in the cloud. Whenever you switch phones, you can easily select a list of all the apps you want to install and _most_ of them have data backed up automatically.

I think literally the only stuff on my phone that isn't backed up is local files (downloads etc.) but those could easily just be saved to Google Drive instead of on-device.