Android 13 | Hacker News Reader

Android 13

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132 pointsskiman10201 comments

The notification shade design is still terrible with comically huge paddings all over the place. Nothing fits. Everything is truncated. My ticket on the subject got closed with bullshittest of excuses: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/232821168

Can't they, like, add new APIs, but not touch the damn UI without a clearly defined rationale? By "clearly defined" I mean substantiated by something besides calls to emotions.

And I'm getting tired of every OS needing a major update every year because reasons. Software products need to have a finished state like every other engineering project does.

Your ticket comes across as very confrontational. This puts the developer(s) into a position where they feel the need to defend themselves instead of acting collaboratively with the user to solve their problem.

Agreed, it's not very constructive feedback. Google does respond to feedback on the Issue Tracker, but I've found posts that sound like rants tend to get ignored (unless there's some critical issue at play).

It's also not a very constructive UI change, and the Pixel 6 doesn't allow rolling back to Android 12, so if you do update, your premium-priced phone suffers a UI downgrade. I don't think anger is unreasonable when all is said and done, it's a phone. It doesn't need constant screwing around with the UI, just make it secure, reliable, and optimize it.

It doesn’t matter if anger is at play. At the end of the day, if you want something changed, you should act in the best way to get it

The best way in 2022, sadly, if you have little clout, is to create a public outcry and potential PR disaster. See it every day on Twitter.

Yes, I'm explicitly asking them to undo their work because it was actively destructive for everyone's user experience.

Consider, maybe, the psycology of the interaction. You may well be used to direct feedback, but when driving change in another organisation -- especiallly one where it's really cheap for them to simply ignore you -- it can help to consider how people will react and make it as easy as possible for them to take the action you want them to.

We can assume that they made these changes deliberately. Therefore it's going to take a lot of conviincing to get them to undo the changes.

For what it's worth, too, I disagree with you: I'm quite happy with the asethetic they've built. Although, in case it's not clear to you, no-one outside of Google can see the screenshots you supplied. So I've not seen the specific notifications you're complaining about.

How not what is the problem.

Imagine you bought a house you like. A year later a team of exterior painters knocks on your door and tells you they are going to repaint your house to keep it up to date with thr latest trends. With some effort you manage to kick them out. This situation repeats a few times until a few months later they show up at night and paint your house without your permission, partially painting over some of the windows and even your car. They also replace your dog with a cat. They do it because they are full time painters employed by the city council and they cant just sit and do nothing.

Your comment reminded me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvQcabZ1zrk

I don't know why Google has declare a "War on Contrast", but since Android 7 it's only become uglier with each release. It's certainly hell for writing durable tutorials, what with each release shuffling the settings and icons randomly.

I wonder if it sell more phones, convincing people to upgrade to get the new Android experience?

People like to have the new shiny that they see around them.

I had the same issue at first. But I set font size to large, and display size to small, and the UI became a lot better.

Something strange has happened to Android... the UI/UX had pulled ahead prior to iOS 7, strengthened it's lead due to the buggy shitshow that persisted through iOS 9, but has recently taken huge steps back in terms of information density and hiding things behind notches for no apparent reason.

Has the team changed substantially? Has Google basically "won" in marketshare and has thrown in the towel? Is there something big coming where the resources are going to?

iOS continues to improve and refine the "total user experience", especially if you're in Apple's multi-device ecosystem but Android feels like it is stagnating in a significant way for the last 2-3 years.

Honestly, I think you're just biased. We all are.

A few months ago I was reading some article which mentioned a common feature on iOS that I didn't even know existed and realized I had been away from the Apple ecosystem for too long. Given iOS's market share and influence, I decided I better catch up and bought an iPhone 13 for my next upgrade, complete with Apple Watch.

I hope this isn't too much of a cop-out, but there are pros and cons to each platform, but both are pretty amazing. We're at the point where we're really comparing subtleties, habits and personal preference. I miss some things on Android and wish Android had some things from iOS. You get a bunch of paper cuts on each platform. I won't list out my personal pet peeves, because they're just that.

After I've absorbed what there is to learn from Apple (I'll probably get an iPad to complete the set), I'll definitely be going back to my Samsung. I personally prefer Android.

I also own a Pixel Pro for testing, and that thing is a buggy disaster, but that's a different conversation.

Full-time designers gotta justify their jobs somehow.

With Android 12 they introduced Material Design 3, the latest iteration of the design system used by Android and other Google products. Their designers haven't even bothered to publish a proper and usable spec this time, but Google marketed it as production ready in blog posts, Google I/O talks and press releases.

The published Material Design 3 spec is missing several basic components, it doesn't even have a checkbox. Google is inviting developers to migrate to the latest version of the design system, while their own teams at Angular and Flutter are now mixing M2 and M3 components and design concepts, and hitting roadblocks because of incompatible elevation and typography changes in certain components.

https://m3.material.io

> it doesn't even have a checkbox

This seems to be intentional. It has a switch component. You don't need a checkbox and a switch.

It isn't intentional, the official implementations of M3 include a new checkbox.

We need to find a way to move on, once something is perfected. Because if we don't we kinda ruin what we have already perfected. It's called planned obsolescence and below are some resources on the same. It is widely used across industries for over a century and kinda plays a huge role in climate change.

Veritasium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE

DW (mostly about phone) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aYJPonRJd8

The problem lies deeper. There's only so much work that the humanity legitimately needs done, but the economy is built upon the assumption that everyone can get a job. So we end up creating jobs the society at large doesn't actually benefit from to make sure every person has to do some work to earn money to live. This includes ballooning IT companies about which you can't help but keep asking "where does enough work even come from to occupy all these people, in a product that's essentially finished".

I don't know how to even approach solving this.

Further reading - The Rise of Bullshit Jobs https://jacobin.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-david-graeber-work...

The solution is both simultaneously simple, yet incredibly nuanced and socially complex: UBI.

And because universal basic income is so nuanced and socially complex, I feel like this problem is here to stay until we reach post-scarcity, if we ever do.

Exactly. That's without even considering a botched rollout of UBI causing inflation and inequality like we've never known before.

Iterating design after success to make it worse isn't the same thing as planned obsolescence.

> We need to find a way to move on, once something is perfected

The GUI/UI/UX on Android is so close to perfection like a zygote is close to a human being.

This is one of the posts I wish I could upvote more than once.

I used both and am baffled by your experience. In my experience Android has been a complete glitch hell only being somewhat fixed since Android 12 (still flawed but it's a huge push) while iOS has always managed to at least be half decent in that regard. iOS7 was a few steps back but they managed to come back pretty quickly.

I agree about information density. Manufacturer makes the screen larger to fit more content, Android makes elements larger to fit fewer controls (this is not just a "ppi problem", the layouts all seem to be designed for 3" screens, yet none of them exist).

iOS/Apple has mostly been good about density, but they too keep being tempted by their large screens to make UI elements unnecessarily large.

I've been on Pixel devices since the 2 XL and other Androids since the Nexus one. For me, Android 12 was the biggest regression that I've ever seen in one major Android update.

The bugs were massive and glaring in the early days. Things as simple as getting a notification would sometimes completely blank the rest of the screen. Since then, random slowdowns and slow animations have only gotten worse.

Beyond the core platform, Google's apps (which feel like an extension of the core) are just getting worse too. Android Auto for phones has been replaced with a terrible driving mode implementation. I recently used voice search to open an audio app in driving mode. It helpfully opened the app on my tv at home instead of the phone that was in driving mode miles away from home.

Everything is more disjointed and less functional than before. The little helpful four icons at the top of the app drawer? That was an amazing feature a few years ago. It'd always highlight one of the ones that I was about to use. Now, it fails 100% of the time, no matter how obvious it should be.

Things that used to be easy to do with the notification shade are now more confusing and take more steps than ever before. Its an awful mess, and this is literally the first time that I've preferred ios on my ipad over the Android UI.

Fascinating how different experiences can be. The changes of Android 12 are what kept me from switching to iOS (even if I disagree with some of the paradigms, transitions are finally only glitchy something like 20% of the time instead of approximately every time).

yeah I really can't fathom how the material design won out. it's so.... gimmicky. like when you click a button, and it radiates out a ripple across the button surface.

Agreed. I am implementing some portions of it right now for an app and some of it is so eye-rolley. I'm just skipping those bits.

Overall, I think it's a nice guide, especially for people like me who are design-inclined but not designers. However it shouldn't be taken as gospel.

I don't want information density, I want a reliable and secure communication device. Sometimes less is more.

Leetcode hiring practices is what I'm thinking.

  10. Android 13 adopts Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio, a new Bluetooth audio standard that results in lower latency than classic audio. This allows you to hear audio that’s in better sync with the sound’s source, reducing delay. With Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio, you can also enjoy enhanced audio quality and broadcast audio to multiple devices at the same time.

This is huge! Now I wonder if I have any Bluetooth devices which support the new standard, or if I will be forced to buy new headphones (again!)

This happens to be my area of expertise (somewhat). You don't and none are planned to be released until later this year.

You likely don't even have a phone that supports it: Only high-end chipsets with Bluetooth 5.2 capability support it (check for an explicit mention of LE Audio in the SoC's data sheet; per my understanding the isochronous channels needed for LE Audio are optional in the standard).

Oh yeah, and it is huge, mostly in one way I care about: The audio quality might not suck so badly anymore when making phone calls because the standard finally allows more than 16kHz audio recording (the need for an extra profile has been removed).

According to the Bluetooth SIG cert for the new Galaxy Buds2 Pro, they support LC3 and many of the relevant LE Audio profiles.

https://launchstudio.bluetooth.com/ListingDetails/154534

There's also this Bluetooth transmitter called the NEXUM VOCE that supports LE Audio, including Broadcast Audio:

https://launchstudio.bluetooth.com/ListingDetails/157814

Hey, nice, new releases! There's a chance that many devices are in the pipeline and have been held back until now with Android 13 just being released and the LE Audio spec just being finished/the marketing push just starting (it might be hard to believe how long I've had to search for basic information beyond years-old regurgitated press releases a few months ago).

For everyone playing along at home: Look out for "Basic Audio Profile" support.

Do you know what Samsung Galaxy phones do differently that lets them broadcast audio to multiple ordinary headsets?

I don't know specifically what Samsung does, but a lot of OEMs who offer similar features licensed tech from a company called Tempow. Tempow offered its own BT stack and profile called Tempow Audio Profile (TAP) that enabled streaming audio to multiple Bluetooth audio outputs simultaneously. Motorola and TCL deployed phones with this tech.

BTW, Google acquired Tempow last year: https://www.protocol.com/entertainment/google-synaptics-temp...

I don't know exactly, but my educated guess is that they form multiple normal Bluetooth audio connections to multiple devices. The standard allows this and the bandwidth should be fine too, so I suppose they just added a little bit of software to control it.

Its BS. The low latency part doesnt come from LE, but from adopting yet another proprietary blob Audio codec. Instead of standardizing on OPUS they went with LC3. 20 more years of royalties for fraunhofer.

Is hard to rate UI/UX of Android as a whole this days. In the last few years, each big manufacturer has created their own design language on top of stock Android and evolved in its own way.

- Samsung's One UI https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/one-ui/

- Xiaomi's MIUI https://global.miui.com/en

- OnePlus's OxygenOS https://www.oneplus.com/uk/oxygenos

- (Stock) Google's Material Design/You https://material.io/design

Yes, new Android versions bring new features for all of them. Many took ideas from Google's vision, and small manufacturers just use stock with a few tweaks. Also Google for his Pixels does exclusive stuff that do not goes to the Stock Android that every manufacturer can use as a base.

The point that I'm trying to make is that today is not much accurate to talk about "The Android Experience" (usually to compare it to iOS).

A pros on Android is that we can (somewhat) escape from bad UI by changing a device. I'm fine with Android 12 because mine is OneUI.

Between Win95 and Mac System 7 you could see a difference. Between all these "Material" interfaces i see no difference.

Google's official blog posts on new Android releases usually leave out a ton of info. If you're curious about what many of the other features introduced in Android 13 are, I wrote a summary over on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/wp0skh/50_features...

This summary is just for user-facing features and doesn't mention any of the new APIs, app-facing behavioral changes, or most of the platform changes. My ongoing Android 13 changelog (currently at >32k words, ~170 min estimated read time lol) covers all of that and then some: https://blog.esper.io/android-13-deep-dive/

Is Android 13 the version that will bring game controller rumble support? Or did that happen in Android 12?

You just reminded me of this article I wrote about that last year: https://www.xda-developers.com/android-12-better-game-contro...

Unfortunately, it looks like the patches were never merged: https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/topic:InputDeviceR...

In fact they were abandoned in August 2021. I haven't heard anything since.

Aw man, that sucks. Not having rumble is a disadvantage for GeForce NOW and Xbox Game Pass on Nvidia Shield TV. I thought that built-in Android support would lead to support in Shield TV's firmware.

> The apps you download will now need your explicit permission to send notifications, rather than being allowed to send notifications by default.

Hallelujah!

I fondly remember waiting for new Android releases years ago. I'd jump to the landing page, get excited for new features, plan ahead on getting a new phone. I never noticed when, but at some point this stopped.

My old phone works just fine (...for an Android, that is), and I don't even mind the cracked backplate. The battery capacity keeps decreasing year after year, but even that feels like a feature in disguise. It won't get an upgrade to the new Android (by design, I presume), but I don't care. Have I gotten old? Is it me? Or is it you?

Mobile OS's have far passed peak change. I think iOS 7 was peak change. Where it went to the transparent UI, swipe up bar etc. Everything since has been a tweak. The next future of "big change" will come in VR/AR || carOS when each OS update dramatically makes the experience better and more efficient. I doubt we will see much in phone OS space in the new few years as VR/AR/ CarOS ramps up.

I think the inevitability of AR/VR is oversold. We have been hearing about the Apple VR project for years now. Hitting the sweet spot between utility and innovation (like iPhone) is an extremely rare occurrence and might not happen for years to come.

They've arguably already hit it. Apple has been testing overengineered features that are suspiciously well suited for AR in broad daylight for a few years now. If they can't pull it off, I don't think anyone can.

have you tried an oculus quest? Its amazing for what it is, and in my opinion its only like an original xbox at this stage.

I am constantly tickled by some new advances in almost each iOS release. When the base UI and interaction works well enough, I don't want major changes for the sake of change.

Some features I really like that aren't glitzy but are game-changing for me:

* The ability to auto-detect and translate webpages in Safari (or SFSafariViewController)

* Advances in the lock screen and control center

* FaceID and no-password FIDO2 sign-in

I'm sure there are similar things for Android (which I haven't touched since my Nexus5). I think the best approach is not to change what works.

No, iOS 7 was when the downwards trend started. I remember seeing the screenshots of the beta and couldn't believe it's the real thing that's going to actually ship for real. I saw those icons that looked as if they're drawn by kids, and assumed they're placeholders, that the real ones were just not ready yet.

I hate minimalistic, sterile, flat UI design with a burning passion. We need skeuomorphism and affordances back, and we need it all yesterday.

The next real improvement I’m waiting for is the EU regulation that requires big companies to be compatible (messaging, video / photo sharing).

I don’t care about a solution that copies video from an Android phone to an Android tablet… I need one that works with every computing device and OS.

Android VMs are plentiful. What can't you do?

I thought it seemed that iOS 7 was too long ago, but I looked at the major changes since then and none of them contain nearly as many major changes as iOS 7. I do appreciate the many iterative changes since such as improving notifications.

Wouldn't this be a sign of a mature or maturing product that's moved closer to maintenance or addressing the longer term health of the platform? I'd argue that most technologies should expect to lose their excitement factor because they've conquered most of their battles and are more like utilities or tools. From an outsider perspective it seems like that is part of the reason it's significant news when there's changes like Google increasing the API level requirements on the store requiring new rework on apps as it shows the platform can't be considered fully stable yet, highlighting a difference in viewpoints.

Similar.

Used to run flagship phones, replaced them on the yearly, ran various Android builds on current phone and/or older phones....

At some point I simply stopped caring, started to get the pixel-A phones, and lived happily ever after. I think my Nexus 6p was the last flagship phone I owned, and I probably swapped the battery in that like ~5 times before I got the boot-loop of death. These days I won't be bothered to replace a battery, unless there is a compelling reason. Just get another phone, and move on.

> These days I won't be bothered to replace a battery, unless there is a compelling reason. Just get another phone, and move on.

Generating less e-waste seems compelling enough.

I fondly remember waiting for christmas. I'd wake up, get excited for new gifts, plan ahead for the celebration, but at some point this stopped.

Bad example. Upgrades became objectively worse (if we’re talking about number of features).

There are some Christmas presents where I'd rather have received nothing than find a way of disposing of some junk.

In some earlier versions, I found there were bit of "must have" improvements over the previous version, but as Android matures, I think it is less so as many of improvements offered by a new version these days are either already possible using an app, or just some nice to have. Occasionally, I do see features that I really want to have but I find they are far from dealbreaker...

Android is a child who never grows up. Is like those children rose by volves.

I feel the same except for the battery life going down feeling like a feature

I’d be perfectly happy keeping my old phone with Android 9 until the battery became useless, except for security upgrades. Old Android versions have some scary vulnerabilities. Doesn’t that concern you?

Is android mainline happened? Like updating many system services, security things and apps through google play without upgrading OS?

Yes. Since Android 12.

Project Mainline was introduced in Android 10 actually.

Finally, the feature I've been most looking forward to is finally here:

- A shortcut to turn on the flashlight

(The "Quick Tap" gesture can now turn on/off the flashlight)

And this concludes all the features I was looking forward to in Android 13.

Thankfully 3-button navigation is still here. The day they remove it is the day I stop using Android.

There's an Xposed Mod/Custom ROM feature enabling you to map a long press of the power button to toggling the flash light and I miss it everywhere it's not available.

MacroDroid has been a lifesaver for simple things like that.

I think the localization preferences will be a big hit in European countries. Translations can be really hit or miss depending on how technical an app gets. For some apps, you might feel the developer did a good job with localization and want to view it in your native language, for other apps you'd rather use the English version because the translations are really bad.

Absolutely. I generally use English (not my native language) as default language for my Android phone, but there are some apps where the English translation is pretty awful and that I prefer to use in the original language. For these use cases app developers needed to add in-app language switchers, which can be a bit of a pain to implement.

There are still situations where the setting in Android won't cut it though, namely if Android doesn't know the language at all. For example, Android doesn't know Romansh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhaeto-Romance_languages) is a thing, so if an app wants to add a translation for it, it needs to be an in-app switch.

I also sometimes use the English version because it’s easier to find documentation. That’s also why I always use Linux in English, localized error messages are useless.

This is a pain on Windows. I can't use an app in different language easily, like by just run `LANG=en_US.UTF-8 xeyes`.

I was honestly massively disappointed with the introduction of Android 12 and its "bubbles" UI; with it came some new pretty animations, and from my experience, the interface was more fluid, but less responsive.

I now run Android with animations completely off because even setting them to .5x duration was too slow.

Who else has a smartphone "stuck" on a older Android OS?

My phone is still using an older Android version - unable to upgrade any further, or receive security updates. Before you recoil in horror, consider the following: the phone is in perfectly working order, it has an excellent screen and camera, it's fast for my needs. The real horror is that millions of perfectly fine smartphones are sent to landfill because these little pocket super-computers with amazing hardware can no longer be upgraded by software. Is this a embarrassing wasteful state of affairs? Or the price of "progress" on the hardware upgrade treadmill?

On top of your point, I think people should also understand that smartphones aren't exactly a small purchase for a non-trivial population. Even tech-literate are stuck with the stock ROM if they need to use banking apps, snapchat etc. because of SafetyNet.

Despite getting a lot of crap online, it looks like iPhones actually do better when it comes to shipping security updates to old phones? [1]

I am not sure but if that is really the case, I think I'll switch to one for my next phone.

[1]: https://endoflife.date/iphone

Apple does a much better job. My Note 10, released in 2019, is officially close to its EOL (last year of life support, i.e. security fixes) - and it was a big step forward for Samsung to ever even give such guarantees.

The iPhone X, released in 2017, still gets new versions of iOS. Even phones that have long been dropped from new iOS releases still get security fixes for a long, long time.

I hate Apple for some things and even they could probably do better, but they're incredibly far ahead here (now if only the devices were more repairable).

It's absolutely terrible. Even on custom ROMs, which can extend the life of a phone quite a lot, the latest wave of obsolescence comes from Android dropping support for old, of course un-updatable kernels.

It's absolutely not the price of progress, it's the price manufacturers not caring (why would they? people have already bought the device and they'll buy more short-lived devices) and there being no legislation to make them care.

With mainline kernels many phones that are a decade old would be perfectly usable today.

I still run an old tablet with 5.1, and a phone with 7.1. I've seen 10 year old iPads running on the wild, albeit for basic tasks.

Still, this situation makes me quite sad. Why I can't easily update my phone OS like I do with my Linux desktops and servers? Things like the /e/ foundation or Lineage OS are great but still have a lot of limitations. Mostly due to closed source drivers that mobile phone makers use.

Even if both of them have hundreds or thousands of CVEs there is nothing I can do since security fixes won't be backported. I use AOSP with the minimal applications required for their "job", that means, mostly F-Droid applications and no gapps/vendor apps.

Until their batteries die, I will keep them around. I won't throw away a perfectly working device.

Most mobile applications still target Android 7 and work perfectly. My phone has a good camera, battery still lasts 3 days, Internet browsing is fast enough and WiFi, LTE/4G reception work great too. Still, watching the mayhem Android 12 and beyond (Material You) has become, maybe my next phone will be an iOS device.

Yeah, my Galaxy Note 8 is the pinnacle of usability and design for me but it's been left behind by updates. Remapping the Bixby button + MacroDroid + Nova home screen is just a perfect balance of usability and customizability. Samsung Dex is a pretty useful Android desktop environment for on the go work. I would have loved if the if the same form factor just got upgraded hardware (the camera is now outdated). It's a bit of a zombie phone for me at this point (a true ship of theseus - I'm not sure if I can say I have the same phone anymore). I've since picked up an iPhone as a replacement but am really missing the old features -- so much so that I've been running them both concurrently. It would be such a waste to get rid of an incredibly capable phone with a still-amazing screen.

I just switched from a Pixel 3 to a Pixel 6 and I don't like it. I am just an average user, I don't use many apps, and the UI in the newer versions of Android is just atrocious. Everything is now "gestures" that don't really work that well, especially when you hold the device in one hand. I had to specially enable the old-school 3-button nav at the bottom of the screen (luckily that still exists) to be able to have some form of non-frustrating interaction with the device. I don't want to be super negative, just ranting I guess. Thanks for listening...

What's crazy is that this problem was solved a long time ago. The Palm Pre had gesture-based navigation and while some of it had to do with the screen size being smaller, there was a focus on navigation from the bottom in applications. Notifications would pop up from the bottom.

It's crazy that we're almost 14 years out from that and with these huge screens you have to reach to the top of the screen.

Yeah, I think that was my biggest gripe, they moved the back button to the top-left of the screen... why??? One handed operation used to work okayish, but not anymore...

With gestures on (the new default), you can swipe in from either side of the screen to go back. Easy to do with one hand.

Enabling the three navigation buttons is the first thing I do on every new phone I get. You can navigate a lot faster with the buttons compared to the gestures.

My personal opinion is that the ios-like gesture-based navigation is hands down the best UX I have ever used, so there is that.

Though I dislike the back gesture on android, ios has it better due to not having it in the first place.

Can we just take a moment and applaud the Android team for evolving the Android UI to a point where it actually looks fresher and more modern than iOS? Android looked like a dumpsterfire and a poor-man's iOS for 10 years but now... who would've thought Google would outmuscle Apple in the design arena? It was unthinkable a couple of years ago. Apple got complacent and Google pounced.

Spotted the Google employee! No seriously though this couldn't be farther from the truth. My wife has the latest galaxy phone running android and the experience is just abysmal compared to iOS. I am a long time android user that recently converted to iOS and I'll never go back. It's leagues better. I am no Apple fan either, but even less of a Google fan at this point.

My wife got a high-end Android phone for work (she just put the SIM card in her iPhone, which her employer allows). Of course, I couldn't resist playing with it. Besides what you say, I was also surprised how laggy rending of animations, etc. was. I kinda expected that they'd have solved it by now.

Which animations? Personally, I just think the default transitions are always too slow. I enable debug tools and crank them up to half speed. The phone ends up feeling much faster even though its just animation speed.

Agreed. 1.0x animation speed feels like molasses. 0.5x animation speed feels like it ought to be the default.

Samsung phones have customised UI which is significantly different than what this Android 13 Pixel rollout looks like. You and the OP aren't talking about the same thing.

My last samsung phone would randomly disconnect from the mobile network, without any warning, and would keep showing it had signal available.

Of course that meant I would lose calls and texts, because it showed no indication of being effectively offline.

The only fix would be a full reboot.

Which is completely moronic for a brand new and expensive phone. More so if you think that receiving and making calls is the flipping basic purpose of a phone.

I have since then switched to an iphone, using the same sim card and provider, and having no issues so far.

I might go back to android in the future, but surely not to samsung.

OneUI is actually much better than the shit Google has tried to pull with A12/A13.

As a Samsung OneUI user (and occasional Pixel user as a developer) I disagree.

I like Samsung for their customisability and additional features, but the UI is very much in a "yeeeeeshhh" category.

I am sorry have used Android 12?

This was probably the case in the past, but I was surprised by how similar Samsung's Android 12 is to Lineage OS 12 on the Note 10. They've kind of converged.

Regardless of customizations, they use same animations. Even high end galaxies are nowhere near iPhones, and I say that as an Android developer and user for 8 years. Framedrops, jank, inconsistent styles, it’s just impossible to fix, it seems. Or Google doesn’t care.

And no, it’s not different on Pixels, it also drops frames and has nowhere near as fluid animations as iOS.

No, they really don't use the same animations (or even look the same).

Moreover, at least comparing S22 and Pixel 6 Pro I have at hand, the S22 is significantly laggier and slow, while Pixel isn't.

Sure they do, or you think Pixels roll out custom animations bypassing OS framework?

It's the other way around, Samsung rolls out custom UI which changes and bypasses animations.

Do you have any links where I can read about this?

Have to get a Pixel to really experience Google's design. Samsung loves to make things worse for no good reason.

OP is being sarcastic. I wasn't sure until I looked at OP's submissions and noticed they're all pro-Apple

Real question for people who use it, do you like it?

I have an old OnePlus that need to be changed but I look at that sad yellow-ish absurdly rounded UI with bland icons and I just want to postpone my purchase until the Android design team wants a bonus and rediscovers colours and shapes and change everything once again.

(I'll admit that I'm someone who frequently launches the wrong app because nowadays the icons are all round and blue)

> Real question for people who use it, do you like it?

I was a bit annoyed at first. But... like most major redesigns, it came to grow on me. To the point where pre-12 Android now looks kinda dated. Better animations, smoother experience, more contrast and more colors fit the OS well I think.

The only thing I regret is that my personal Samsung phone didn't pick up on the design language - OneUI is much more conservative and, IMO, less attractive to look at. It follows iOS cues a bit too much.

I dislike the huge padding in the UI and the loss of transparency but more than that I'm annoyed that they removed things I used frequently like the separate wifi and mobile data toggles in the quick settings pulldown. Now it's an extra tap and a long animation to use functionality I frequently need because I don't live in a place where I get an ideal signal.

A big part of android 12 and now 13 is "Material You", which is their name for the design language + color customization throughout the OS. I agree that the yellow color is awful but that's not the standard. You can also disable the color-theming on the icons entirely if you want to and it will default to the full color originals.

I have Android 13 on my Pixel 4 and I like it.

Personally I disagree. I've been using iPhone for 13 years, I have complaints sure, but it works. I got an Android Samsung Galaxy thing earlier this year as a work device - primarily to offload Teams, email etc of my personal device. The phone itself is good, hardware feels modern, but the Android 12 OS is just poor from top to bottom. It took far too long to work out some of the most basic features. Even today I find myself getting slightly lost or confused when looking for some hidden setting. Windows 10, OSX, iOS, you can search battery and go into the battery menu... my galaxy doesn't do that. I'm sure someone will tell me the Samsung version of Android isn't the real Android or some bollocks, but really, Android needs some serious work and little UI/UX tweaks wont cut it. The experience has shown me that my 4 year old iPhone is far more modern than a latest Android.

My anecdotal experience is that the things you are talking about have way more to do with what you are used to then what is "better".

At this point I don't think either is that much better or worse the the other.

For one I have your exact same feeling when using an iPhone. And I know it's not because it's bad, it's just completely different than what I have been using for many many years.

(And yes, i can just go to the app drawer, type "battery" an find the battery settings)

Oh I appreciate its different, that's not my complaint, the UX is just a heavy learning curve that sours the entire experience for something that is actually a decent device. It feels like its built by engineers where having things a certain way makes sense to geeks, where as iOS is built by designers to work for the masses.

I suppose this is where I get the feel that iOS is more modern.

Pulling the app draw and searching battery doesn't work. I've tried it again. Not sure what I've done wrong. I can search in settings itself, but given I'm already half way there, I don't really need to search from there.

> I'm sure someone will tell me the Samsung version of Android isn't the real Android or some bollocks, but really, Android needs some serious work and little UI/UX tweaks wont cut it

I'm sure that if you stop to reflect on what you've just stated you'd realize that accusing stock Android of poor design from your experience running what is not-Android-design maybe doesn't make much sense?

Samsung radically changes the UI on their phones. They're significantly different from every other Android phone out there. Lots of other manufacturers don't make massive changes to the UI.

I'm running Android 12 on a Pixel 6a right now. I flipped up the app drawer, tapped the "Search your phone and more" at the top, and typed "bat" and it has an autocomplete suggestion for "battery percentage". The list then shows a deep link to the Battery Percentage screen on the Battery settings, then a link to the Battery settings area, then a link into the Battery usage area under the Battery Settings. Then it shows Pixel Tips for "Quickly see battery info for your devices", "Make your phone last longer with Extreme Battery Saver".

Your experience is 100% a failure of Samsung, not of Android. The stock Android Open Source launcher does the thing you're wanting. You bought a device which purposefully doesn't do that.

The equivalent would be to install a Linux distro that defaults to just a command line interface and then complaining that Linux is impossible for average users to figure out. There are other choices out there! You could have bought a Pixel, or a Motorola, or a OnePlus, or a Sony, or a Nokia, and all of those would have done this.

Theoretically, you can also install a different launcher which might do this behavior. Maybe try the Pixel Launcher?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

There are lots of other potential launchers which take over the home screen UI. It won't change the settings UI or some of the other Samsung related skinned areas. You can then revert back to the default Samsung launcher.

Samsung S10 lite. This device went from Android 10 to 12. At each version what parent said works just like you said it does on your phone. (Maybe not the autocomplete)

I usually go to Settings and search there but searching from the top search thing on the App drawer works fine too.

> Windows 10, OSX, iOS, you can search battery and go into the battery menu... my galaxy doesn't do that.

You have a malfunctioning Samsung device then.

I go to settings, search battery, and choose the first result which takes me to the battery menu.

Agreed, this is definitely in there. Not sure what PP was talking about.

Either that or search in the app drawer (at least on a pixel)

Not sure if you are joking. Beating Apple on design? They have a way to go.

Personally I think iOS design is garbage and patronizing to the user, and finds every possible way to hide what you actually want to do. It's absurd how hard it is to find out how to do something on an Apple built OS, especially as they used to be so easy to function and navigate in the early iOS days, to help everyone get onto smartphones.

Android doesn't baby me like that but has millions of other giant problems.

You know what?

Both android and iOS won’t let you change dns server for mobile data.

They’re both patronising to the user, in my opinion.

You can now set Private DNS on Android, that's at least handy, and I think you can achieve the same thing on iOS through VPN settings or "Encrypted DNS".

Patronizing how?

iOS has looked like shit since iOS 7, with its flat design.

I picked up a device with iOS 6 and marvelled at how beautiful the design was.

Android needs only to give up the flat material design to beat iOS entirely on the design front.

And yes I use Apple.

Is this sarcasm?

I had my app drawer on the swipe right screen. I updated to android 12, now that's the Google screen. You can't remove it. You cant replace it through the settings.

However, you can disable it. But now, you have a giant blank page that says click to reactivate. It's personalization alright, but not the way you think. Kinda like how turning off wifi is a suggestion, not a guarantee.

What are you talking about?

Long press on background -> "Home Settings" -> "Swipe to Google app" disables that panel on Pixels (for which this 13 is rolling out for).

The page is then fully gone.

I wonder when will Google finally stop harassing users to enable Google Play Protect when they install or update an app with F-Droid.

I don't have any issue with Play Protect on LineageOS without Google services.

Just saying, I guess. It's cool to be reminded what increasingly crazy bullshit it saves you to not be too tightly inside some walled garden.

That's Play Protect's sole purpose. It isn't actually a useful piece of software in any meaningful capacity (and remains, several years in, the industry worst in independent testing[1]). Play Protect is there to provide the "green checkmark" people expect to see on their PCs that tell them they are safe, even if it's kinda a joke because they're running Norton or something that doesn't do jack to protect them. Speaking of, Norton's mobile antivirus rates better than Play Protect.

Play Protect is a scare tactic for installing software that doesn't pay Google a 30% cut. Probably the only functional thing it actually does.

[1] https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/mobile-devices/

I'm a little concerned with where google is going with all these proprietary chromeos phone integration features.

They discontinued chrome apps but PWAs aren't really ready as a replacement and it seems like google is continuing to use stuff like PNACL in various places which now nobody else is able to use, plus they are now just adding functionality like this that really should just be provided by apps directly to the OS to avoid the limitations of not having native apps and not have to compete with developers.

Instead of chromebooks being a neutral platform where all developers have the same capabilities since it's just chrome, it looks like its turning into a situation more like the original release of the iphone where Google is just the only company that is allowed to make native apps, and they are using that to add features that can only be used with android.

It kind of feels like they just invoked switching to PWAs as an excuse and instead simply closed down the os.

Imo no matter how great Android is, Samsung ruins it with their awful bloatware. There seem to be no way of removing them either.

I don't know if the bloatware is worse in the USA or something, but as a former TouchWiz hater I have to hard disagree on this. I would take One UI any time over whatever Fisher Price crap Google's designers have been peddling since Android 12.

Stock Android really peaked around version 10. Ever since they have just been messing with things that weren't broken, like the notifications or lock screen.

I thought I never would say this but thankfully Samsung doesn't automatically go along with Google's yearly inflation of whitespace [1] and other UX "improvements".

[1] Example of how ridiculous it has become: https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/qbljd0/the_margins...

Then don't buy Samsung phones?

Believe me, after this experience I will not buy another Samsung phone again.

Personally I expand that out to generally be avoiding Samsung anything.

The only positive experience I've had with Samsung devices was dumpster diving their TVs as they had a stupid high failure rate of their capacitors. A couple of dollar order from Mouser or DigiKey and the TV would be better than new.

The fact that the only positives I've had with Samsung in the last decade or so is fixing their broken devices to score nearly free TVs says a lot about Samsung. I used to really like Samsung. I bought a lot of Samsung electronics, either as the original device or with their equipment in things (they used to make a ton of PC power supplies for OEMs, their CRT monitors and TVs were often re-badged in the US). I avoid it like the plague these days.

Pixels aren’t available in my country.

They aren't in my country, yet I have my second one (Pixel 3 and now Pixel 4). There are ways depending on your country, e.g. Amazon sends phones further than Google. Sometimes you can get overpriced Pixels in your own country (this way I got my replacement Pixel 4, Amazon didn't have them in stock after my warranty claim, so they gave me my money back and I bot Pixel 4 again for similar price).

Pixel series is my favorite. Even the second tier Pixels are better than the Samsung Galaxy I got last year. The builtin Samsung apps suck and can't be installed, true. But also the keyboard or screen size isn't a fit for me so it's constantly inserting periods/upper case words into my stream of words when I type quickly. And worst of all the USB-C port has gotten so bad only 2 of my 8 USB-C cables work with the phone anymore (though they still work with other USB-C devices I need to charge).

Really looking forward to going back to the Pixel phones and not touching Samsung again.

Pixel is generally out of my price range

Which Samsung do you get? My Samsung is more expensive than any Pixel I've had before.

Pixel 6a is $449 new. You can get an older model than that used for half the price too.

My sister-in-law got a Motorola phone under our Fi plan and I think it was fine too. They're around $300 new.

https://fi.google.com/about/phones/moto?pli=1

> There seem to be no way of removing them either

LineageOS is pretty good and non-American Samsungs are easily unlocked.

A custom ROM is probably the most (only?) reasonable way of using an Android phone.

Samsung is not a good choice for custom ROM due to Knox warranty hard fuse, Snapdragon/Exynos split on the "same" model, etc.

Xiaomi and other Chinese brands seem to be the way to go for flashing ROM's. There is still a huge community for those.

I ignore Samsung apps. What apps are you unable to avoid, other than the settings and tray?

you cannot remove them completely, but using ADB you can disable almost all of them.

The media sharing tools (allowing all of your photos to be shared with an app) are the largest silent invasion of privacy on both Apple and Android phones, which is not much discussed.

Even on IOS, until recently, every app, as long as you allowed media viewing permissions, had access to EVERY PHOTO in your library.

I'm confused by your comment. The new permission tools address the fact that apps have access to your entire library. It's an evolutionary improvement in security, since in every computing device since the 80s, all your apps had access to your entire filesystem.

To be honest it can be annoying sometimes. I was happy with the all-in photo library access restriction we've had since 2014. Any app that would do something nefarious with my pictures would have to be something photography related, in which case they can still trick me into giving full library access even with the fine-grained policies. I'd much prefer a short-lived one-time access permission instead, for those times when you need to upload something.

What Photo Picker does was (mostly) already available since Android 4.4 KitKat with the documents picker (Files app) and the ACTION_GET_CONTENT or ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT intents.

What Photo Picker adds is a much nicer, more intuitive UI and the ability to grant read-only access to user-selected media files. URIs obtained through Photo Picker can be persisted, but unlike with documents picker, they don't grant write access as well.

If you're curious about how the photo picker works under the hood, I wrote an article that goes into that: https://blog.esper.io/android-photo-picker-backport/

And on a linux desktop, EVERY FILE you have is accessible, writeable, sendable over the internet.

Don’t get me wrong, these are very welcome capabilities, but phones are still eons ahead of desktop OSs.

Your message confuses me. Do you mean to say the improvement noted in android 13 is a good remedy for, historically, a bad privacy practice?

To me, limiting which folders/pieces of media an app can access seems like a win.

Cool, I guess? I don't see anything actually useful.

Right now I'd like Google Translate/Assistant that would translate everything it hears and simply show the language next to the translation on screen.

Would make my talks with several coworkers so much easier.

There was a device that did exactly this, and it also seemed to do voice-to-voice pretty well but I can't remember the name.

I laugh every time Google's multibillion dollar AI shows me the same ads for already installed apps, still shows me ads for women's products (they 100% know I'm male) and can't understand I'm on an anime songs binge (or rock, or a certain band) this evening.

On that note, I can't update my OnePlus anymore. I know they stopped releasing updates, but I thought they'd keep the OTA update servers online. Guess AWS is too expensive.

> Right now I'd like Google Translate/Assistant that would translate everything it hears and simply show the language next to the translation on screen.

Uh... Google Assistant Interpreter mode exists for years now?

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9234753?hl=en

> Right now I'd like Google Translate/Assistant that would translate everything it hears and simply show the language next to the translation on screen.

This exists. There is also a live transcription tool for deaf people that works really good (in german tested, i was very suprised) since android 12.

https://support.google.com/accessibility/android/answer/9158...

Whoa, OK, thanks!

"I laugh every time Google's multibillion dollar AI shows me the same ads ..."

So much this! I see 10 Google Fiber ads a day on YouTube even though I'm on their service and have an IP address they've assigned, lol.

Shared clipboard is decently useful, but that's probably it

I just installed android 12, and I am surprisd how enormous everything has become. Volume picker is like 1cm thick now. It scares me if it becomes even bigger with the new version.

Mainstream OS updates seem to have long past the point of diminishing returns.

Personally, I would only upgrade my phone if there's significant hardware improvement, e.g. camera sensors.

I gained nothing by upgrading from Android 11 to Android 12... actually I don't like it as much. Hope 13 is better.

2022, the top innovation in smartphone space is to have color themes for applications...

Time to party like it’s 1990!

https://eduinf.waw.pl/inf/hist/002_gui/images/w30color.gif

I am looking forward to shared photo librairies in iOS. Also, the super duper locked down security mode looks nice.

this is why I don't care that much about OS updates anymore (even though my phone still gets them)...its usually just pointless UI tweaks. security updates and app updates are now handled separately from OS updates

Is it me or the whole Android UI is becoming more boring and bland with each iteration?

I don't need fancy new features just for the sake of new features.

Android is quite good as it is. Compared to iOS that seem to be stuck some ten years ago.

I am not talking about new features.

I am talking about UI style. It has never been so boring, for me at least.

Compared to recent Android, Microsoft is looking sexy and innovative.

When you get to version 13 of an OS, it's natural that the changes are more minor, but the permissions/privacy changes (though wonky, and harder to explain to the average user) are good and important.

Android is such a weird beast.

I'm a life long (unenthusiastic) Android user, coming up at around 13 years now.

Still 0% interested in what new features they bring, for some reasons even iOS previews excite me more (which doesn't mean a lot, but definitely not zero percent).

Guess it's because I only use 5 apps on my phone and prefer a computer for basically every task, but I couldn't even tell you any meaningful change I've witnessed over the years. It somehow works and they've not yet driven me to buy an iPhone, but their (Google and vendors) messed up policy on not providing updates for older phone models might just do that for my next purchase.

Detailed post here: https://blog.esper.io/android-13-deep-dive/

Wait, so basically no more filesystem access? So it's the end for third party file managers? Wow...

No more log access either, so that also means no more automation apps. And dns over https is hard-coded to cloudflare or Google with no way to chose another provider.

I'm so confused about Google's strategy here. File access has always been one of Android's most attractive feature versus iOS. At this point it seems like I'll be using an iPhone very soon, for the first time of my life. Losing features that you rely on every single update is such a pain. At least with iOS the platform is stable, and updates never really remove any core feature.

>Wait, so basically no more filesystem access? So it's the end for third party file managers? Wow...

Third-party file managers never had full filesystem access. Without superuser, they've only ever had access to external storage (what you may know of as /sdcard, /storage/emulated, or /data/media). When Google started enforcing Scoped Storage in Android 11, they disallowed apps from accessing files in external private storage directories, ie. the /storage/emulated/{user}/Android/data and /storage/emulated/{user}/Android/obb directories. Each app you install can create its own directory here, and they're only intended to be used by the app that owns them, not by other apps.

The MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission introduced in Android 11 gave apps like file managers access to all of external shared storage, which excludes the /Android/data and /Android/obb directories since those are deemed external private storage. However, file manager devs figured out a loophole using Storage Access Framework that let them ask the user to grant them access to those external private storage dirs anyway.

Said loophole has been closed in Android 13.

>No more log access either, so that also means no more automation apps.

This one is a bummer. Apps can still read the logcat, but they have to ask for permission every time. So yes that definitely kills any kind of automation you can do.

>And dns over https is hard-coded to cloudflare or Google with no way to chose another provider.

For now. Google never said they'd keep those two as the only DNS-over-HTTP/3 providers.

per app language setting is great. I have been using my phone in English for so long because often times the apps would have very poor translations.

Is UI fixed in A13? A12 has absolutely ugly and inefficient UI design made for... kids I guess?

Oh cool! I was just getting used to how fucking terrible and broken Android 12's interface changes were. Now I get to start over.

You're in luck, all the broken interface in 12 is still there for you to enjoy!

these os vendors (google, apple etc) keep changing and rearranging the ui every year... at some point isn't there diminishing returns?

anecdotal but i get so many annoying issues with older family members "where di that button go" or "i cant find x" after upgrading...

I never use this "only the photos you want to share" shit. In the event that I do it and then want to add more photos to the list, the process is arcane. So I just share all photos.

And Android Tablets? I thought they were dead. I used to have a Nexus 7 but now I'm all iPad.

This link currently redirects to blog.google, perhaps it was taken down.

There seems to have been some weirdness in posting the blogs, but the link works now.

Obviously, they're Google, but does it strike anyone else as odd that the `.google` tld exists? Why not `.amazon`, `.toyota`, etc

https://icannwiki.org/.amazon https://icannwiki.org/.toyota

They both exist.

But as far as I'm aware they don't use it because (my guess) they're rightfully scared of it looking incredibly silly.

https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/delegated-strin...

There are many corporate TLDs, including Amazon (took a while to be approved due to protest from the Amazon region of the world). They also have many sites on the .aws TLD.

https://global.toyota/ is a real site.

Tip: You can search the term `site:ext` on DuckDuckGo to see sites using that domain extension (TLD). It's not very helpful for .com for example, but it's useful for queries like `site:aws` to see what sites are using the .aws TLD.

There are many brand tlds. Many large companies have them, even if their main site is not on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...

https://icannwiki.org/.toyota

They do exist![0][1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.amazon

[1]: https://icannwiki.org/.toyota

Today I learned... Crazy! Thanks for your reply :)

Both `.amazon` and `.toyota` both exist and are owned by the respective companies.

Both exist.

Owning your own TLD is pretty cost prohibitive. I take it that many companies simply don't have the technical skillset and have determined it isn't worth the costs.

I was at a phone repair shop and a guy came in saying he got hacked because when he did "something" a new thing popped up that was different from the one he wanted.

Turned out he just upgraded Android to the next version and when swiping down the top bar all the icons were completely different (I imagine it's Android 12?). Can't wait for him to upgrade to 13 or 14 and see what else they can uselessly rework

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