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> Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen.

I do think that this comes from the code base not being very good. The base layout and view classes have hundreds of thousand lines of codes, the layout algorithm is quadratic to the number of views. It was originally designed for digital cameras, not for phones. The base classes use many bit fields as well instead of enums, they don't look like Java.

Plus the strange back button concept which comes from the camera.

All this means developers waste a lot of time wrestling the framework.

What's strange about the back button? It is one of the things that makes me not consider Apple devices since they lack it.

Didn’t Google get rid of it as well?

There's a gesture now, but the consistent OS response is the important bit.

You can configure on Android (at least I can on my Pixels and Motorolas) whether you want gesture navigation or 3-button navigation.

The gesture navigation is similar to what iOS does (not the same), and the 3-button navigation is basically the old version of the Android navigation.

This article could help you understand where Android stands today https://www.makeuseof.com/three-button-navigation-vs-gesture...

I'm a Flutter developer working on iOS and Android apps, my 2cts is that the Android back button experience is more predictable (both with the gesture navigation and with the 3-button navigation): on iOS, the back swipe doesn't always work and sometimes I need to track down where the on-screen back button or back icon is. On ios, sometimes instead of swiping horizontally, I need to drag the panel down, and even though it's easy to figure out based on the screen which one will work, it's one more way of doing things, whereas on Android, I can just hit the back button in most scenarios.

The 'back' gesture is a piece of shit. I'm forever accidentally setting it off when trying to swipe to the next photo or drag something from near the edge of the screen, it's lost me browser tabs I'd just opened. Swiping left/right is too common an action to be an OS-level gesture.

Edit: since having the above whinge I've found the option to turn down the sensitivity. I'll see if that makes me a bit less 'old man shouts at cloud'.

From iphone x onwards the back button is implemented as a gesture.

What's the gesture?

Swipe from the left side of the screen to the right side

Ugh. They just had to be different, hadn't they.

Pixels work that way too, now

On my Samsung the main gesture for back is right edge to left swipe.

What I find strange is not the back button, but the lack of a forward button.

It has improved over time, however it is clearly Java written by C++ developers, like we were doing back in 1996.

There used to be lots of issues with rotating the screen, many apps would lose UI state almost as if everything was torn down and rebuilt. Never looked at the code but guessed it was never designed to be an iPhone.

This is why I really miss the Original Motorola Droids. The full slide keyboard and a ssh terminal was incomparable to anything we have today.

Its on the list of things that I guess me and like 12 other people care about. But I would probably go back to Android if someone made a similar phone.

Some of the early Samsung Android phones also had excellent slide-out keyboards. Would love to have one again but that form factor is probably dead. Device manufacturers want to sell the same few SKUs worldwide instead of producing a hundred different variants of hardware keyboard layouts.

That was my first real smartphone.i loved it. Still miss it two. If you find the other 11 let's have a LAN party or sth.

That was my first real smartphone. I loved it. Still miss the flip down tactile keyboard. If you find the other 11 people let's have a LAN party or something.

My Android phone is a BlackBerry Key2 and I've loved it for the almost five years I've had it now. I have trouble living without a physical keyboard on the device and I lament the fact that I may have to carry a touchscreen-only phone for work in the near future. I don't want to carry two, but I may end up doing that anyway.

The Key2 is easily the best smartphone I have had, beating even the Nokia N900 due to reliability (i did not get five solid years out of that) and compatibility with mainstream (read: Android) apps.

(Compatibility is not perfect, though. You may think android is android but the screen of the Key2 is a few pixels shorter than the common ones, so some apps have buttons that are always rendered outside the screen. Also some apps seem to do some sort of vendor check against a whitelist that does not contain this model.)

For what it's worth, I like the on screen keyboards.

I use four languages on a daily basis (English, German, Spanish and Hungarian), and SwiftKey helps me with that without having to worry about changing layouts.

It gets better over time and after I fed it my emails (yay privacy), I barely find cases where it doesn't know a word I want to use. I can also type with a swipe which works pretty well and lets me type relatively fast.

Yep, I still have my Passport in a drawer somewhere. The keyboard is -sensitive, which means you can swipe on it to scroll. Awesome device.

>The keyboard is -sensitive

s/-sensitive/touch-sensitive

See, on a blackberry I would never have had that problem.

It was and still is the coolest device, holding it sideways and scrolling with your thumb, it was so light and perfectly sized, the battery lasted for DAYS. I really want another phone like it, but everything now is the same, except for the foldables, which intrigue me just because I want something different and new. It's too bad the bigger ones are so expensive.

I bought the BlackBerry Classic a while ago and I also own the Key 2.

The BB Classic is everything I want in a smartphone, the build quality is great, the keyboard is amazing in and BB OS is really intuitive and fluid to use.

Such a shame that every smartphone nowadays is just a rectangle with a screen and nothing else...

> with a double curse if I have to use it while in a car

Are you really complaining a virtual keyboard is terrible to use WHILE DRIVING?!

I think (hope) they mean as a passenger. The various bumps and turns are likelier to throw off your aim on a virtual keyboard compared to a proper tactile keyboard.

heh, No as a passenger. but I will say if a car has a touchscreen as a primary control device. not only are those miserable to use while driving, they should probably not be used while driving for the same reason you don't want to be using your phone while driving. if you are lucky it will have large fixed predictable (virtual)buttons. however even then it usually requires visually fixing your hand to the keyboard and there is no way to touch it without activating it. this is what makes it miserable to use in a vehicle. what would help(a little, not much) is a big bar to rest your hand on. See also: why touch controls are terrible in a vehicle.

most people spent the majority of their time viewing the content not typing so that's why our screens get bigger and bigger.

This is the design goal, it's working great for the status quo, everything you say is hard then burned eventually.