Android 14 review: There's always next year | Hacker News Reader

Android 14 review: There's always next year

arstechnica.com

55 pointsossusermivami57 comments

> With Android 14 comes ART 14, the Android Runtime. Google numbers the ART releases like major software projects now, and because the runtime is a Mainline module, it will be installed on older versions of Android, too. Ever since ART became a Mainline module in Android 12, users on that version or newer will get a better, faster app engine no matter how long their OEM takes to update the phone.

This to me is the most exciting update! With most apps already being updated from the store including the Launchers/Browsers and all Google stuff including Play Store and libraries - adding ART to the list makes the OEMs not updating Android as often problem much less of an actual problem. (It basically leaves the kernel/drivers and maybe a few more super low level things in the problem category - IIRC even the modem driver/firmware stuff is separately updated now a days.)

I've been using Android since version 2 and for most of the time since about 4/5 I feel it's been getting worse, not better. With every new phone there are more things to disable or work around or re-learn or just plain live with the irritation of.

It seems Google is still trying to chase Apple when it comes to UI but if I wanted an Apple UI I'd be using one already, and I don't. I only hope Linux (yes yes, Android is Linux, but you know what I mean) is ready for day-to-day use on phones by the time Android finally becomes too horrible to use, much as it has become on the desktop fairly recently as Win10 nears EOL.

> I only hope Linux (yes yes, Android is Linux, but you know what I mean) is ready for day-to-day use on phones

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you talking about having a typical desktop Linux distribution on the phone (eg: Ubuntu, Arch) instead of an OS that is made for a phone? What is wrong with something like LineageOS or other alternatives?

He means GNU/Linux.

Probably means one of the GTK based distros running on a phone, like on the Purism phones

He means he wants to adjust the ringer volume with alsamixer in an xterm.

The names didn't come to mind while I was bashing out the previous post, but kind of - Mobian, PureOS, Ubuntu Touch, Postmarket, etc. (Though I have zero interest in using a command line or editing config files on a touch screen, so hopefully a little more polished than desktop Linux.)

Lineage is a great version of Android, but it tracks AOSP so it's always (I think?) going to be a fork of whatever Google is doing and probably won't diverge massively from wherever mainstream Android goes.

If Google is chasing Apple’s UX, I’m not sure they’re going a very good job. As someone who regularly uses iOS and Android, loads of little bits of Android UX are irritating enough that I can’t see Android becoming my primary mobile platform.

That’s funny, because as someone who just switched from Android to iPhone i feel the opposite. Android nails some basics that iOS really misses on, like notification handling and gestures.

Notifications I can take or leave, they’re not really too important for my usage. In fact most just get sequestered into morning/evening summaries if they’re enabled at all.

Gestures and UI animations on Android feel weird to me though. Compared to those of iOS, gestures feel “disconnected” from somehow (something to do with touch tracking) and the animation curves feel more mechanical and less organic.

I'm pretty much in the same boat, all my smartphones have been Android phones and I was always excited to see what changed from version to version because Google had a good track record. I didn't agree with every change but for me, the change from Android 11 to 12 was unbelievably mindboggling, and a complete change of pace from everything before. And worst of all, you could not disable everything I list:

- Everything suddenly had to be a large round button which took up more space than necessary. The notifications + quick options menu in particular became suddenly bloated. In particular the keyboard press preview when from neat little rectangles to large distracting circles to the point where I had to turn it off.

- A ton of transparent elements were removed with a simple black box, which removed a sense of continuity when using my phone. Dragging down my notifications didn't show me the app in the background, and switching between apps didn't show my wallpaper in the background. It might seem minor, but it's such an odd change to make after so long and I struggle to see why Google decided to remove the ability to see everything behind the notifications menu.

- Android 12's UI colour schemes were suddenly dictated by your phone's wallpaper, but the palettes are a selection of garish pastel colours. Until Android 13 toned it back a bit I was reliant on using a monochrome wallpaper to have the notifications menu (now a screen-filling behemoth) not be a selection of greens.

- Google introduced a stretchy rubber effect when scrolling through everything which to me was suddenly jarring (especially when it'd break at the bottom of a page or while holding my finger in place). I clearly remember it being the first thing I tried to disable, but the only option that seemed to stop it was to remove animations as a whole.

- Google removed the old split screen feature and replaced it with a less functional "app pairs" system. Before Android 12 you could pin any app to the top half of your screen and switch around other apps on the bottom half, a great feature if you wanted to multitask or simply wanted to watch a YouTube video while jumping between browsing the web and messaging friends. With the new app pairs system, you can only split the screen between two select apps, and you need them both to be open before you attempt it - if you want to swap out the bottom app, you have to unpair the two apps and repair the top app with a different one, which just seems worse in almost every way. It made attempting to multitask a nightmare which takes up a lot more time than it requires[1] - and despite multiple complaints for the last few years, Google hasn't commented on it whatsoever[2]. It also generally coincided with when Google made YouTube Premium let you watch videos in a window or in the background on mobile.

Again as someone who's always liked Android and was excited about new updates, I've hit the point where I can't bring myself to look at anything new because of all the recent decisions, UI changes, and introducing confusingly odd features which I don't have the ability to disable or customise to my liking.

[1] https://imgur.com/IXmpubM [2] https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/210345474

I really wonder sometimes how many of the decision makers on Android products are actually using iphones. That would be a great statistic to know. I'll bet it's higher than we would like. And I would likewise bet the number of iphone decision makers using android is at or near zero.

I haven't yet met a designer who understands the concept (let alone the merit) of Android's universal "back" button, I think almost everyone involved in "UX" decisions anywhere is an Apple user at this point in time.

It's indeed tiresome to configure a new phone. There're a ton of apps to uninstall and to remove permissions.

Honestly, a "no bells and whistles" OS release is welcome.

The less the OS APIs change, the easier it is to build for the OS. As a small developer, constant API thrash is a nightmare. For example, the Android storage permissions API whiplash between 9, 10 and 11 was particularly painful.

Win32, for all its flaws, is brilliant in that regard.

The most disruptive change in 14 is probably the "full screen notifications" permission, which makes me a bit sad.

Now, only alarm clocks and VOIP apps are allowed to use full screen notifications. The motivation is good (prevent abuse), however this approach of "only these approved, pre-existing use cases are allowed" is an innovation stifler. This was functionality that made Android a lot more powerful than iOS.

There are plenty of valid use cases for a rich full screen, interactive notification-e.g. something that is extremely time sensitive.

The policy should be "don't abuse full screen notifs", not "only alarm clocks and voip". The latter ensures that there will be no further innovation in this area, and we'll never know if the limitations were overly strict or not.

> There are plenty of valid use cases for a rich full screen, interactive notification-e.g. something that is extremely time sensitive.

Like ads?

Yeah... Is there ever a thing that wasn't abused by ad companies yet?

It's a real problem. There's a huge overlap between "things that can be abused by ads" and "things that allow boundary-pushing products".

On Desktop, historically we chose the "buyer beware" route which, for all its 10-IE6-toolbars flaws, led to an environment that felt like it was full of possibilities.

On Mobile we are going for a "you get your little sandbox" route, which delegates innovation to the OS vendors only.

I understand the frustration, but it is a different threat model. Your phone more-or-less knows your exact location at all times (and has to, by design). In my view this calls for a different set of tradeoffs re: application permissions.

And not just location, also who you communicate with (contacts and "phone" permissions), are you currently walking/driving/sitting still, who is around you (wifi and location/bluetooth permissions), it can record audio/video (camera, mic permissions), and it's al based on the user knowing enough to allow or disallow those permissions when needed.

By restricting full-screen, you're punishing the top 85+% of users who are fully capable of understanding what a permission ask for "Is allowed to display full screen while locked" is asking. Generally spekaing, the race to design everything for the bottom 10% of users is resulting is a world of forced conformity, severe artificial limitations, and basically the Simpsons episode where Homer bubble wraps the entire playground, but in a tech sense.

Right.

But there has to be a better model than delegating innovation to Apple and Google. It's a huge conflict of interest too, since they are both Ad companies.

We're heading down a path where there are products that only Apple and Google can build, and it's a huge problem for the ecosystem.

Putting Apple in the same basket as Google in terms of ads is just misleading.

These are both outgrowths of where they came from. Desktops came along in the 1970s as (relatively) powerful do-anything machines. Phones came along as simple phone (and later SMS)-only devices that have gradually grown more advanced features.

And yet, they are precisely dropping binary compatibility for no good reason in this release.

I think it’s likely a goal of Google’s to automate Play Store app reviews to the maximum possible extent, and “don’t abuse” sorts of policies don’t play well with that since it requires human judgement. It’s much easier to restrict permissions to a couple of app categories and completely rule out abuse.

I would like this but I don't know how much of a demand there is in the popular market. Eg. There's windows ltsc available but people aren't exactly clamouring over it. Stuff like debian has a limited user base.

I think tech for most people is like clothing - part of the excitement of having it is the fact that it's the latest and greatest. Stability is the priority of a minority it seems

LTSC on Windows is a crappy experience. For example, instead of shipping with a suitable long-term supported Camera program (either Win32 or UWP, who cares), they just decide not to put any camera program whatsoever, for no apparent reason. Just Google around to find a lot of users complaining about it. Same with every other program which MS claims needs to be updated frequently, which are excluded from the LTSC. Most of these "programs which require frequent updates" are fully local-only programs like the camera or media player. I'm quite sure it'll include Notepad soon, as it is now a UWP program. It's ridiculous.

Plus, you get like what, 5 years normally, 10 if you're lucky? Peanuts. We're talking about API stability in much longer terms (which Win32 itself somewhat manages).

I think that developers do care about API stability (who wants to rewrite working code for no good reason?), but the effects of this time wasting are only felt indirectly by normal people.

Since consumers have very little choice in their mobile OS, developers just have to put up with the thrash.

It is possible to build new OS capabilities whilst maintaining a good deal of stability for existing APIs.

Their approach to permissions is mind-bendingly weird. The technology is completely good, what’s weird are the policies of which permissions the user is asked about. I don’t think there’s ever been a permission popup for full-screen notifications, has there? From what I remember that’s how a lot of adware has been able to install itself so easily.

Ron Amadeo has such a strange life. He spends most of his time following Google just to write up how much he hates everything they do.

It would probably be healthier for everyone if he got a new beat.

He’s definitely gotten increasingly negative and aggrieved. IIRC correctly, he used to be fairly enthusiastic about Android. Definitely time to move on.

If that's what he do I'm thankful for his work

Customisable lockscreen is a really funny selling point, considering 10 years ago you could put any widget on the lockscreen and there was stuff like dashclock

I lolled at that too a little bit, but then saddened because I think it's the result now of 10+ years of tech industry "best practices":

1. Ruthless data-driven decision making for products (not allowed to use any subjective judgment, gotta go only on metrics). And assume that the data is always painting a clear picture, not one that is easily subject to all the pitfalls known in statistics, and goes through subjective interpretation (especially impacted by confirmation bias). Don't use your intuition or judgment to question the validity of the metrics and try to figure out a better way to measure!

2. Dumb down the product, aka remove features. "simplify" is the euphemism we all use now, even though it doesn't always simplify things (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't).

3. Make changes to get promoted. Removed a feature? Great, promotion! Added a new feature people wanted? Promotion! (never mind it was the same feature in both cases)

The reason I'm excited for Android 14 is it includes support for passkeys being managed by third-party software like 1Password. Android 13 has passkey support but you are required to use Google's passkey store, now in theory you can use anyone's. It is all working, sort of, and was the last major component I needed to start using passkeys to log into things for real.

Unfortunately it's exposed a bunch of other unfinished parts of the passkey ecosystme; the user experience is still not very good. But Android 14 is part of the march of progress, even if it goes slowly.

Let's not forget the big bug though <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38043574>.

I thought you were referring to "Support for DHCPv6 (RFC 3315)":

* https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36949085

Marked as WONTFIX.

What a painful read that was. It's really hard to understand the Google position from that thread when the representative engineer seems to only answer things very selectively, and even after four years of discussion, writes and gets pushed through an RFC that sides with his viewpoint.

I find Google's Material design horribly ugly, and like all flat UIs with abstract monochrome icons painful to use. I need my UI elements to have text labels.

Sure would be cool if Ars had someone to cover Google who didn't hate Google and every Google product. There have been some pretty minor iOS releases but each and every one of them got a 90-page review by a person who was actually interested in the product.

I only just started using Android yesterday after many years away, and as a reader I would have appreciated more information and less detached snark.

For better or worse...that's Ron's whole personality.

He used to be good at holding the manufacturers a little bit responsible using it back in the A.P. (not _that_ AP) days, now it just feels like every article is "why does google hate you? These features are why."

I don't know the full situation, it could be because of Ars' editing policies, or it could be any number of factors. Me saying this isn't to knock him, just that I don't enjoy his writing on Ars.

Sure, but it seems pretty clear that Google __does__ hate you so it doesn't exactly feel misplaced.

Sometimes, its easier just to ignore certain editors on Ars.

It's always been amazing to me the 'apple blindness' that goes on. They really can do almost no wrong and everything is almost magical. Fortunately, for most readers here we don't need someone else to tell us what crap this "upgrade" was, but I agree it would be nice to get unbiased reviews, but it is owned by Conde Nast so I wouldn't expect it to change.

Maybe I could be the Ron of the Apple world. I use Apple products because they probably suck the least, but I can tell you a lot of ways in which they suck.

For anyone finding the qr reader unselectable for the lock screen buttons, don't forget to first enable it in the quick settings tile.

To anyone that didn't know Android has a proper built-in qr reader (camera app UX isn't very good for qr), same here. Just learning that and finally uninstalling 3rd party was probably the most important feature of this update...

Isn't is ubiquitously available via Lens? By default, it's right there on the home screen.

Assuming someone actually knows it (most non-engineers will likely install an app not finding one called QR), I find the UX to show a small, non-persistent link hover on top of the code difficult to use compared to a normal qr reader (both built-in or 3rd party) which freezes with a large clickable region when it detects a code. Especially when outside and lighting conditions or angles can make scanning a code a challenge, having to actually click to complete a scan would always be a big problem for me, so eventually I installed a third party app. Finding the built-in "app" was nice to allow uninstalling that.

This may be a more important issue in Japan where I think? QR codes are more used than in the US and often require scanning around other people, or other physical challenges. I guess most here get around the problem by using an iPhone though which has a built in and highly obvious QR app.

Wait, doesn't Pixel camera app support QR code? I agree that its not ideal app to read a code, but it's better to have by default. It's the same feature as iPhone, so beginner user will find (or taught by iPhone user) it works

I enabled the Predictive Gesture Flag in the settings, played with it a bit in the settings panel, thought "That's nice, it's going to be fun having this in Android 15"... And then launched the Harmonic HN app and was pleasantly surprised that it already worked!

As long as it gives device manufacturers an excuse to pat themselves on the back for updating some almost-current devices and phase out some others, they will be happy. And customers rejoice because UI change for change's sake is rarely an improvement.

Been hearing quick OS updates with project Treble for 6+ years now & no OEM has it as good as Pixel series. Lineage & PixelExperience ROMs are what's pushed my older devices to the latest OSes & be functional beyond manufacturers EOL

Absolutely. It's been ~10 years since I last had a phone that wasn't running Lineage.

Pixel is the fastest device to receive latest version by definition. IMO it's not good characteristic for average user because some apps (that haven't tested with Android beta or slow to fix) tend to have problem when latest OS launched. It will be fixed within month, so delaying upgrade works. Anyway Android upgrade is no longer fun.

I'm on Google Pixel 7 Pro with Android 14. The amount of random UI glitches since I got the phone (recent app picker button stopped working 10 min ago, Google Photos UI not working randomly til I restart phone) is inexcusable. Samsung went from horrible laggy touchwiz to UI better than stock Android based on my experience

Oh. And Android 14 update rearranged camera UI which was already fine

Samsung OneUI has good UI and performance, but the 3-year support limit is terrible and unacceptable. I own various Samsung devices, their policy of abandoning 'old' products to bit rot or quietly making them disappear from SmartThings with an update convinced me that they are not as dedicated to their products as Apple is. Today's phone OSes aren't "just" OSes but whole ecosystems of devices. When I buy TV or smartwatch I expect that it won't become e-junk in 3/4 years. The rate of change is currently so slow, that new devices don't bring any new features that are forcing for the upgrade. They are just a refresh.

Android 14 has been my favorite update ever. It seems like my Pixel 5 battery lasts wayyyyy longer!

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