Dear. Android – Leave. The. Power. Button. Alone | Hacker News Reader

Dear. Android – Leave. The. Power. Button. Alone

androidauthority.com

14 pointsshdon26 comments

I hate my samsung phone with a passion i also had while hating my iphone before it.

The stupid thing keeps trying to get me killed, is unresponsive to the most obvious urgings, and insists upon joking around when i need some info NOW.

I also have issues with most map apps and using them for navigation. It seems that the UI designers for these things never consider difficulty in seeing the crucial details on a small screen at high velocities with small glances.

I need the remaining KM until that turn, in large numbers, Google.

At the end of the day, despite being an allegedly technical person, I find smart phones to be rather difficult to use for their intended purposes. I have had immense difficulty in answering phone calls with mysterious swipes that at least this horrid samsung willfully ignores, laughing at me in derision, no doubt.

I don't get along with smart phones.

> I also have issues with most map apps and using them for navigation. It seems that the UI designers for these things never consider difficulty in seeing the crucial details on a small screen at high velocities with small glances.

Enshittification. I don't know what is being taught in design schools but enshittification is definitely one of its subjects. Take a look at major products and how shitty they became, with poor design decisions that are unjustified.

Google Maps switched to a Apple-like color scheme months ago. Everyone hated it, the main roads were no longer highlighted and distinguished from normal roads. Google ignored. I had to drive back to the office 2 weeks ago and my friend setup the GPS, only to be confused about the route because the streets I should take were highlighted in blue, but due to high traffic in the area they became yellow. I was confused for a few minutes thinking "okay, this is a main road, where the hell should I go?" until my friend told me it's yellow because of traffic conditions.

OsmAnd has a nice design, IMO: https://imgur.com/a/oZJIZst

It also lets you change the widgets and colorschemes, that's the LightRS map style and route line.

Honestly, I think Samsung has one of the worst android interfaces. It looks approachable, but most any activity is harder than on others that are truer to the stock experience. That said, every manufacturer has some stupid things. My Moto phone always blanks the screen when you are talking, which is great, but then makes it difficult to actually get the screen to stay on if you need to use it while talking.

>I need the remaining KM until that turn, in large numbers, Google.

One thing with maps too is that it decided to default to auto mode when using the app, but auto mode won't bring up the keyboard, which sucks if you need to make changes to your route and aren't wanting to use the voice mode.

> My Moto phone always blanks the screen when you are talking,

I don't know exactly what model of phone you have, but most smartphones have a proximity sensor which is used to intelligently blank the screen only when it is at your head. Not uncommonly this sensor gets dusty or dirty, causing the issue you describe.

It maybe something to do with that, because it doesn't happen if I use the phone sitting on the desk, but once I've tipped it to my ear, even after I tip it down to look at the screen it'll lock the screen, I unlock it, it immediately locks it again, I unlock it, etc over and over.

Despite the title, iPhones do this too as noted, and importantly it was a change made after removing the fingerprint reader. And of course in perfect Apple fashion you don't get a choice. I hate it. I still fail to turn my phone off sometimes. But also I will probably eventually get used to it, and people who started using iPhones after the change won't experience it as a change.

The iPhone at the very least always has the slide to power off feature, even before the fingerprint reader was introduced.

The point of the article is the process needed to access the slider in the first place. You can't access the slider without first knowing the magic button combination. The slider used to come up just by holding the side button. Now that the side button is how you access Siri, that's no longer the case.

however they did say:

That’s because, in a rush to move to touchscreens and display-based electronics, every company has let go of the simplicity of buttons.

This is kind of maddening. Tesla is the worst. Their recent cars have very. few. buttons. They have NO stalks, and what hasn't gone to the touchscreen goes to a few touch buttons in the center of the (rotating) steering wheel. They "control" turn signals, wipers, lights, etc. It guesses the gear shift (forward or back).

I do agree the Tesla has certainly gone too far

I rented a Model Y which was an incredible experience, but so much is on the touch screen and being new to the car I did have to take my eyes off the road a few times to flick through menus.

Having said that with further customisation you can control a fair bit from the steering wheel.

Removing stalks is a bit full on in the Model 3.

I don’t get this point of this article. Turning off your phone is an infrequent activity. Using a two button combo to accomplish this seems perfectly fine. It’s not like a two second hold is that inconvenient, and once you learn it in your phone… how often are you turning off other people’s phones?

Relegating the side button to only function as power off and nothing else is not a good default behavior, in my view. For power users, sure… let them configure it to do that, I guess.

Me neither.

If anything, a combination seems like the better option when we’re talking a feature that is almost never used triggered by exposed buttons on a device that spends most of its life in people’s pocket.

If I accidentally turned my phone off in my pocket as often as I seem to accidentally hit buttons on my car key fob, it’d drive me fucking bonkers.

The extra button presses the once or twice a year (if that) I intentionally turn my phone off is really not much of an inconvenience, comparatively.

> Relegating the side button to only function as power off and nothing else is not a good default behavior

And what will be a "good default behavior" ? A button which choses its actions by the phases of the moon ? /s

I turn off my phone, when not in use (at some nights or my work phone when i'm in the office).

If you turn your phone off frequently then knowing what the “secret combination” for power off should not be difficult. We’re talking about holding down the power button and one of the volume buttons… it’s not rocket science.

You can argue whether or not the default behavior is good… but no phone “chooses its actions by the phase of the moon”. That’s very disingenuous. Either way, having the power button held down not force off the phone is a good thing for avoiding accidental power down.

I think the underlying issue is that phone power buttons are “special” in that they don’t work like literally any other power button.

I do not chord key binds on my desktop with the power button. My speakers, TV, router, etc will only ever turn off/on when I hit the power button.

It overrides a fairly rational user assumption: that “the power button” is responsible for controlling whether the device is on or off, and that that is its primary function.

They would probably fare better if they switched to calling it a Meta key (or something else that doesn’t invoke Facebook). Meta+VolumeDown to shut down makes more sense than Power+VolumeDown; the latter makes me wonder why the power button alone isn’t enough.

Overall, there really just aren’t enough context-free inputs on mobile phones. Apps generally use the whole screen, so all your non-app-specific inputs have to be put on weird chords of the 3-ish physical buttons a mobile phone has.

They’re also special in that the adverse outcome to powering them off accidentally is much more likely, though. Not many other devices are stored in our pockets and can be pressed accidentally.

Also, it probably would be best to call it a “sleep” button or “screen” button… or something like that. After all, that’s the primary single press function that is universal to all phones. It’s not actually a power button from a single press, it’s a button to toggle the screen on and off. The long press not resulting in a power off command is somewhat unusual, but also not ridiculous.

Why waste an entire button to just be responsible for powering the device on or off? It's not something I do very often at all and if can be repurposed as a functional button then I am all for it.

It's especially helpful as an accessibility option.

Short and long presses of the power button are the STANDARD ways to control the power of a device, be it a PC, phone, tablet, or even random things like my sous vide cooker or an aircraft GPS.

Reliably being able to determine and set if a device or computer is running is a critical aspect of making sure that machines serve their users. If a device is doing shitty, undesirable things, I want to know that I can quickly and easily power it all the way off. That includes if the screen becomes unresponsive or otherwise damaged.

Considering that Google Assistant (and Gemini now, I guess - the distinction isn't clear) have somehow managed to get LESS functional and useful as time has gone on, I found it extremely irritating that some promo-chasing PMs and engineers at Google tried to hijack this basic, established device control to push a garbage product which I KNOW is getting discontinued, migrated, or cancelled in the next few months.

I'm not even much of a zealot for free or pro-user software, but this is an insane idea from Google that speaks to a deep misunderstanding about how much control I think they should have over my phone.

The author acknowledges normal users rarely power off their phone; but goes on to mention that they are a tech reviewer and constantly switching phones, applying updates, restarting to reproduce glitches, etc. So it is not a real problem.

Part of being a luddite who doesn't discard perfectly good tech when newer and shinier gadgets come out is that I get surprised hearing about negative trends like this.

Really, the power button doesn't work any more?

We really need a third operating system. One that applies common sense like: power means power, and direct have integrated ad tracking.

In fairness, iOS does not call it a power button anymore. iOS uses the term "side button". That's, of course, its own other problem, because the volume buttons are also on the side, but still.

This is such an odd rant. My old Nokia occasionally restarted in my pocket somehow, I'm happy Android has found a better solution.

Besides, the power shortcut is the most used (and appreciated) function on my phone. I'm using it to quickly open the camera.

I have my Android phone's power button set up to turn on/off the flashlight feature with a double click. It's immensely convenient. I have a low-end Samsung A23 5G.

HahahahhahahajajjajahahahahahBNnNnbn. The consumer speaks. You'll get what you want if you're upset, so keep it up. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com