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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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".
