Google shows off Android 12’s huge UI overhaul
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Yeah, yeah, we get UI overhauls every time, and we get updates in how notifications work every time. It's just shuffling the chairs on the deck.
The security improvements and update improvements are far more helpful, but I guess everyone wants to see the shinies.
The security improvements and update improvements are far more helpful, but I guess everyone wants to see the shinies.
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It's really quite amazing that an advertising spam company actually went and built their own mobile OS.
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As soon as I saw the title my first thought was "Again?". Can't they settle on _anything_? Regular people don't have time to relearn the OS every single release.
This is one reason why I stick with iOS. It hardly changes. Is it boring? Yes. I'm tired of all these edgelord developers making unnecessary changes just cause they seem cool.
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All I want is for an option to separate the ringtone from the notifications. If 12 has that then I will be impressed.
I wasted too much energy and money just trying to fix this simple issue. Had to resort to creating my own different volume notification sound files, low medium and high. Stupid solution to a simple problem
I wasted too much energy and money just trying to fix this simple issue. Had to resort to creating my own different volume notification sound files, low medium and high. Stupid solution to a simple problem
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The Android notification shade with its combined quick toggle buttons was the last bastion of safety from the barfed up collection of garbage that is the two separate iOS pulldowns. Please Google, let their be an option to not have gigantic buttons that are more suited to 90-year-old legally blind people.
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After a while, OS iterations just don't excite that much anymore. I'd rather Google spend more time and effort on security and better app vetting.
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I don't care about this at all. Would love to hear when I'll be able to delete the Google Drive/Pay/Meet/etc. apps from the phone I own though.
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I have mine on but I turn them to double speed in developer settings. You learn which apps are using them to cover up terrible loading times in a hurry.
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For me, this resembles a bit the Star Trek: The Next Generation era LCARS design from Michael Okuda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCARS
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... lpaper.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCARS
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... lpaper.svg
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Downloading the beta now.
Edit: I'm not sure the wallpaper color feature is in Beta 1.
Edit: I'm not sure the wallpaper color feature is in Beta 1.
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It very obviously will not be forced on people.
Beta 1 has selectable color schemes. But doesn't seem to be doing the automatic generation. There's no way they're removing the color picker.
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shut up shut up SHUT UP! They'll hear you! Have you seen the fiascos that the OS upgrades have been from the 7's on? I'm here rocking my 6T in the hopes that they've forgotten about it, lest theu decide to improve it!
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For me the sticking points are:
- I won't get it as I'm still using a Pixel 2 XL
- I'm still using a Pixel 2 XL because no Google phone has remotely interested me since I got one
- No Google phone has remotely interested me since I got my Pixel 2 XL because... I don't think I need to explain this to most of the crowd here...
- Due to the above I realise that a Google phone isn't an option for me now
- I look at other manufacturers' Android phones and realise none appeal to me either
- Neither does Apple!
- Bah I'll just continue to use the 2 XL for a while longer
- No more security updates since almost six months ago
- *cries in a corner for a while*
I used to love messing around with the best phones I could get my hands on, flashing custom ROMs and making my Galaxy SII's bootscreen look and sound like a 90's PC POST screen.
Nowadays, there's so many caveats with phones that I couldn't care less.
I think I'll go outside and shout at distant things.
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"I'll see your friendly rounded cards and tiles aesthetic, Apple, and raise you ... a universal color tint!"
Sheesh.
There's a few exceptions to prove the rule, but for the most part I find it quite depressing how these other global multi-billion dollar tech companies seem to be incapable of creating a unique and appealing aesthetic of their own without shamelessly aping the latest look and feel shipping out of Cupertino. There are lots of brilliant creative UX and UI professionals in the world. Hell, I'll bet every one of those mega-corps are loaded with tons of bright minds more than capable of matching creative wits with Apple. What's holding them back? Failures of leadership, lack of courage, institutional cowardice, greed, timidity? All of the above?
Maybe it's not so baffling though. We do live in an era where a sizable enough internet backlash could destroy an entire business unit in an afternoon. In that light, I can see how corporate VPs are deeply incentivized NOT to empower or approve risky, unusual, or novel designs. It's obviously much safer to go where the competition has gone before. Especially when the competition just made a billion dollars in pure profit every day or two during the last quarter. The irony being of course that one of the reasons Cook and co. make all that insane profit is that people perceive them as being the creative leaders, a label which only gets reinforced when Google and Samsung and everyone in between just keep churning out their wannabe, Johnny-Ive-come-lately products.
The smooth, bland, derivative nothingness of the design-singularity awaits us all, right on our home screens.
Sheesh.
There's a few exceptions to prove the rule, but for the most part I find it quite depressing how these other global multi-billion dollar tech companies seem to be incapable of creating a unique and appealing aesthetic of their own without shamelessly aping the latest look and feel shipping out of Cupertino. There are lots of brilliant creative UX and UI professionals in the world. Hell, I'll bet every one of those mega-corps are loaded with tons of bright minds more than capable of matching creative wits with Apple. What's holding them back? Failures of leadership, lack of courage, institutional cowardice, greed, timidity? All of the above?
Maybe it's not so baffling though. We do live in an era where a sizable enough internet backlash could destroy an entire business unit in an afternoon. In that light, I can see how corporate VPs are deeply incentivized NOT to empower or approve risky, unusual, or novel designs. It's obviously much safer to go where the competition has gone before. Especially when the competition just made a billion dollars in pure profit every day or two during the last quarter. The irony being of course that one of the reasons Cook and co. make all that insane profit is that people perceive them as being the creative leaders, a label which only gets reinforced when Google and Samsung and everyone in between just keep churning out their wannabe, Johnny-Ive-come-lately products.
The smooth, bland, derivative nothingness of the design-singularity awaits us all, right on our home screens.
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In other words, Google learned how to calculate the average color in an image?
Also, with “Material You” they finally found something that equals the cringe of Microsoft’s “Authentically Digital”.
Also, with “Material You” they finally found something that equals the cringe of Microsoft’s “Authentically Digital”.
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I think this is a mass improvement over the move away from Material Design in the last few releases. The original Material Design release was great. The follow-up releases where all the color was sucked out of everything were awful.
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I have the suspicion this time around it should be a lot faster. Material design was a huge paradigm/design shift across multiple platforms, but if you think about it, nothing they have presented is a huge departure from the original vision. It's just material design with a bit of visual tweaking.
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"Android 12's huge UI overhaul"
I read that part of the headline with dread.
Change just for the sake of change irritates me on a fundamental level. Often times, it's accompanied by vast increases in code length, reducing available storage. It also rarely improves the performance of the device it's installed on. Almost always, it makes that devices slower and harder to use.
This bit of visual fluff would be an issue with me, since I'm partially color blind and use high contrast settings because someone in their infinite stupidity thought pastels of the same colors were great (they are usually all one solid shade to me). I assume high contrast settings would eliminate this feature's function, or I could just turn off this feature, but it's still more dead code I'll never use cluttering up my phone.
More generally, and the reason why this post is longer, is I greatly dislike UI changes in my devices IF they don't come with improvements in the way I do things. Most often, these changes do the equivalent of turning a simple two click procedure into a four of five click marathon. Or they hide labels and change icons at the same time so you don't know what the fuck is going on. Or they change positions of buttons so you don't click the same place anymore, but always do out of habit.
I always hated Easter egg hunts in UI's. After you reach a certain level of fed-up-ness, change just for the sake of change begins to really piss you off.
TO BE FAIR, and the only thing that give me hope this rant is might pointless regarding Android 12 specifically, I saw very little change between Android 10 and Android 11 when it recently updated in my phone. Some visual bling differences, but everything was where I left it, and navigation was still much the same as before. That's the rare exception to OS changes in my experience. I was braced for disaster, and didn't experience one. It came as a profound relief.
Kudos to Google for making that transition as smooth of one as I've seen in decades.
If going from 11 to 12 is just as smooth, well, I'll feel pretty embarrassed about this diatribe. But this shading feature, which wouldn't work for me AT ALL, along with the "huge UI overhaul" in the headline portends other and major changes to the UI. If those changes improve the performance and the use of my device (which they usually do NOT in other devices), then I've got nothing to diatribe about.
But I'm bracing to be spending precious hours of my life ONCE AGAIN contending with an utterly pointless change in the UI of an OS.
Now, this isn't to say I dislike updates. I'll take all the security updates they can throw at me. I'm GOOD with those, EVEN IF they mess with the UI. They're NECESSARY changes. I get that. But devs love to pee in everyone's herbal tea and do stupid visual changes that alter button locations, icon designs, layout and other things just because they can without any valid reason for doing it other than "change is good". It may have been fun the first thousand times. It gets quite irritating eventually.
Again, I don't KNOW that this will be a problem between 11 and 12. And I'll see what's coming before hand thanks to Ron's reviews and insights. But I do not get excited about changes in the way I use my phone. If the experience is as smooth between 11 and 12 as it was between 10 and 11, then I'll probably be embarrassed by this diatribe. But this diatribe isn't specifically about that. It's about how devs change UI's in OS's and how often those changes just suck great, greasy, hairy balls for the end user.
If updating a UI was as nice as it was between Android 10 and 11, I'd have no issues with UI updates. That was an unusually pleasant experience because other than some visual bling, I noticed no functional differences that negatively impacted my experience. That's how it SHOULD be. My diatribe is about how it's usually awful for OS's in general, and that's NOT now it should be. With a "huge UI overhaul" coming, I'm not nearly as sanguine about the coming experience as I'd like to be.
/rant
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No comment on the baby-mode/Duplo quick settings?
Tinted instead of grayscale, but looks just as mono-color as anything else Google. Look at the Settings screen.
Employing AI, I'm sure.
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The media seeker bar looks like a diagram from health class and I, for one, am here for it.
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BevansDesign
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Hopefully it's smart enough to know that using a matching color isn't always desirable. One of the best things you can do for readability is to display a bold complementary (opposite) color.
Also, we've seen this sort of thing for years, and most photos have muted shades of green (grass & trees), blue (sky), gray (concrete & walls), or brown (everything else) as their dominant color - and never as vibrant as you'd like.
I'm seeing a whole lot of dull pastels in those screenshots. I think the majority of people are going to get "meh/bleh" as their color scheme.
Also, we've seen this sort of thing for years, and most photos have muted shades of green (grass & trees), blue (sky), gray (concrete & walls), or brown (everything else) as their dominant color - and never as vibrant as you'd like.
I'm seeing a whole lot of dull pastels in those screenshots. I think the majority of people are going to get "meh/bleh" as their color scheme.
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Please fix the actual problems instead of ignoring them but then making new ones. Thanks.
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fellow human
Ars Praefectus
I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising that the World’s largest ad network would try to figure out what colour you want rather than just asking. Hopefully it works out better than it usually does.
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I'd like to stress test the colour changing, by using an abstract expressionist wallpaper like:
I have a feeling that the result may be, uh, interesting.
I have a feeling it would just pick tan or yellow, or maybe red. You could try it on a Windows 10 computer that is set to auto-change the window border color based on the background image. It's basically the same thing as what Google is doing.
Pretty much. I'd like to see it pick a palette of complementary colors. I could get behind that, especially if it let me pick the rule set. Just picking one color and making everything shades of it seems like a good half step, but not quite there yet.
I'm an artist, so I care a lot about color. The themes are the major reason I use a Samsung phone now.
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Reminds me a bit of Windows phone where you'd pick a colour and it would change everything throughout the system, tile colours, text, icon & msg BG etc, I thought it worked well there as it was a quite coherent design, solid colours, high contrast sharp edges.
The amount of corner radius here looks a little off IMO, that settings screen cap doesn't look great, minor concern though.
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Good News: Screens are bigger than ever before!
Not-so-Good News: Padding is bigger than ever before
Dumb News: Font size is about the same as before
So the information density is, at-best, the same as before, but harder to see...
Not-so-Good News: Padding is bigger than ever before
Dumb News: Font size is about the same as before
So the information density is, at-best, the same as before, but harder to see...
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I largely think it looks good but wow the new quick settings tiles...really hope Samsung Goodlock let's us revert to the current style because that is the ugliest, least functional thing I've seen in ages.
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Whitespace waste has been getting worse with seemingly every release. Doubt it gets better.
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Wow a bunch of unlabelled, confusing icons that look like they were drawn by 4th graders. It's almost impressive how much screen space is taken up to show so little information.
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I was hoping for new on the tablets, nope, adding color, another UI update. At least it is supposed to use less CPU but still, nothing interesting.
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Let's make it easy.
The UI color scheme should be black, regardless of background. Done!
Saves battery, looks good, and doesn't cause nighttime blast-o-light.
The UI color scheme should be black, regardless of background. Done!
Saves battery, looks good, and doesn't cause nighttime blast-o-light.
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