The notification shade design is still terrible with comically huge paddings all over the place. Nothing fits. Everything is truncated. My ticket on the subject got closed with bullshittest of excuses: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/232821168

Can't they, like, add new APIs, but not touch the damn UI without a clearly defined rationale? By "clearly defined" I mean substantiated by something besides calls to emotions.

And I'm getting tired of every OS needing a major update every year because reasons. Software products need to have a finished state like every other engineering project does.

Something strange has happened to Android... the UI/UX had pulled ahead prior to iOS 7, strengthened it's lead due to the buggy shitshow that persisted through iOS 9, but has recently taken huge steps back in terms of information density and hiding things behind notches for no apparent reason.

Has the team changed substantially? Has Google basically "won" in marketshare and has thrown in the towel? Is there something big coming where the resources are going to?

iOS continues to improve and refine the "total user experience", especially if you're in Apple's multi-device ecosystem but Android feels like it is stagnating in a significant way for the last 2-3 years.

  10. Android 13 adopts Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio, a new Bluetooth audio standard that results in lower latency than classic audio. This allows you to hear audio that’s in better sync with the sound’s source, reducing delay. With Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio, you can also enjoy enhanced audio quality and broadcast audio to multiple devices at the same time.

Is hard to rate UI/UX of Android as a whole this days. In the last few years, each big manufacturer has created their own design language on top of stock Android and evolved in its own way.

- Samsung's One UI https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/one-ui/

- Xiaomi's MIUI https://global.miui.com/en

- OnePlus's OxygenOS https://www.oneplus.com/uk/oxygenos

- (Stock) Google's Material Design/You https://material.io/design

Yes, new Android versions bring new features for all of them. Many took ideas from Google's vision, and small manufacturers just use stock with a few tweaks. Also Google for his Pixels does exclusive stuff that do not goes to the Stock Android that every manufacturer can use as a base.

The point that I'm trying to make is that today is not much accurate to talk about "The Android Experience" (usually to compare it to iOS).

Google's official blog posts on new Android releases usually leave out a ton of info. If you're curious about what many of the other features introduced in Android 13 are, I wrote a summary over on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/wp0skh/50_features...

This summary is just for user-facing features and doesn't mention any of the new APIs, app-facing behavioral changes, or most of the platform changes. My ongoing Android 13 changelog (currently at >32k words, ~170 min estimated read time lol) covers all of that and then some: https://blog.esper.io/android-13-deep-dive/

> The apps you download will now need your explicit permission to send notifications, rather than being allowed to send notifications by default.

Hallelujah!

I fondly remember waiting for new Android releases years ago. I'd jump to the landing page, get excited for new features, plan ahead on getting a new phone. I never noticed when, but at some point this stopped.

My old phone works just fine (...for an Android, that is), and I don't even mind the cracked backplate. The battery capacity keeps decreasing year after year, but even that feels like a feature in disguise. It won't get an upgrade to the new Android (by design, I presume), but I don't care. Have I gotten old? Is it me? Or is it you?

Finally, the feature I've been most looking forward to is finally here:

- A shortcut to turn on the flashlight

(The "Quick Tap" gesture can now turn on/off the flashlight)

And this concludes all the features I was looking forward to in Android 13.

Thankfully 3-button navigation is still here. The day they remove it is the day I stop using Android.

I think the localization preferences will be a big hit in European countries. Translations can be really hit or miss depending on how technical an app gets. For some apps, you might feel the developer did a good job with localization and want to view it in your native language, for other apps you'd rather use the English version because the translations are really bad.

I was honestly massively disappointed with the introduction of Android 12 and its "bubbles" UI; with it came some new pretty animations, and from my experience, the interface was more fluid, but less responsive.

I now run Android with animations completely off because even setting them to .5x duration was too slow.

Who else has a smartphone "stuck" on a older Android OS?

My phone is still using an older Android version - unable to upgrade any further, or receive security updates. Before you recoil in horror, consider the following: the phone is in perfectly working order, it has an excellent screen and camera, it's fast for my needs. The real horror is that millions of perfectly fine smartphones are sent to landfill because these little pocket super-computers with amazing hardware can no longer be upgraded by software. Is this a embarrassing wasteful state of affairs? Or the price of "progress" on the hardware upgrade treadmill?

I just switched from a Pixel 3 to a Pixel 6 and I don't like it. I am just an average user, I don't use many apps, and the UI in the newer versions of Android is just atrocious. Everything is now "gestures" that don't really work that well, especially when you hold the device in one hand. I had to specially enable the old-school 3-button nav at the bottom of the screen (luckily that still exists) to be able to have some form of non-frustrating interaction with the device. I don't want to be super negative, just ranting I guess. Thanks for listening...

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.

I had my app drawer on the swipe right screen. I updated to android 12, now that's the Google screen. You can't remove it. You cant replace it through the settings.

However, you can disable it. But now, you have a giant blank page that says click to reactivate. It's personalization alright, but not the way you think. Kinda like how turning off wifi is a suggestion, not a guarantee.

I wonder when will Google finally stop harassing users to enable Google Play Protect when they install or update an app with F-Droid.

I'm a little concerned with where google is going with all these proprietary chromeos phone integration features.

They discontinued chrome apps but PWAs aren't really ready as a replacement and it seems like google is continuing to use stuff like PNACL in various places which now nobody else is able to use, plus they are now just adding functionality like this that really should just be provided by apps directly to the OS to avoid the limitations of not having native apps and not have to compete with developers.

Instead of chromebooks being a neutral platform where all developers have the same capabilities since it's just chrome, it looks like its turning into a situation more like the original release of the iphone where Google is just the only company that is allowed to make native apps, and they are using that to add features that can only be used with android.

It kind of feels like they just invoked switching to PWAs as an excuse and instead simply closed down the os.

Imo no matter how great Android is, Samsung ruins it with their awful bloatware. There seem to be no way of removing them either.

The media sharing tools (allowing all of your photos to be shared with an app) are the largest silent invasion of privacy on both Apple and Android phones, which is not much discussed.

Even on IOS, until recently, every app, as long as you allowed media viewing permissions, had access to EVERY PHOTO in your library.

Cool, I guess? I don't see anything actually useful.

Right now I'd like Google Translate/Assistant that would translate everything it hears and simply show the language next to the translation on screen.

Would make my talks with several coworkers so much easier.

There was a device that did exactly this, and it also seemed to do voice-to-voice pretty well but I can't remember the name.

I laugh every time Google's multibillion dollar AI shows me the same ads for already installed apps, still shows me ads for women's products (they 100% know I'm male) and can't understand I'm on an anime songs binge (or rock, or a certain band) this evening.

On that note, I can't update my OnePlus anymore. I know they stopped releasing updates, but I thought they'd keep the OTA update servers online. Guess AWS is too expensive.

I just installed android 12, and I am surprisd how enormous everything has become. Volume picker is like 1cm thick now. It scares me if it becomes even bigger with the new version.

Mainstream OS updates seem to have long past the point of diminishing returns.

Personally, I would only upgrade my phone if there's significant hardware improvement, e.g. camera sensors.

I gained nothing by upgrading from Android 11 to Android 12... actually I don't like it as much. Hope 13 is better.

2022, the top innovation in smartphone space is to have color themes for applications...

Is it me or the whole Android UI is becoming more boring and bland with each iteration?

When you get to version 13 of an OS, it's natural that the changes are more minor, but the permissions/privacy changes (though wonky, and harder to explain to the average user) are good and important.

Android is such a weird beast.

I'm a life long (unenthusiastic) Android user, coming up at around 13 years now.

Still 0% interested in what new features they bring, for some reasons even iOS previews excite me more (which doesn't mean a lot, but definitely not zero percent).

Guess it's because I only use 5 apps on my phone and prefer a computer for basically every task, but I couldn't even tell you any meaningful change I've witnessed over the years. It somehow works and they've not yet driven me to buy an iPhone, but their (Google and vendors) messed up policy on not providing updates for older phone models might just do that for my next purchase.

Detailed post here: https://blog.esper.io/android-13-deep-dive/

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per app language setting is great. I have been using my phone in English for so long because often times the apps would have very poor translations.

Is UI fixed in A13? A12 has absolutely ugly and inefficient UI design made for... kids I guess?

Oh cool! I was just getting used to how fucking terrible and broken Android 12's interface changes were. Now I get to start over.

these os vendors (google, apple etc) keep changing and rearranging the ui every year... at some point isn't there diminishing returns?

anecdotal but i get so many annoying issues with older family members "where di that button go" or "i cant find x" after upgrading...

I never use this "only the photos you want to share" shit. In the event that I do it and then want to add more photos to the list, the process is arcane. So I just share all photos.

And Android Tablets? I thought they were dead. I used to have a Nexus 7 but now I'm all iPad.

This link currently redirects to blog.google, perhaps it was taken down.

Obviously, they're Google, but does it strike anyone else as odd that the `.google` tld exists? Why not `.amazon`, `.toyota`, etc

I was at a phone repair shop and a guy came in saying he got hacked because when he did "something" a new thing popped up that was different from the one he wanted.

Turned out he just upgraded Android to the next version and when swiping down the top bar all the icons were completely different (I imagine it's Android 12?). Can't wait for him to upgrade to 13 or 14 and see what else they can uselessly rework

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