Android's UI/UX is getting worse ?!

Every cellphone company seems to have their own UI or "skin." To avoid this I bought a Google Pixel 5, giving me the vanilla Android experience. Compared to iOS, Android looks unpolished and unfinished. My Pixel 5 is a backup device for my iPhone 13 Pro Max but I switch over to it periodically to keep abreast of Android. My parents bought their first smartphones to replace their basic flip phones and asked my advice. I suggested iPhones for their reliability, simplicity, and ease of use. So naturally they went Android. Knowing I'd be their first call for tech support as usual I figured I had better be up on the ins/outs of Android.

iPhones are a natural fit for me. I'm a Mac user, plus the wife and kids have iPhones. It's the path of least resistance so I have embraced it. Actually I'd still be using a BlackBerry if I had my way, but alas, the true BlackBerry experience (BB7) is over.

The only mainstream phone maker that's "fairly vanilla" is Google itself, and even then the Pixels have some degree of customization. You're dealing with a Xiaomi skin (which I fully understand is popular in Europe and lots of other places but virtually absent from the US market so I and many of us would have no idea about its customizations) vs. a Moto (not all that vanilla) skin. Android 12 improves a lot of experiences but degrades a few, like the WiFi button.* Lots of skins frankly improve the experience, but it's maddening in that I can't find one I like even half as much as LG's extremely sensible set of configuration changes (RIP LG.)

I suspect almost everything you're missing was a MIUI / Xiaomi tweak to their OS.

I've never seen a button on the notification shade to take a screenshot and frankly not sure how that would even work. Screenshots are taken via chording two of the physical buttons and which two depends a little on your specific phone. Usually wake/lock and volume down. The icon for recording screen video is normal.

I've never seen a native ability to lock certain apps behind a biometric check or similar within the OS. Some (like banking) have the option to do it in the app, but never before the app launches.

Quicklaunch having 4 app icons (or whatever number) is a manufacturer-configurable option. I have 5.

Etc. I just have no idea what you're seeing as I'm not particularly interested in what phones Moto has to offer. Someone needs to hire UI/UX engineers and work on features to help discover customizations (usually there's a fix for almost everything if the manufacturer allows that customization, but figuring out how can be hard.) I'm just not sure that someone is Google.

Google apps all looking the same is clearly their marketing choice, where they mostly all have the same 4 colors on a white background. Most of them are pretty distinctive and for the ones that aren't I can find them spatially. Maps is always (for me) top right etc. The iPhone's inability to have me drop an icon in an arbitrary location and have it stay in that specific location (possibly bounded by free space) is maddening. Some Android OEMs have that as a default or optional mode also, where icons just barf on to the screen filling every space. I just don't get it, since Apple has tried to copy a lot of the features that make Android great and in being the first to mass-market a GUI-based OS, they should have clear understanding of how people want to arrange apps and widgets etc. spatially on a desktop.

*Samsung flatly ignored Android 12's new arrangement of hotkeys grouping features and just kept doing what they always did (similar to Android 11 and prior) but some features that never were a stupid hotkey were moved to the hotkeys like QR scanning that used to be built into the camera. It's stupid.

Yeah, it sounds like they're missing miui stuff rather than vanilla android (of which Pixel is the closest thing there is outside building your own rom.)

Having said that, you can switch launcher which might get rid of some of the pain points. Nova was always seem as being pretty close to the pixel launcher, though I don't know if they sold out since I last used it a couple years back.

I’m an iPhone user and not familiar with Android UI. But I remember that the first Xiaomi phone tried to copy iPhone as much as possible, just like early Samsung Galaxy did.
Wikipedia confirms my memory but it says MIUI started shifting to vanilla Android since 2018. So it may have less stupid ideas and incorporate better features of both.

rambo47 said:

Every cellphone company seems to have their own UI or "skin." To avoid this I bought a Google Pixel 5, giving me the vanilla Android experience. Compared to iOS, Android looks unpolished and unfinished. My Pixel 5 is a backup device for my iPhone 13 Pro Max but I switch over to it periodically to keep abreast of Android. My parents bought their first smartphones to replace their basic flip phones and asked my advice. I suggested iPhones for their reliability, simplicity, and ease of use. So naturally they went Android. Knowing I'd be their first call for tech support as usual I figured I had better be up on the ins/outs of Android.

iPhones are a natural fit for me. I'm a Mac user, plus the wife and kids have iPhones. It's the path of least resistance so I have embraced it. Actually I'd still be using a BlackBerry if I had my way, but alas, the true BlackBerry experience (BB7) is over.

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Emphasis mine.

More than a decade ago one of my friends asked people advice on her first smartphone. Another friend said that Android is complex and iPhone is simpler and easier and recommended iPhone.
But it looked like that she interpreted the advice as a challenge to her intelligence and picked Android.

I know you're not looking for tech support, but...

obarthelemy said:

- no notification button to take screenshots. theres' one to record the screen, but it's only for video, not for pics, not for scrolling screenshots. I take several screenshots per week, and have never, ever, needed to record a video of my screen. The shortcut should at least offer a choice.

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There's nearly always a key shortcut (power + volume down, some crap like that). Actually using a shortcut bugs me a lot. It's likely that you can find a screenshot app that does this (although that's the good and bad thing about Android...).

obarthelemy said:

- no "wifi on/off" notif button, which I use several times a day. It's behind the Internet button, because.. erm, I'm not sure what the use case for a combo button is, though I'm very sure what the use case for shutting off wifi when out and about is.

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On most phones you can reorder the shortcuts and the first five-six show up on a first pull. I'm not entirely possible if that's possible on your phone, because I'm not 100% sure I'm parsing your sentence right.

I suspect that few enough people use the wifi on/off button that they moved some button that stats say people prefer. Whether the data they collect for that decision is flawed or not... that I do not know...

obarthelemy said:

- there's no way to hide apps behind a ID re-check ? Just out of an abundance of caution, my banking apps and some others ask for my fingerprint... on my old phone. It seems that's not an option on my new phone ? Or the option is really well hidden ? Maybe it was an MIUI improvement, but it feels like a very basic one that should have been generalized by now, MIUI's had it for years.

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That's normally a manufacturer customization, yes.

obarthelemy said:

- the quicklaunch bar at the bottom of the home screen is 4 apps + plenty of negative space, 5 apps is not an option. And if you don't fill it up, it fills up by itself w/ random crap.

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... and you can change your launcher.

I think this highlights the good/bad thing about Android: you can customize and replace most things. I like this in theory- I love using Linux as a desktop because you have so many good options. The bad thing is that on phones, the economics of app stores have screwed us up. I know on Linux I have many customization options at my fingertips, and I know if they are packaged in my distro of choice, they are unlikely to do terrible things.

On Android... frankly, I am "afraid" to experiment with apps from the Play Store. I am happy to experiment with F-Droid apps, but even OSS apps are sometimes only available on the Play Store (!).

Something-something-old-man-yells-at-the-cloud... I feel the quality of freeware has decreased sharply since "the good old days". For me, Linux is still good, and I actually think the distro model still works very well (although it doesn't scale infinitely). Plus Linux being a niche platform, it has a bit of "no crap by obscurity" (why bother inserting spyware or trying to monetize ads on Linux?).

It's a shame because I think it's basically Whatsapp (maybe Google Maps too?) who prevent any of the "open source phones" being good for me. That's an app that I'm basically forced to use. If those EU laws break the stronghold of Whatsapp over my phone... I know it's only four geeks that will care, but some of us might be able to have a cleaner phone experience.

Samsung One UI is pretty good. The only thing missing is the tap the top to scroll up, but I think Apple has that on infinity patent.

md5crypto said:

Samsung One UI is pretty good. The only thing missing is the tap the top to scroll up, but I think Apple has that on infinity patent.

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There are always a few 'gotchas' with Samsung's implementation, including how they tie certain aspects of the experience (especially a multi-device experience) to their app store and other ecosystem bits but in general the nice thing I can say about it is that they're at a good level of conservative in terms of not changing things that don't need changing.

I know most of you may not remember those days-- back when there were 4 core navigation buttons on Android and they were physical buttons-- not zones on the screen in a navigation bar. The predominant order in early phones was the old task switcher (not exactly the same as modern OSes but close) the main home button, the back button and the Google Search button. As Google realized that nobody wants a separate button all the time for search and an odd number is more 'balanced' they killed search leaving the main three-- task switcher, home and back. Back being on the right is a nod to the backspace key on a physical keyboard, but at some point the UX team at Google decided that it should be on the left, as that's a reference to going backwards logically for languages that read left-to-right (I guess Arabic and Hebrew were outvoted.) The Koreans said "nope" (both LG and Samsung at the time) and retained the original layout as default. You can change it to the Google preferred arrangement of "back, home, task switcher" but you don't have to. Google then decided to go with gesture navigation and to kill the navigation bar. On Pixel you can turn the navigation bar back on, but it's off by default. Samsung retains and prefers the navigation bar as default across all devices, but if you want to have gestures you can go turn the phone into that mode.

Pixels don't even allow you by default to switch the order of the navigation buttons if you turn them back on, but that functionality is built into the OS. Samsung retains some of that customization being visible to users (you can completely re-order the nav bar in some OS skins but Samsung only allows those two.) Google denies all of those options even though they built the OS to have that flexibility. That's part of what I mean by "even Google's phones aren't stock Android." You'd need a launcher to fix that.

Likewise when Google started collapsing multiple functions in the notification shade (WiFi, Bluetooth, flashlight, Airplane Mode etc.-- all the hotkeys) into related groups -- and to be fair some phones are starting to get a LOT of hotkeys-- Samsung said "nope" -- every function will retain its own hotkey even if we have to make the users expand the list and scroll to see them all.

Xiaomi and Moto may do whatever they like and probably will deviate in many ways from the standard, from the Pixel implementation, from Samsung and from each other.

I completely understand that Xiaomi is very popular in Europe and in many other countries -- the 3rd most popular worldwide -- and while not effectively banned in the US the way ZTE and Huawei are, they've never officially sold phone in the US either--only non-smartphone products. Anyone who has one has gone to the trouble of importing one, and even that is unlikely as the N. American carrier bands may not line up with the phone's supported LTE bands. I've only ever seen them in person overseas so I have zero knowledge of how their OS customizations work. I don't think they're likely to sell in the US anytime soon either as they seem to resist selling through carriers, which is how the majority of Americans buy phones. Our cellular carriers (three core companies who own effectively all of the network, plus smaller companies who buy service from the big 3) are vastly more expensive than European carriers, but to keep customers loyal and paying recurring contracts, we get deals on the hardware-- sometimes including free phones. Moto is one of those lower cost brands that might be packed in to a contract completely free or very cheap but it will be locked to the carrier for some period depending on contract. Buying a phone outright at full MSRP/RRP and then using one or more SIM cards from one or more carriers is possible, but significantly less common than it is in Europe. Some discount carriers are trying to change that model, but that's not typically done here. Carriers supporting different LTE bands and different 5G tech makes that tricky anyway, even if you have an unlocked phone.

The only Chinese phone manufacturer who is willing to adopt the carrier-centric model typical in the US and Canada is OnePlus and OnePlus (not Oppo-- just OnePlus) is fairly common here. That said, the iPhone dominates the market and the younger and richer you are the more dominant it is. iPhones make up >90% of all smartphones for people under 20 years old, unlike in other countries where there will be a mix and WhatsApp serves as a platform-neutral bridge between Android and iPhones.

The Google Pixel UI is pretty good too. I feel like Android UIs have really come into their own in the last few years. It feels so adult compared to iOS.

I mean if you really want pure android (probably a generation or three old) just buy some no-name Chinese device on Ali Express. Just don't expect it to be a great experience.

Otherwise basically nothing is vanilla. It's helpful to understand what underlying flexibility exists for the OEMs to customize with but pretty much everyone is going to interact with some set of customizations provided by the OEM and then possibly a different set overlaid with a launcher.

I for one overall think OneUI is better than the Pixel / vanilla Android UI. It just has more functionality out of the box, and you can add more functionality with additional plugins (like Good Lock). And there are plenty of customization options, but the out of the box experience is great for many users.