Some apps have useful information that you can glance using the notification, like Tasker or those Battery monitoring apps. Dismissing those notifications is a pain in the ass for users that use them

A family member always downloaded and installed APKs from the internet and didn’t know about the Play Store cause that is how you did things on Windows.

The person is question has low tech literacy, and they were doing this for years

As if ‘working’ in black and white means there’s any benefit to being in black and white.

There are bunch of benefits to that, just look at the popularity of monochrome icon packs. Even before the official introduction of Adaptive Icons on Android 12, the status bar was already using monochrome icons to increase visibility. Notification icons were monochrome since a while ago.

When the UI itself works without hue, you are pretty much guaranteed that color blind users aren’t left behind, how’s that not a benefit?

Whilst complaining about a logo that’s already basically white-on-blue. And is plainly a compass even to me

I mentioned they eventually increased the most defining features of the icon after a Redesign, as the cardinal directions letters were removed to make the needle and the… degrees(?) more visible.

How do you encourage that, right after complaining that part of the Safari icon is only as distinct from its background as the entirety of any Material You icon?

I’m frankly unsure how the hell would you get a Material You icon (actually Adaptive Icon) to have the same low contrast as the safari icon. IIRC it is using primary and on-primary color tokens.

again, they look fine.

Agree to disagree.

And doing ANYTHING for the sake of 320x480 in 2023 is just fucking insane! Have we addressed that, directly? The fact we’re even talking about how this style looks at original 2007 iPhone resolutions, while discussing enormous high-def pentile OLED pocket supercomputers, makes no god-damn sense. ‘It wouldn’t work as well as it did on the the displays it originally worked on’ is a complete non-sequitur, even if it wasn’t self-contradictory,

Why the hell are we still talking about this?!

Actually, the newly released Pixel Tablet has a closer than you think density to the first iPhone. IIRC each dp on the Pixel Tablet is less than 1.75 pixels. It isn’t even double than the first iPhone.

You are misunderstanding the situation. The safari logo is a mess, we know what it means because we’ve seen the big res version. For a designer, this means that color can get in the way when pixels are limited and it makes then aware that too much detail can result in a visual mess, the solution is to create a logo that can work in monochrome and to make the necessary parts of the logo more prominent.

The safari logo removed the letters and focused on the compass metaphor. On Android, notification icons are monochrome, so this implies the app logo should also work in monochrome. What this all means is that a Designer is more likely to start with a monochrome and low detail logo icon and then start adding details if necessary, because removing detail is more difficult than adding.

I don’t think the picture you sent of Android 12 is actually from Android 12, at least I think it is from Samsung due to the icon colors, not AOSP. I really hate Samsung’s implementation of Material Design so I will not defend them, because it really sucks.

I was pointing out that even in the old iPhone, the actual division of items were made with colors and outlines, not with gradients, which are not great to actually create UIs

This is purely speculation on my part after using Material Design 3 for an App Redesign, but I think the actual Material You system probably started as a way to help developers get a color palette. Material Design 1 and 2 required the devs to actually code the colors(or get the palette from a website) and sometimes this resulted in weird combinations, Google simplified the process so devs can just add 3/4 colors and it is harmonized.

At some point they figured out it would be useful to have the seed be a dynamic image, like the new media stream controls on the quick settings which use the colors of the album cover. If there is already a tool go generate a palette from a picture, adding a way to generate the palette from the user wallpaper is a nice bonus.

Tl;dr: I think Material You is a bonus from the development and streamlining of Material Design color palette. As well as a greater understanding that designing with saturation is better than with colors due to the existence of color blind people.

The only colors that have a contrast issue in Material Design 3 is actually the surface container colors, but they are not meant to be used together without another means of separation, so it is fine

It doesn’t stop working per se, but it starts looking… weird.

Take for instance this screenshot, I believe it is from an iPhone 1st gen, but I’ve never seen an iPhone so who knows.

You can see how the battery icon gradient is kinda weird close to the outlines.

The bottom area of the axis of the General icon is almost bleeding with the background

How the top of the Sounds, Brightness, Wallpaper and iPhone is starting to blend with the highlight.

And the Safari icon is a blurry mess.

Even here, you can see that the actual list items lack any sort of skeuomorphic design, being separated by an outline to improve visibility. Heck, even the status bar and the top app bar uses outlines to separate them from the main view, foregoing drop shadows.

Exactly. A 4k screen will have the same amount of DP as a 480p screen if both have the exact same size. Elements will appear smoother and more defined, like letters, on the 4k screen than they would on the 480p one, because the 4k display has more pixels per DP, but the actual number of DPs on screen will be the same.

Like, imagine you have a 1080p phone and a 4k Tablet that physically could fit 4 of those phone screens. The Tablet would have two times the amount of vertical and horizontal DPs than the phone, but each DP would correspond to the exact same amount of pixels, and the buttons would have the same real world size.

Oh wow, so a one-DP drop shadow scaled to 4K would be six whole pixels.

If, and only if, the screen size was the same. And even then it would be 10 pixels.

Gradients can scale, but if you are trying to use a big fancy gradient effect and the actual pixel size is, like, 1 pixel, then you lose all those effects and it looks weird. You can kinda see something similar with Apps icons losing visible detail and looking weird if they are too detailed.

IIRC Android actually has the minimum width/height of 360 DP, which is basically 360 pixels (or it was 320?)

Mostly variable screen size and resolution.

Google created a system called DP (not DPI, or PPI), or density-independent pixels.

To keep it very short: The gist is that bigger resolution on the same screen size just allows better clarity, but doesn’t change the size of elements in relation to the physical world. So a button would have the same real-world size on a 720p device or a 1080p one (assuming the screen size is the same), which is desired because with phones, the screen is the thing you use to control the device. App devs use DPs as the target, not a resolution itself, the system can handle how things are actually displayed.

This is fine for an interface that uses color as the way to differentiate elements, but it gets really weird when you use something less flat. Like, imagine you are using gradient and shadows to separate UI elements from each other, but you want it to have the same real world size, like Android. On some devices, the actual pixel size of the gradient can be too small to actually render properly so it looks blocky, or the pixel size is too large, and it looks weirdly over smooth.

That said, one point in defense of the minimal height is the miniplayer. As media apps, YouTube, YT Music, and YT TV have to display playback controls just above the persistent navigation element. A tall bottom bar with another row of buttons above it would just cut into the viewing space for content.

Heavily disagree with that, the mini play is dangerously close to the system gestures, and sometimes I triggered the system gestures by mistake before the current redesign. It is still too close for my liking.

Edit: a thing that I hate about YouTube design is that it is really close to Material Design 3, but it sorta of misses most of the things that make M3 look coherent, so it just looks bad, like a knockoff M3 from someone that had to implement Material Design through a verbal description rather than looking at it

Tasker. Can’t even begin to describe how awesome this app is.

Also cloned apps which is big for me

It makes me really mad cause YouTube is clearly taking ideas from Material Design 3, and even M3 recommends customizing it, but the way YouTube has done it is to make components smaller and harder to use in comparison to canonical M3. Like the bottom bar which is way thinner than the M3 one in comparison.

It makes YouTube look like it’s using a M3 knockoff

Even if a social network loses 99,99% of the user base due to charging to use it, those left are the ones that see no problem paying to use it, so they are more likely to eat up some insane pricing, which would help recoup losses from a smaller user base. Basically whales.

I think the only way to try to kill a social network is by going full scorched earth on it. Remove all your comments, or change them to be an annoying copy pasted comment about why you’re getting off the platform. And even then I don’t think it is helpful, I did that with Reddit but was forced to leave technical posts intact because I feared I might prevent someone from solving their issue.

I’m actually pretty excited for this version due to app cloning being added to AOSP, as well for predictive back, but IMO that will be something that will take a couple of years before it gets going to the point where we couldn’t imagine living without it.

Android 13 that was rather eeeh, but that one was mostly a refinement over 12

I understand there are use cases that require high security, like a whistleblower. But at the same, security is about minimizing risks that are likely to happen, you pay attention and obey traffic laws, you don’t stay inside your house forever fearing a car accident.

Yeah, and thieves are definitely going to use your data rather than sell it anyway

Alright, this is slightly related to the topic at hand:

I think the charging up to 80% is kinda bullshit. I’ve been using my Redmi Note 10 for 2 years, and during that time I’ve used the 33W charger and almost always waited until the device was under 10% and charged it to 100%.

I’ve used AccuBattery and it guessed the battery health was at 85%. This is still more battery left than what I would have if I kept the device between 20~80% charge. So I don’t get it

I just flash LineageOS even when the device is currently supported by the OEM. I buy the hardware from them, not the software.

Edit: Like, the vast majority of actual custom ROMs users are either using Pixel Experience or LineageOS, there are a bunch of other ROMs, but those are mostly “purpose built” for enthusiasts of what they offer. Like, GrapheneOS is for security reasons, and things like that.

There is a bit of headache installing custom ROMs, but once you install it, it is usually pretty stable. Also, I don’t get the locked vs unlocked bootloader thing in regards to security. The device is stolen and outside your hands, it is doubtful that a thief would go through the steps of flashing a ROM, but wouldn’t be smart enough on how to make the device unusable if it had a bootloader locked. Either way you are screwed.

I will copy a comment I made a week ago in another thread:

It was five years after her first Android phone that I noticed that when asked to install an app, my aunt proceeded to download an APK from a random website and installed that rather than using the Play Store. In fact, I think she didn’t even know the Play Store was a thing, and she was on her third android phone already.

She isn’t tech-savvy, she did that because that is how she did on Windows. After that, I just accepted that things need to change in a way that might annoy me.

That is to say that while the solution found by Google has a bunch of drawbacks, and I’d prefer if old games and unmaintained apps were left alone, I don’t think it was a totally wrong decision (this time).