mono
3996
Unlike iOS which stacks rows of icons from top to bottom, like it or not, you can do whatever you want w/ icons on Android. Organization on a typical iPhone screen is akin to the most barbaric of PC user desktops.
But, no wasted space!
I have to give props to that desktop background. It’s nicely designed to be covered in icons over mostly empty space.
I usually have beautiful rotating scenery as part of the bing desktop backgrounds, so I hate to cover the beautiful image with icons.
Same on my android phones, the google wallpaper app has a user-picked new background every day type of thing that sometimes gets really beautiful backgrounds.
ow fuck my soul
edit: I also just got a flip4, not sure what difference there is between my old flip3, but it was free
Soma
4000
That packed desktop defeats the whole point of GUI for file management. How are you supposed to find an exact file from there? Eyeballing??? And where is room for growth? If you download something from the interweb, where do you put it? And how would you organise the new files??? It is as unproductive as a messy desk.
So I’m excited. Last couple years I’ve had a Fossil WearOS watch. Not the best but not terrible. Sadly there are some apps I wanna use that require WearOS 3, but this thing is stuck at 2, so I shelled out for a Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, which should be here tomorrow, and I am super jazzed about it!
The biggest letdown with this Fossil watch has been its inconsistent sleep tracking. Even my old FitBit did a better job. I’m hoping this new Galaxy watch fits the bill.
I’ve interacted with a lot of iPhones, which work with the same kind of mess, and I think how it works is that you just start remembering where everything is. Since it grows over time with you, you always develop a sense memory of where everything on the cluttered desktop, and so you remember where everything is.
Enidigm
4003
Call quality, screen quality, ect are less than the iPhone, the UI experience feels so second class compared to the iPhone (legibility, ect) and i don’t really see myself having time or energy to figure Android out - phones to me are basically 4 functions anyway - so i’m probably going to take it back and use my old iPhone instead for the second line. Wanted to get 5G just for the better network, but it looks like i’m having network issues still with Fi up here, so it’s got to be deeper congestion problem.
Sadly not only do i prefer i giant wall of icons, and not only are my work desktops giant piles of icons, but i’m pretty sure my personal life is a giant pile of unsorted icons. ^^.
It’s funny @Enidigm and we’re all past debating phones these days “so 2013” but I currently struggle to see the value in iPhone beyond cultural cachet.
When I switched to Android I was all weirded out by the settings and app drawer too. Felt sort of like using a mouse with my left hand.
To me the apps work the same, Google Photos is awesome, Google Maps is better, Android phones are cheaper, IOS is simpler, debate the rest. My wife has an iPhone and prefers it, and obviously my daughters when older (one already has an iphone) wouldn’t even think about Android.
So ya go back to iPhone you Empire-loving cult Apple follower sheeple dumb-dumb :)
Canuck
4005
I’m not going to bother explaining how wrong you are, but I can certainly understand how someone might not want to figure out a new system. I had to laugh at your description of life being a wall of icons! Hopefully Apple figures out how to let their users organize the position of their icons someday.
Enidigm
4006
Well I’m forging ahead with it yet! Truly a hero of our time!
It’s less the UI (though it feels less efficient) but more the polish of Apple. For many, the polish either doesn’t matter or can’t really be felt. But, like my ex-BiL, some people are happy to eat Marie Callender’s $1 frozen chicken alfredo and honestly think it tastes the same as a $50 nice restaurant meal. Just side by side there’s absolutely no doubt the Pixel looks like a cheaper, less quality screen, with the Apple much superior in backlight quality, text quality, handling (i mean, barely, but it’s certainly easier to hold than the Pixel by a noticeable if unimportant amount). If you literally can’t tell a difference between them, that $1 frozen meal i’m sure is just fine. (To be fair, the iPhone was twice the price. To be fair again, i couldn’t tell a huge difference between the Pixel 7 and the Pixel 6a’s screen quality).
I do appreciate how Apple being locked down is a big drawback. I guess it comes down to your relationship with the product. Like today i was trying to rotate a PNG in stupid Paint 3D - the 10 or 15 seconds of trying to figure that out in the middle of a workflow was teeth grindingly painful. F#$% Paint 3D, i don’t have time for that @#$%, where’s regular Paint, all i want to do is rotate a #$%@ image. I basically use my phone for webbrowsing, weather, messaging, Outlook, music, podcasting and phone calls. Everything that slows me down from doing that is time i don’t want to spend. And webbrowsing on the Android (so far) has many, many times, probably an order of magnitude more, misclicks. I can’t even scroll through Qt3 without constantly highlighting text or trying to click/open some other window. Though, i’ll say, so far the Podcasting app feels a bit less annoying than the Apple one (though the UI feels less efficient).
Canuck
4007
Oh my, I thought you were talking about some no name off brand Android phone and then I looked up several posts and saw that you were maligning the glorious Pixel 6a of all phones! Well, fortunately I’m still too lazy to rebut any criticisms. I’m sure the iPhones are all very polished. Did you ever sort out your icons issue? If you simply swipe up from the bottom you’ll have your wall of icons that you want. You’ll have to do that every time you want a wall of icons but in the plus side, it will free up your home screen to give you a clear view of your wallpaper of your favorite child or cat or something. I keep my daughter on there and have a few icons arranged around the edges. :)
Not if you put a wall of icons on your home screen. That would be insane, but he apparently does it on his desktop, so…
Why are you using stock podcast apps? They’re terrible.
I can only imagine this is somehow related to carrying over iOS habits, as it’s not something I’ve ever encountered. I expect it will go away as you get used to Android.
Incidentally, in case you didn’t know, you can put QT3 on your home page.
Agreed. I can’t imagine how many hundreds of foot-pounds of pressure it takes in iOS to scroll, that the same behaviour is selecting text on Android.
I really think that any argument about iPhones vs. Android phones is kind of dumb, because it comes down to what works for you. I’ve used both, and I could go either way on the basis of the phones and their environments alone. I currently have an iPhone, because I use an iPad and Apple TV a lot, but I’ve also had Motoroloa, HTC, and Google Pixel phones that were fine. I do like a lot of the slickness and fluidity of the iPhone, but the walled garden approach to apps and connectivity can be irritating.
My wife loves Samsung phones. When upgrading, and the cost of both an Apple and a Samsung device is the same (or even if the Samsung is more) she gravitates to the Samsung. It’s a matter of preference, because everything someone likes or hates on these phones may well be viewed differently by someone else.
Enidigm
4012
I’m getting there!
I haven’t seen a useful widget yet. I haven’t tried getting Outlook on here yet due to not wanting to mess with MS Authenticator.
Weirdly enough I really dislike the alternatives for one reason or another. The big thing I want is a giant unsorted pile of episodes all visible in a scrolling screen. I don’t need / want the app to download or tell me a new episode is available, or hide completed episodes, or sort by some filter, just a giant list, 1-500 please, thanks. I don’t remember why I disliked them but I found all the non-default podcasts apps (Stitcher ect) annoying enough that I went back to the default. I tend to go back several years in podcasts and listen / relisten to old episodes.
Why doesn’t this surprise me?
To be fair, Stitcher is even worse than the stock apps.
Enidigm
4014
Can I wax poetic about the lost design language of skeuomorphic design? Three lines = menu can diaf. I respect Brutalist concrete horrors more! Give me faux leather desktop environments! But seriously though there’s a kind of limit to how much design language you have to learn today. All of Apples 2.5 fingers with a twist gestures can also diaf - if you even can tell they exist.
It really bugs me that the icon for the Google clock app always shows a static 10:10 time, while the icon for the Samsung clock app shows the actual time. I prefer the Google clock app, but I want the icon to show the time!
