Material You is pretty cool and I’m glad to finally be able to use it. That, and gesture controls, were the last things I’ve been excited for with Android releases.
To be honest, the whole OS feature releases were stupid to begin with. Half of Apple’s special new features would’ve come through the Play Store on Android as a normal app update, but Apple makes it seem like those are important OS features instead. Why would you ever need to download an OS update to “swipe to reply” or “filter messages”?
Apple’s absurd design decisions makes it seem like you need OS updates for some basic app improvements. Some things new iOS releases bring can’t come through a normal app update (things affecting the lock screen or the system UI for example) but half the features advertised are in messenger apps, dialer apps, calendar apps, assistant apps, and all other kinds of apps that don’t need to be baked into the system image.
Google added its own shitty Airdrop alternative to billions of phones running five different Android versions, all in the background. No need to download Android 14 to get Nearby Sharing, your phone just downloaded it last night. Need an AI acceleration framework? The beta is already on your phone. System integration with a new smart home standard? All just a simple update away.
I like how minor Android updates are, because Android gets festures much faster. There’s a weekly or a monthly update cycle where in iOS you’ll need to wait until the next WWDC. Safari is especially bad, you can’t just install a new version of the browser, you have to wait for the entire OS to be updated alongside it.
Treble and its descendents are in full swing. Porting custom ROMs to devices has become a lot easier, though you’ll still need to fight the manufacturer to let you install the damn thing. You can download a basic precompiled image and run it on any phone with a supported chip in it. Some hardware will be buggy and less power efficient because of missing drivers, but the OS will boot without needing any modifications.
Things like vendor libraries and the standard Android core components are spread across different partitions, and they can all be updated separately. Some OS components, like the Bluetooth stack, can even be updated independently through the Play Store (and presumably other installers as well if your OS has the necessary updater baked in) without needing a manufacturer update.
Every app implementing their own stupid special share menu is infuriating. It’s really simple to call the standard share API, but Mozilla has to be special just in case you want to send the link to your laptop (which they could easily do through the OS share menu if they cared).
Pinning apps is actually possible using the standard share menu. You can hold a share option to pin it (since Android 10 I believe? Could’ve been 9). Of course this won’t work if apps decide to know better than your OS and implement their own special share menu, but for most apps pinning will work.
Material You is pretty cool and I’m glad to finally be able to use it. That, and gesture controls, were the last things I’ve been excited for with Android releases.
To be honest, the whole OS feature releases were stupid to begin with. Half of Apple’s special new features would’ve come through the Play Store on Android as a normal app update, but Apple makes it seem like those are important OS features instead. Why would you ever need to download an OS update to “swipe to reply” or “filter messages”?
Apple’s absurd design decisions makes it seem like you need OS updates for some basic app improvements. Some things new iOS releases bring can’t come through a normal app update (things affecting the lock screen or the system UI for example) but half the features advertised are in messenger apps, dialer apps, calendar apps, assistant apps, and all other kinds of apps that don’t need to be baked into the system image.
Google added its own shitty Airdrop alternative to billions of phones running five different Android versions, all in the background. No need to download Android 14 to get Nearby Sharing, your phone just downloaded it last night. Need an AI acceleration framework? The beta is already on your phone. System integration with a new smart home standard? All just a simple update away.
I like how minor Android updates are, because Android gets festures much faster. There’s a weekly or a monthly update cycle where in iOS you’ll need to wait until the next WWDC. Safari is especially bad, you can’t just install a new version of the browser, you have to wait for the entire OS to be updated alongside it.
Treble and its descendents are in full swing. Porting custom ROMs to devices has become a lot easier, though you’ll still need to fight the manufacturer to let you install the damn thing. You can download a basic precompiled image and run it on any phone with a supported chip in it. Some hardware will be buggy and less power efficient because of missing drivers, but the OS will boot without needing any modifications.
Things like vendor libraries and the standard Android core components are spread across different partitions, and they can all be updated separately. Some OS components, like the Bluetooth stack, can even be updated independently through the Play Store (and presumably other installers as well if your OS has the necessary updater baked in) without needing a manufacturer update.
Every app implementing their own stupid special share menu is infuriating. It’s really simple to call the standard share API, but Mozilla has to be special just in case you want to send the link to your laptop (which they could easily do through the OS share menu if they cared).
Pinning apps is actually possible using the standard share menu. You can hold a share option to pin it (since Android 10 I believe? Could’ve been 9). Of course this won’t work if apps decide to know better than your OS and implement their own special share menu, but for most apps pinning will work.