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  • it's an improvement but I'm still not happy about these huge ass buttons in the notification shade that could easily be half the size. Theres so much wasted space. I used to be able to access 6 quick tiles in the minimized shade. now its 4. Used to have 9-12 tiles on a full shade. now we have 8.

    If you're going to continue to make 6"+ phones, USE THE SCREEN SPACE FOR FUCKS SAKE

    • Phones used to be small enough to fit in your pocket, had features that made them useful, and came in a variety of form factors (remember sliding keyboards!?). This is not the future we were promised or the future that we wanted. Today every phone is a rectangular slab that most people can't reach from the bottom all the way to the top with their thumbs. They are made flimsy so that you must buy a case to entomb your phone in if you want it to last. They have weird bulbous protrusions like google's camera bar and apple's lenses so that you even have to look for a case that makes the device ergonomic to have in your hand. They come with spyware you didn't want, and battery draining features. It used to be a single charge could get your phone through a day and a half. Now they promise us batteries that will last 3+ days and deliver experiences that the battery is drained after 12 hours.

      Smartphones are not for us. They are tools of the oppressor class. Kurt Vonnegut was terrified at the prospect of television as a mechanism for addictive control of the populace, but never could he have imagined the terrifying reality of the smartphone. William Gibson did though. He didn't think it would be a compact rectangle that fits in our pocket, but he did think we would all become addicted to a massively online network of computers that we were never truly separated from even as we navigated the physical world. The problem is too many people read the Sprawl trilogy and thought they would be the super cool hackers that have lots of sex, failing to recognize that the main characters of those books are brutally depressed broken people who are addicted to sex, drugs, and the internet.

      And I'm one to talk. I have my phone sitting here next to me. It was made by a big tech company using slave labor. It's ensconced in a rubbery pink case to keep it from getting brutalized by the realities of my clumsiness. I have apps installed on it. I check it throughout the day. But I would get rid of it instantly if my work would provide me with a hardware MFA device. They will not because "it costs too much money." It would cost them $60 to furnish me with one. "But that doesn't scale to all of our employees and contractors." We all get paid 6 figures and receive various benefits through the company. That when faced with a choice between furnishing us with MFA devices or requiring we own smartphones, they choose the latter. They even give us a $150 stipend to make sure we have a smartphone. They are spending more to make sure we have smartphones that it would cost to have MFA devices that they claim are too expensive.

      Why? The only reason I can fathomably come up with is that a smartphone also keeps us shackled to our work. We can be out walking our dogs and get a notification ding on our phones and immediately be back to thinking about what we were doing at our desk. Nowhere are we free from work when we have a smartphone in our pocket. The administrative state has us at their constant beck and call. And what's more, the law enforcement agencies love our phones, too. They have GPS, tower triangulation, and with 5G the towers are closer together and the triangulation is more precise. Never, so long as your smartphone is powered on, are you truly free from the surveillance state. And I don't even think there's any one person (except for maybe Peter Thiel) who likes every aspect of this system of power between the bosses, landlords, law enforcement agencies, and technocrats. I don't even think each aspect of the system is aware of their role in the system. But nevertheless, the system of oppression and torture we live under persists to the benefit of 22 truly horrible human beings.

  • They just keep making the quick action buttons worse, don't they?

    I miss the Android 11 style ones, myself.

    • android 4-7 were perfect. it all went to shit with Oreo, we just didn't realize it at the time because we thought the changes were minor inconveniences we'd get used to. once md2 dropped, we should have realized we were cooked, but it was still… innocuous how small and mildly annoying the changes were. by 2020 though i had noticed: no good updates had come to my phone in almost 4 years and every update just broke something that used to work. then in 2023 google announced gemini was adding new features to the assistant. features that had slowly gotten broken but had worked back in 2015. this is our lives now. a constant churn of features being taken away and brought back

  • The quick settings menu is one of the worst parts of android 15 visually, and it desperately needed a redesign. We're getting resizable quick actions, so now we can fit 16 settings on one page instead of 8. You can now turn Bluetooth and WiFi on/off with just one tap again. Adding settings to quick settings is easier.

    More intuitive settings menu. Boring single color white/black backgrounds are now blurred wallpaper. There's a new option for displaying notifications. There's notification bar icons that are less weird, and more compact battery percentage. Sliders are a little clearer now (rounded colors was a terrible idea). We can now customize icon shapes.

    Can someone explain why everyone is shitting on this? I get that people here don't like change for the sake of change, but most of these are positive, or at least neutral changes, and this fixes some gripes I've had with android.

    • I can only speak for myself, but the quick settings menu has been terrible (IMO) since 12. They've gotten worse each release. So the "overhaul" is mostly just going back to the way it already was before they made it garbage. The exception being it's still oversized and unwieldy.

      Peak quick settings (A11):

  • The current material look is so ugly that I welcome any redesign.

    • True, but I was just getting over how ugly it is... Now they want us to go through the agony again.

      I feel like it's some kind of a conspiracy to tire out the community developers so they don't have a time to bring the quality of life upgrades in custom android distributions anymore. Or I just became too old to to adapt to the pace of life itself. idk...

      edit: on the second look it's not actually that much of a change. I think the wallpaper choice has made it more ugly then necessary.

    • This is probably a hot take but I like it. The bigger buttons are nice and I like the new theming.

  • Wow, finally. The new changes are much appreciated and long. I like the blur UI from Smart Launcher 6 and what ColorOS has done for the notification shade. As long as they keep the unified notification shade. I'm fine.

  • It feels too samsungy to me. Overall it seems a tiny bit better, but man just give it more wacky or intense colors from the wallpapers and avoid this flatness please. I want MORE FUN

53 comments