Android 16’s eventual redesign leaks in latest look

Gone are the days when major version upgrades meant performace and feature overhaul.
Now it's just boring UI or AI bloat needing way more resources while doing nothing in the background.
- Isn't this the case with every (commercial) OS these days? You could copy your comment and paste it in a Microsoft Windows thread without the slightest edit.
  
  Until the AI hype train finally falls off the tracks. Of course, then there will be something newer and dumber they'll all set their sights on. Tech CEOs are all lemmings with goldfish memory capacity.

I don't like it. Blur makes most of the UI less readable.
- I just don't think it looks very good. I know that everyone has different tastes of what looks good but I personally love modern design when it comes to UI and IMO Android was the best looking OS UI and right after that GNOME. But part of why I think both of them look so good and why I think they even look better than Apples design, is that they don't use blur. I don't think it really fits into the Material 3 design language.
- Really wish these companies would stop with the pointless UI "reimaginings" - the point of a user interface is to interface with the user - yet they think stupid new shapes will give people boners.
  These terrible colorless undefined icons are so annoying as well. I like icons having shape and color, so I can go, "I want to go on the web, where's orange fox circle shape?" "I want to send an email, where's blue envelope rectangle?" Not neon screaming colors, but some subtle difference beyond "gray starburst with straight line versus gray starburst with weird symbol." Might as well just do away with icons entirely and just use hieroglyphics.
  
  I'm not against experimentation and changing things. I liked Material 2 but Material 3 is an improvement in every way. Even some of the changes in this redesign are pretty good. My main issue is with the blur. I don't think it works well with bold contrasting colors that Material aims to use.
  And regarding your point on icon shapes, I kind of get it but also I get the reasoning of having uniform sizes — it does look better. I wish there was a way to have different shapes that are uniform in size. They've made these new various shapes and they look nice but it would be even nicer if we could apply different shapes to different icons, and not use one shape exclusively for everything.

It's 2025. Mobile operating systems have basically peaked at this point. These yearly OS updates offer nothing but change for the sake of change with very little in the way of actual use for the overwhelming majority of people.
I'm tired of having to re-train my muscle memory every year just because Android releases have become "events" for marketing instead of offering features that useful.
NEW ANDROID OS! ALL YOUR SETTINGS ARE CHANGED, HAVE FUN!!

What about finally doing something with RCS?? It's been stagnant for YEARS, no audio speed-up, no pinned messages, not possible to separate contacts to useless 2FA SMSs... What about the promised mini-apps? What about opening the API??
What about doing ANY ACTUAL WORK?
- They'll never open the API, they closed it specifically for control. This has been their Android plan all along, and why AOSP slowly loses more and more functionality with each release. They wanted the perception of "open" while actually ensnaring users.
  Best to abandon carrier messaging at this point except as a last resort and use something decent like Signal that doesn't leak telemetry to Google.
  Android really should be divested from Google due to conflict of interests. They will never have users in mind when data mining is the top priority.