Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason
Argh, lollipop's driving me up the wall! Vent time, woo!<p>The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful.<p>And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone app instead of unlocking the phone is becoming obscene. I often have my phone landscape while using it as a mini-tablet and in that orientation it's easy to do. Perhaps I'm paranoid but I think the screen now locks faster than it used to and I haven't been able to find the setting to slow it down yet, which exacerbates the problem, when you're lounging and intermittently transferring your attention between tv and internet browsing.<p>And the new calendar app only allows you to see 6 hours at a time, so you can't get an overview of your day.<p>The settings app requires some sort of double swipe down that's just plain awkward. Auto-brightness has been got rid of so often you're constantly fighting the brightness of your phone at night.<p>The new notification have to be double tapped, which again is awkward, especially as they register the first tap and then "helpfully" tell you to make a 2nd one. But the first tap is behind a button press of the lock screen so it's actually a triple press.<p>I'm also slightly perplexed as to the home button icon change, to a circle of all things. It actually offends me a bit, it's so tiny and yet completely devoid of meaning. It's different for Apple's circle button as that was a real button, Google's tiny circle just kinda floats there. And the "back" triangle changes orientation for no discernible reason other than the designer obviously wanted to animate something.<p>The new phone app is strange, the buttons are too small, the volume of the button presses doesn't turn down as you turn down the speaker volume.<p>And this is in a day and a half of use. It honestly feels like anyone testing it would have hit most of these issues. I suspect Google's designers then turned round to the testers and said "As designed. Material, you know. It's just a new way", rather than admit they'd screwed up.<p>The worst part is, it's not added anything. I've not come across a single thing yet that I've gone, oh, cool! Not one.