I would most certainly not peg Android as the promised land for users.
It's indeed "devolving" slightly as of late, after a peak UX around 7-8 imho (still not perfect but it was smoother back then I feel, less clutter).
Note that my screen brightness control, manual (slider) or auto (toggle), is right there in the notification menu.
Android seems to be the least of two evils for me, as I've just found out in these comments, insofar as I have more access (filesystem etc) to do 'enterprise-y stuff' like data sync to personal infrastructure, remote flow management, etc. But it's evil, like iOS :)
Oh let's define "evil", because this is not r/conspiracy. I mean:
- not user-centric but vendor-centric (this is true of all commercial OS, which is why I use Linux whenever I can, or FreeBSD when it applies)
- feels less like your "home" (as a desktop does) and more like some project housing or hotel room (all identical, like appliances in dev terms). Think not "wallpaper" but "GPOs", what a sysadmin can do (or should be able to).
- tons of hidden 'features' and otherwise magic triggers that are poor in the way of discoverability, let alone transparency if we're gonna get there. Obfuscated, silent, opt-out, the whole dark side of tech is concentrated in mobile platforms.
Lol, I am so jaded with UX these days. Why can't we have nice things. I mean, user-centric UX paradigms. How hard can it be to make money by selling great(er) products?
I hear your point on third-party apps loud and clear.
Sometime in the 2000s I became a self-proclaimed "platform agnostic" (no OS church, a desire to be productive on any of them).
This lead to a long journey in cross-platform-land, third-party apps, and naturally the open source of it all (ideally). My threshold of acceptability for any app is now "give me data files" so I can just use CLI mojo and tools like SyncThing to sysadmin the hell out of my digital life.
SyncThing, as I've just found out, is not available on iOS. So clearly (assuming this is a limitation of the system itself regarding filesystem access), that platform cannot fit my IS paradigm.
It seems like it could be an "edge" device but even that is pushing it... (sync my flows through some ad-hoc proprietary clouds per app; and then sync from those clouds back to my IS, i.e. one custom path per file type probably... maybe have to resort to IFTTT for some... yeah no that's too much work).
Thanks a lot for the perspective. It really helped my see where I fit based on my needs and former experience (I can relate to a lot of what you said).
I had heard that there was a file exploring app now however, doesn't that make everything easier? My idea was to just use SyncThing¹ as I do on Android, and I was thinking I could just open things from there in any app.
Thanks a lot for this account, it really helped confirming my personal bias regarding this (I mean 'bias' neutrally, neither good nor bad just mine).
____
1: Actually I just checked, there is no iOS client for SyncThing... And no plan to either. (I assume it's a limitation of the system and so is true for all such apps like Seafile, NextCloud...)
So yeah, nope. That's a showstopper for me. My entire information system (like any IS worth its salt) is based on having plain access to files... I honestly though that was long solved on iOS. Misinformation from the media, I guess.
Honest question: every time I must debug my mother or a friend on an Apple device, I have to go through a Windows-Vista amount of confirmations of multiple-FA steps and it never seems to stop or remember my agreement to this or that feature.
I've been using Apple devices exclusively for 10 years until 2016 or so but I reckon it's become incredibly bloated UX on iOS devices, at least from my very anecdotal perspective.
Meanwhile Android seems much more 'sane' for me as a user, but more so software developer aware of the cost of bad UX.
So I'm wondering, in making this choice to go for SE rather than 4a, I'm assuming you're familiar with both OS, how do you think they compare?
I really like what I hear about the iPhone SE but immediately I remember how dreadful my experience is every time I have to use an iOS device, they're just so unnatural to me, just so weird UI/UX choices. I feel like they're maybe great for seniors but as a 37 nerd/geek I feel lost with iOS. It's just not doing what I want it to. Like Windows 10. Like Gnome. I tolerate KDE because it's great but it's not without big issues yet.
Am I too demanding? Have I been spoiled by the best products during 30 years of computing, such that 'average' in 2020 doesn't cut it for me, or did UI/UX really get worse as I suspect?
Please, someone, in this highly popular thread, help me make sense of this perception, and see where I fit in a large 'nerdy' crowd.
It's indeed "devolving" slightly as of late, after a peak UX around 7-8 imho (still not perfect but it was smoother back then I feel, less clutter).
Note that my screen brightness control, manual (slider) or auto (toggle), is right there in the notification menu.
Android seems to be the least of two evils for me, as I've just found out in these comments, insofar as I have more access (filesystem etc) to do 'enterprise-y stuff' like data sync to personal infrastructure, remote flow management, etc. But it's evil, like iOS :)
Oh let's define "evil", because this is not r/conspiracy. I mean:
- not user-centric but vendor-centric (this is true of all commercial OS, which is why I use Linux whenever I can, or FreeBSD when it applies)
- feels less like your "home" (as a desktop does) and more like some project housing or hotel room (all identical, like appliances in dev terms). Think not "wallpaper" but "GPOs", what a sysadmin can do (or should be able to).
- tons of hidden 'features' and otherwise magic triggers that are poor in the way of discoverability, let alone transparency if we're gonna get there. Obfuscated, silent, opt-out, the whole dark side of tech is concentrated in mobile platforms.
Lol, I am so jaded with UX these days. Why can't we have nice things. I mean, user-centric UX paradigms. How hard can it be to make money by selling great(er) products?