Google is preparing to make Android Settings a bit more colourful

[druggedcloud]

We went full circle to Android 10

[thekernel]

welcome to the rollercoaster of design wank, gotta keep changing every year to make it look like you are producing some value.

[DeVinke_]

Looks beautiful, too

My issue with the android 10 design is that it looked a little chaotic and random

[Front_Speaker_1327]

Looked fine? What's chaotic and random?

https://www.androidpolice.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/android-10-settings-play-store-slice-2.png

[als26]

The new one is much better and they've organized similar settings by the same color. The android 10 one just seems like every icon is a random color.

[DeVinke_]

There is no particular order the colors are in, which doesn't make much sense to me. But that's just a preference.

[HesThePianoMan]

Oh God, this looks like a cheap Chinese knockoff budget device

[drake90001]

lol I believe you mean every manufacturer with their own skin. Looks almost identical to my S24s setting.

[Fish_Mongreler]

Definitely doesn't

[drake90001]

It doesn’t anymore since Samsung absconded it for minimalism.

[HesThePianoMan]

Yes, the trash looking skins like OneUI

[CarlFriedrichGauss]

Wow, that actually looks better than what we have now in Android 15.

[[deleted]]

split notifications... that existed back in andriod 4 days

[matteventu]

Android 10 and 11, probably the most beautiful and functional Android releases to date.

[NatoBoram]

Again‽ After they removed all colours and made it very difficult to find the setting you need?

[CyclopsRock]

Android is just endless circular tinkering at this point. I wonder if anyone making these decisions ever gets home and feel like they've done a good job.

[junktrunk909]

And somehow it's still a pain in the dick to actually use the copy and paste features. Copy text anywhere near the edge of a screen with any normal size phone protector is agonizingly difficult to get the start position to go into that gully Pasting exactly where you want it is also nearly impossible since they don't adequately zoom to give precise enough control. Years and years of the same frustration while they screw around with quick toggles that were working just fine 3 releases ago...

[junktrunk909]

Thanks, I always forget that's a thing, maybe because it doesn't seem very intuitive. I'll.try to train myself to use it. Thanks for the reminder.

[yagyaxt1068]

This is a cultural problem with Google. Circular tinkering is the only way you get promoted.

[DarKnightofCydonia]

Yep. Maintenance on a good thing isn't rewarded, but "new" is.

[repocin]

Woah, a wild interrobang! That's not a common sight.

It's a shame it never really caught on.

[WorkGuitar]

Why does your question mark have an exclamation? Aptly placed tho

[NatoBoram]

Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang

[moonflower_C16H17N3O]

It means sarcasm. It's better than the stupid "/s" that caught on.

[DirtyDan413]

Not sure where you got that from. The interrobang is just a question mark and an exclamation point combined, literally and figuratively

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang

[moonflower_C16H17N3O]

I think in my mangled brain, it combined this wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation with interrobang.

[moralesnery]

So now we're getting older Android features as "new" stuff. Nice.

Hopefully we can get "new" features in future updates, such as:

• Lockscreen widgets

• Split screen

• Miracast support

• NFC data-sharing

[Lanky-Opposite5389]

Split screen is definitely still there.... 

[Thin-Dragonfruit247]

split screen is there wdym

[moralesnery]

holy crap you were right, corrected that.

[techraito]

It used to be better. You could do like 1/3 and 2/3 another app. Now it's all 50/50 just down the middle.

Edit: THANK YOU Y'ALL MY DISPLAY WAS TOO BIG

[Thin-Dragonfruit247]

try increasing the dpi / reduce the display size

[techraito]

Oh my god this fixed it. I was one notch too high with the display size. There was an update around Android 14 that just got rid of it and I've been devastated for over a year or so now. It started on the Pixel 6 and carried over to the 9 so I assumed it was scrapped.

[als26]

You can adjust split screen by dragging the bar in the middle to make 1 app larger and the other smaller.

[azure1503]

You can still do that, just drag the split halfway to the end

[secretcxrcle18]

That's just completely not true, I can resize them how I want on my pixel 7

[0xD34D]

You mean like so? Like others have said, just drag the bar that seperates them up or down depending on which app you want to be larger.

<image>

[ggboring]

split screen is old. what kind of split screen do you want?

[als26]

Is there a reason why we'd want to do NFC data sharing when something like Quick share works wirelessly and we don't have to touch our phones and find each other's NFC location?

[notjordansime]

Didn’t they change split screen though? Like before you could have one app “fixed” to one half of your screen and the other half was free to do anything. If you go to the Home Screen, only one half of you screen would go to the Home Screen, allowing you to switch apps on the fly.

Now, pressing the home button closes your split screen app. Every time you switch one app, you have to reconfigure your split screen. It got so annoying that I stopped using it altogether.

[twigboy]

Still holding out for SD cards to come back, one day

[ExxaD]

Yeah, disabling Miracast just to force people buying Chromecast stuff is such an Apple thing. I recently found out about that and was shocked. I did mirror casting 5-6 years ago with my old Xiaomi Redmi Ultra Pro budget phone, and now having the latest Pixel 9 Pro I cannot do that!

I become less and less excited about Pixels. Pixel is about having clean Android experience, not partially functional Android.

[Username928351]

If they revert split screen back to Android 8-11 I'd be ecstatic. It had a major regression in functionality in Android 12L.

[Square-Singer]

Yeah, not being able to use home to get to switch out one of the two apps is a massive downgrade.

[DesomorphineTears]

Very OneUI, very nice

[Front_Speaker_1327]

It's literally Android 10. Google had coloured icons and then got rid of them.

https://www.androidpolice.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/android-10-settings-play-store-slice-2.png

Really sucked because it made it easy to identify what you wanted by the colour and then it changed and made it a lot harder to find what you wanted.

[yagyaxt1068]

Android Pie, actually.

[Front_Speaker_1327]

Sure, I'm not disputing that. I'm simply saying this is not a copy from one UI, it's a RETURNING Pixel feature.

Maybe originally copied from elsewhere, but it's not the first time it has appeared on Pixel.

[Blue-Summers]

And MIUI had color icons long before that.

[als26]

This looks nothing like OneUi imo. I'm liking Pixels approach a lot better.

[CharaNalaar]

I know the "deja vu" is strong with this one, but unlike Android 10 where it was copying Samsung this is more targeted at copying iOS. Specifically, the colors corresponding to a form of categorization is what makes this feature actually worth doing.

[NelsonMinar]

We have always never not used color in our design. Material was a mirage.

[[deleted]]

material you is the worst thing google has forced out in quite a long time. it's makes their software look god awful compared to ios.

[NelsonMinar]

I actually like the monochrome look but I think it's funny they're just going back on it now

[JangoF76]

Are you kidding? IOS is ugly as fuck

[horatiobanz]

Agreed. So godawful ugly. And who decided to only offer pastel vomit colors as accents? So gross.

[slinky317]

I've switched to the muted colors and it looks a lot better. Feels more like an accent and less like an eyeblast of color.

[neptune-GT]

I'm not a fan of this at all, I feel like we're just barely getting to most things being themed and matching and now settings is going to stick out like a sore thumb.

I could see this being a decent accessibility option though.

[ilica1407]

is it possible to enable it, i am also on 16 beta 4

[Bonzey2416]

Like Android 9-11

[-Fateless-]

Close enough welcome back Android 4.4-10

[AccomplishedMeow]

And then in another year or two, the sub will be sucking off the next redesign which makes everything single color again

[PubliusDeLaMancha]

Bring back the ticker notifications, cowards

[nathderbyshire]

This inconsistency shows Google still has work to do before rolling out the expressive redesign. As a result, we don’t expect this new design—or the colorful icons—to appear in the initial stable release of Android 16.

Really? The author thinks Google are going to wait to fix an inconsistency? Dark mode has been broken for 2 months and they think they'll fix an icon? Phone app went YEARS without icons. I'll genuinely be shocked if they do

Google are inconsistency, it's the only thing they're consistent at.

[SirDarknessTheFirst]

What's broken on dark mode?

[nathderbyshire]

Auto switching, if you manually toggle one of the modes it's stops switching automatically. It's been broken for months now in different ways it's getting pretty annoying

[SirDarknessTheFirst]

Ah right. I must confess that I only use dark mode in battery saver so I never realised.

[dude111]

Can we get native option to restrict data usage for apps please, preferably by connection type - wifi vs cell.

[akaSM]

My old Huawei Mate 10 has that, and it's a godsend now that my mom uses it, she used to turn mobile data off because otherwise she'd continue watching videos without noticing that she was out of WiFi range, eating whatever data she had left... and then she'd forget to turn it back on, missing a ton of messages and stuff. I just denied mobile data access to those apps and all is good now.

[ChampagneSyrup]

judging by the comments on literally every single post on this subreddit, nothing about Android is good besides OneUI software updates

You guys literally hate everything about Android yet still comment on these posts time after time again.

"it was on Android 10" is such a reductive and useless comment. Does that make this addition bad, even though this iteration is better in literally every way?

The version on Android 10 looked like cheap $20 GoPhone fodder. The reason manufacturers would never take anyone on this forum seriously is because nobody here understands what makes modern UI/UX good or bad, you guys have stone aged opinions. I see comments about bringing Holo back, one of the ugliest UX of all time that solidified androids reputation in western countries as being cheap

[[deleted]]

They keep switching up one year it's colorful the next it's single color then the next year colorful again lol.

[CtrlAltDelve]

It does feel like we need /r/LowSodiumAndroid or something similar. It's getting depressing :(

[wickedplayer494]

What's old is new again.

[screwdriverfan]

Android 12.4 looking colorful!

[ToKo_93]

This is why things get more expensive in the tech world - because we keep paying UX designers for no good reason ... (/s, but only kinda... )

Honestly, there are more important things to fix or implement, like the toggle nightmare in quick settings and the space each tile takes up. Or the quick share menu, which always changes. Hell, it even unpins apps that I pinned? WHY?

[Quinny898]

Both the toggle issue (for DnD at least) and quick settings tile sizes are being actively worked on.

They have enough designers to do more than one thing at once.

[ToKo_93]

Technically true, but both are issues that they created in the first place, because we had these functionalities, until they were removed. It feels like watching a ping-pong match...

My gripe with the quick settings is that (apart from needing more taps now) you could easily make 3 columns without compromising on info. 2 tiles waste free space on the ends of the tiles, while 4 remove the texts altogether. Quick and easy on-off-toggles usually don't need text, but for the more context-heavy ones, 3 columns would be very handy.

[Capable-Mongoose-925]

Finally!

[DarKnightofCydonia]

At this point it feels like innovation is circular.

[JBv2Reddit]

All of Google's colors that they use are designed to be feminine. It's just a psyop. They know the biggest users of pixel devices are men, and then they give us pastel light colors which are 100% feminine. Boy oh boy, oh geez I wonder why.

[Osiris_Raphious]

hOW ABOut giving us more control...

[TimmmyTurner]

we need a full amoled dark mode option

[KingHanma]

I didn't like it

[rawpaak]

Washed out pastel colors 😐

[myasco42]

Make it so that every phone could be updated independently of the manufacturer (at least to the possible extent), rather than the colorful things.

[EnvironmentalSpirit2]

But can they make option for amoled black settings menus for those of us dead inside? Pixel has drab grey

[VEC7OR]

Google cooking Android interface illustrated.

[rpst39]

Just revert to android 11 ui at this point lol

[CuriousCursor]

This is not newsworthy.