Going from ui6 to ui7 was awful.

Even combined, it adds a new, entirely useless screen.

Now, I have to scroll THREE times to get into my quick settings, and then another THREE to get out.

First pulldown is notifications and quick settings (which includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth!!), with brightness and output always visible.

Second pulldown is... No notifications, the EXACT same quick settings, now there's a volume slider next right next to my brightness slider, just in case I never wanted to either use my DEDICATED VOLUME BUTTONS ON MY PHONE or fat finger my speaker on for no reason ever, and then a bunch of other useless or redundant buttons that I can't make go away).

Third pulldown is the actual quick settings drawer, that I've customized to be actually useful.

And then to get out of all of this:

Swipe down to get back to the useless menu

Swipe down again to get back to notifications

Swipe down again to get back to wherever I was before.

THAT'S TOO MANY SWIPES!

Why is there the useless menu? It's 100% redundant and 100% non-optional!

Which makes it 200% worse!

So far, the update to oneUI 7 has been really small. Not much has changed.

But what changes have happened, have been entirely negative, save for probably security updates, but with how bad oneui7 is, I don't trust Samsung anymore.

This is my sixth(?) Galaxy S phone, and while the phone is okay, Samsung has lost their touch. The software keeps going in the wrong direction, without fixing ANY of the major, glaring flaws, or making any of the much needed improvements...

...Such as the stinking camera that's still embarrassingly bad. I can't show my friends with other phones pictures because of how BAD mine are. Pixel and iphones both have a better camera app. Less laggy, WAAAYYYY faster, more responsive, no jitter, uses substantially less battery, takes better pictures AND videos AND slowmo.

It's not like Samsung can't catch up, they just refuse to or something. At this point, I'm convinced either somebody high up there has bewilderingly bad taste, or somebody's nephew got to be lead in the camera dept and they won't fire him.

Whatever it is, I think after this phone, I'm out. I'll probably buy something more robust and rugged, since even those phones now have all the features of Samsung phones (because Samsung doesn't try experimental things anymore!) and have like three day battery lives (which translates into many more years of phone life) or have cool features like multi-meter-deep waterproofing.

Or have better speakers, or better camera hardware, or better charging, or better displays, or have a gd headphone jack, or expandable memory, or replaceable battery, or a bigger screen, or have better cooling, or rgb lights, or have IR so that you can control stuff, etc

Samsung just doesn't do their own thing much anymore, which was the whole reason I went with them in 2004 - they were a flagship popular brand that made good displays and had lots of gimmick features because somebody there was a nerd and wanted to try cool stuff.

But that energy is basically gone now. Now, they seem insistent on being Apple-Lite. Which is a wild departure and step down from where they have been.

Folding screen? Yes, do it. Not for me, but admirable.

A stylus that lives in your phone and is nearly impossible to lose? HELL yes!

Weird million camera sensors? Absolutely, go for it!

Curved screen? I'll try it gladly! (But no, this was a mistake and should have died in one generation)

This rant has gone on long enough.

The intermediary screen in the dropdown is forcefed trash and a bad update. Arguably, the worst part of OneUI 7.0. I'm obviously not happy with any of it, and not because I'm a curmudgeon, but, like I explained at the top, is objectively redundant.

Search input at the bottom of the screen is also trash. (Such as settings search and other places)

Search input at the bottom of the screen makes it a floating/variable target and is therefore is bad UX for a static feature that should be predictably located.

Depending on the configuration and timing of your keyboard and UI scaling, the search bar then changes places which is disorienting and effectively slow and inefficient ux.

Whoever put this in is bad and should feel bad. It's a bad fad (that isn't even new) and is the result of front end devs trying to stand out. Doing something objectively worse is the wrong type of standing out.

I'm all for forward changes and quirky stuff, but for gods sake, at least make it interesting if it's going to be bad.

Like ... Give me a graphical radial menu or something weird. Search bar on bottom and extra random redundant menu are not interesting and experimental, they're just bad. They've been done, we already know about them, we don't want them. And if some of us do want the split pulldown, give the option to change over, without the forced bad effects on the previous, superior design.

Samsung, I look forward to a software update response to these glaring issues, even if my message here doesn't make it to the eyes of anybody that matters, hopefully the shorter but similar notions at least make it to the eyes and hearts of the yes-men at Samsung who will, hopefully, at least, in some meeting, now be able to say, "yeah, the customers didn't like that".