Lollipop is bad enough that Touchwiz, on devices like the Note 4, is a massive i...

nilkn · on Aug 17, 2015

That's the first time I've ever seen that claimed. In what way does Touchwiz improve on Lollipop?

On my Note device, I've done everything I can to hide Touchwiz and go back to stock Lollipop because of how much better it is.

ypcx · on Aug 17, 2015

I tried both and I was all about going back to iPhone, until I tried Cyanogenmod, which puts (a lot of) the sense back into Android. It uses the Google launcher (without the Google Now page integrated on swipe left), but it removes the insanely annoying design decisions by Samsung, e.g. displaying a confirmation dialog when you increase the sound volume over a certain threshold even with your Phone locked in your pocket and you bombing it on your bike downhill. Or the "cannot use camera" and "sorry, dimming your screen" on 5% battery threshold. I don't know what they are smoking at Samsung, but it's not good.

wvenable · on Aug 17, 2015

> displaying a confirmation dialog when you increase the sound volume over a certain threshold

Don't blame Samsung for that, my Nexus 7 did that as well. And in Netflix the dialog appeared behind the active window so you couldn't see it or hit the button.

inversionOf · on Aug 17, 2015

Critics of Android embraced a meme that Lollipop was Android's Vista, substantiated by users anecdotal claims about poor battery life from a given upgrade, or the changes to notification levels, etc. So you still see the echos of that. I've never seen someone go so over the top to claim that it justified vendor skins, though, so this is a new pinnacle.

To everyone else it was an incremental update.

tdkl · on Aug 17, 2015

Yeah, the ritual of rebooting the device every two days because of the memory leaks and camera crashes were quite an incremental update over stable Kitkat.

nilkn · on Aug 17, 2015

This is more of a comparison of Lollipop vs. Lollipop + TouchWiz rather than Lollipop vs. KitKat.

inversionOf · on Aug 17, 2015

Even ignoring the placebo effect, and a contingent of people carrying forth a message between advocating the amazing world of task killers, what in the world would a skin have to do with that? TouchWiz and others are literally layered over stock Android, so if there was a fundamental issue it would have the same issue. The notion that the skins are somehow superior is nonsensical, despite the comical, ignorance-induced downvotes I've predictably received.

georgemcbay · on Aug 17, 2015

Speaking as an Android user/developer:

Lollipop's first release was a bit of a mess in terms of bugs (it has since gotten a lot better, at least on devices that have kept up with releases, like Nexus devices), but I'd still run a stock 5.0 release as a daily-use phone OS over any Touchwiz release ever.

I can't begin to describe how terrible I find the Touchwiz interface relative to stock.