Google's products do seem to be getting progressively shittier, in profound and confusing ways.
take their home assistant, which used to be able to find information online and compose an answer to your natural langauges queries. Now she just says "I don't know, but I found this online..."
Google Search seems to be getting truly terrible. Results completely unrelated to what I'm looking for are placing in the first page of results.
Android seems to get more janky by the day. Lots of UI elements across different apps that mostly work, but sometimes don't. Holding the power button no longer turns off your phone, but instead opens voice assistant(?!) Changing a long-standing and universal power-off gesture to what used to be the screenshot gesture was rage inducing when I had to go and figure out how to power off my phone again.
Content sharing is a disaster on Android too. They keep INSISTING you use their specific 'share' buttons for webpages, none of which are consistent. Sharing a link from Google Now? click the share icon, then copy. Do not use the "Copy link" button, which only sometimes works. Using google image search? Hit the three dots icon, and then "share" text, and then click copy. Don't you dare try and long press on the image. I assume funneling everything through the OS share menu adds telemetry to both what is being shared, and who it is going to.
Removing the fingerprint reader from the back of the pixel devices is a huge flop imo. It was very useful to bring down the setting shade, and was way more reliably than the under-screen reader. And now they have a foldable pixel device. I've never seen anyone use a foldable phone.
It's like nobody at Google actually uses their products. I've been a long-time android user but it's becoming harder to justify as nobody at Google actually seems to give a damn about their products anymore. :-(
I agree that the "Share" modal on Android is one of the most confusing parts of the OS. It makes more sense if you try thinking of it as UI kludge, a halfway measure that tries to speak to an audience of 'digital natives' who didn't grow up with copy/paste and multi-window tasking, as well as the prior generation accustomed to more traditional computing functions.
When I used iPhone up until this year, I also felt like the flaws were as though nobody uses iPhones at Apple, which is obviously not the case. However, there is a lot of brainwashing going on telling people that something that is bad is actually good.
Whenever Apple locks people into one of their properties, people say, "ooh, smart move". Maybe it is, but it's shitty. Siri couldn't turn my lights off, for example, and Google and Alexa have no trouble with that.
Google "full screen mode Safari iPad" for another highly confusing design decision. In portrait mode, Safari of course fills up the screen with chrome.
iOS is full of these annoying little features that are WONTFIX.
>Holding the power button no longer turns off your phone, but instead opens voice assistant(?!)
I've got an up-to-date Pixel 6 and this is not true. Hold the power button, and I'm presented with options for powering off, restarting, making an emergency call and "Lockdown".
I'm on Pixel 6a I can confirm that holding the button triggers the assistant. I'd like to mention I think what triggered this behavior is me getting a pair of pixel buds.
The products must change because engineers need to do something to show impact and get promotions. Therefore, if the product has reached the maximus of quality, but you need to change it, you end up with zugzwang. Always follow the incentives.
I would argue it's not the engineers that need to do something, rather middle management that needs to show 'results' and show that they are there to bring 'value', even if it's not real value. I seriously doubt changes like moving fingerprint sensor under the screen come out from an individual contributor.
It’s becoming equally shitty on the the apple side of the fence as well. To the point where I barely see daylight between iOS and pixel. Which is a huge drop for apple.
take their home assistant, which used to be able to find information online and compose an answer to your natural langauges queries. Now she just says "I don't know, but I found this online..."
Google Search seems to be getting truly terrible. Results completely unrelated to what I'm looking for are placing in the first page of results.
Android seems to get more janky by the day. Lots of UI elements across different apps that mostly work, but sometimes don't. Holding the power button no longer turns off your phone, but instead opens voice assistant(?!) Changing a long-standing and universal power-off gesture to what used to be the screenshot gesture was rage inducing when I had to go and figure out how to power off my phone again.
Content sharing is a disaster on Android too. They keep INSISTING you use their specific 'share' buttons for webpages, none of which are consistent. Sharing a link from Google Now? click the share icon, then copy. Do not use the "Copy link" button, which only sometimes works. Using google image search? Hit the three dots icon, and then "share" text, and then click copy. Don't you dare try and long press on the image. I assume funneling everything through the OS share menu adds telemetry to both what is being shared, and who it is going to.
Removing the fingerprint reader from the back of the pixel devices is a huge flop imo. It was very useful to bring down the setting shade, and was way more reliably than the under-screen reader. And now they have a foldable pixel device. I've never seen anyone use a foldable phone.
It's like nobody at Google actually uses their products. I've been a long-time android user but it's becoming harder to justify as nobody at Google actually seems to give a damn about their products anymore. :-(