Happy weekend!
You might have noticed that !android@lemdro.id has reached 15K subscribers, with over 400 active visitors per week!
With the release of Android 14, which is slowly making its way to more devices, it seems like a good time for a community discussion on the direction of Android development.
Discussion Questions:
- What do you think about this latest release?
- Do you think things are going in the right direction?
- Is there anything you’d like to see prioritized in future releases?
- Which device are you on?
P.S. Subscribe to !askandroid@lemdro.id if you haven’t already. It’s the best place to ask questions, seek advice, or to help steer others in the right direction for all things related to Android.
You must log in or # to comment.
In my opinion, no. At least not under the reins of Google.
Android 11 added scoped storage, severely limiting file access from apps, although app developers have found ways to work with it.
Android 12 did a lot of UI redesigning, including the horrible Internet toggle and it just seemed like there is way too much whitespace.
Android 13 did something right: Made you confirm if you want notifications from apps. IDK why it took this long for such a basic feature even iOS had for forever.
Android 14… Nothing really useful, but they are limiting sideloading of old apps that tend to be super efficient on storage, memory, and CPU. It’s a defeat in the ongoing war between Google and sideloading. They also are trying to force the volume down when it’s too high for too long, even when it’s paired with a Bluetooth device at low volume, another braindead move with possibly good intentions but terrible execution.
With other OEMs (Samsung, BBK, Xiaomi, etc), they still sometimes add useful stuff, but I have a Motorola, so I don’t have much of an opinion on the extra stuff.
Google is saving their actually innovative and useful features for the Pixel line of phones. Many of these features are really software that Google arbitrarily locks to the Pixel.
And many of the Google stuff has just been getting worse and worse, they’ve been getting more and more pushy on me when I do something they don’t like (disable location, for example). Google likes the idea of trying to make Android more like iOS and restrict user freedom. This is why Android market share is declining in the US: If you want iOS, buy an iPhone.
Yesterday, I was trying to simply automate turning on/off Wifi via Tasker at a set time. Turned out Google has removed API access for this pre Android 12 only and can’t be done. If Google wants to be make an IOS clone, then it is doing very wrong, IMO.
In android 14, they still allow sideloading via stuff like F Droid or apk’s downloaded from internet? Or does the user has to confirm a prompt everytime? At the rate Google is restricting stuff, maybe some years down the line, the only way to sideload apps would be via adb.
Been using android since the first galaxy. Never have I experienced such a fuck up as when I let my pixel 7 pro update to 14. And this is from someone that used to run random custom stuff going back a few years.
Android 14 caused my phone memory to become corrupt and I had no choice but to factory reset, losing everything not synced. Apparently this was due to running two separate user profiles.
Somehow Google was too busy finding ways to get and sell more of our data and forgot to test if this basic feature fucking works.
Not looking forward to Monday when I’ll have to jump through flaming hoops to set up my work micrishaft authenticator / profile / intune crap again.
Other beef with 14, custom launchers are broken. I have never been able to stand the stock launcher, it is like babies first launcher. No customisation options and the stupid search bar can’t be removed. A few apps I use on a regular basis claim to to not be compatible, even though they ran fine for several days in 14 till the whole thing shit itself.
On the UI front I feel as if everything seems to get more bland each release with less interesting customisation than we had circa android 5.
Android is maturing. Big changes are becoming increasingly rare, therefore, I think Android and perhaps also hardware vendors should move to a two-year release schedule. I think it’s time to accept that annual releases are no longer necessary.
Now that we fully understand the use cases of the smartphone, I believe Android should provide an advanced mode or power user mode that extends beyond Developer Options for developers. I’d like to hand an Android phone to my grandmother in Basic Mode and know she can’t possibly mess up, but also I want to be more enabled in a Power Mode where not screwing up my device is my responsibility. I think the casual and advanced user are different beasts and should be respected separately.
Finally, I want to see mainline support for desktop mode. Android can increase demand for high-end devices and rejuvenate the premium segment if it shows that it fits new use cases to justify the money. Many users no longer own a laptop computer. Android should move now to capture this form factor.
Written from my Google Pixel 8 Pro.
The only good things about the latest version are the custom clock feature and the easter egg.
i miss when android was fun tbh i don’t like material; i liked jellybean and lollypop and holo before that. i liked the deserts and robots. bring back that.
14 is the most underwhelming release I’ve ever used, to the point I didn’t even notice when my phone updated
Is Android going in the right direction?
Not really, IMO. As a user of Android since v1.5 Cupcake, it’s disappointing to see how locked down Android has become over the years. I still recall how I took a leap of faith when I ditched the then highly customisable and feature-full Windows Mobile, to the barebones Android - I believed in the opensource nature of Android, thinking how exciting it was to be on what could be a developer’s and power user’s dream mobile platform. Although the Android dev scene at the time was nascent, I could forsee an explosion of root utilities, mods and custom ROMs. And I was right - the early Android dev scene was so exciting. From cool and useful utility such as DriveDroid or Chainfire’s CF.Lumen, to innovative custom ROMs such as Paranoid Android with their per-app DPI, Halo, Pie controls etc, the early Android scene was full of activity and really exciting as a power user.
But even as Android got more and more locked down and killed my favorite apps, mods and ROMs, I still enjoyed following many of it’s developments such as the projects Butter, Svelte, Volta, Treble and Mainline. However, I can’t recall anything major or exciting in recent years.
As someone else here mentioned, nowadays all the good stuff seems to be Pixel exclusives (like motion deblur, 7 years or software updates etc). Plus, Google keep pushing more and more stuff towards their proprietary Play Services stack, encouraging developers dependency on them - including anti-freedom features such as Play Integrity (SafetyNet). All of this makes it increasingly harder to break free from Google’s grasps, and as former fanboy of a company which once claimed to “not be evil”, it makes me sad that the ecosystem I once looked fondly towards, is now something that I’m looking to move away from.
Oh wow you made my revive those days when I was changing the ROM of my One Plus 3 every week because there was so many on development and adding new features. So many great memories having control of my device.
I do agree with some points. However, most of these changes are somehow related to security. As someone working in FinTech, play integrity and the likes are something you cant escape, as rooted devices,ROMs, emulators and such are 90% are ‘hackers’. Shame google didn’t think of a way to bake it into Andorid itself… Having it in their services is locking Android so much.To add, lately all the “new” features are something that Samsung already had for years. Like Knox work profile container added to Android. Samsung seems to be evolving Android more than Google which is just sad.
They’ll give the excuse of ‘security’ for any anti-consumer feature, but I’ll never accept exchanging control over my device for ‘security’.
Would you sacrifice NFC/Wallet features to have that freedom back? I personally would not.
I do see a genuine market for a phone you can root and apply custom ROMs etc on, but not do banking or public transport tickets or anything else that needs a layer of trust between the merchant and the phone user.
Oh great I am a hacker now because I installed a modified ROM! I will go to my boss and ask for a promotion.
No. Its still more customizable and capable than iOS, but it’s been getting more locked down, with more new features integrated into Google’s proprietary services. I still would get an android phone over an apple one, but that’s only because I can root it and replace it with a better custom ROM.
Honestly, the MD3 You had been to my liking. I agree lots of features are getting Pixel Exclusive nowadays, but let’s not blame Google for this. The general space of Android in last 2 releases has been refinement over time but obviously with contestable decisions like AppData folder access and others. On the other hand, Android OEMs are not innovating enough in Android Space like they used to do at one point. They are just focusing on UI changes and not features.
deleted by creator
which is why we need to support developers of custom ROMs who are giving us lightweight open source alternatives.
Is there any way we can help steer the direction of AOSP?
I’m some ways yes, in others no.
They’ve been slowly removing power user things that once set Android apart from Apple. For example, a few versions ago, they stopped allowing apps to disable WiFi. I liked having it off when away from home.
You can still do this without root, but the app needs to target an older SDK version, meaning you can’t install it from Google Play. And even if you get the APK, Android will only let you install it through ADB. You can run an ADB shell on-device with Shizuku, so you don’t need a computer. Still annoying they made it so difficult though.
I’ve been firmly in iPhone-land quite a while and dabbled only a bit since my phone-switching days so my current perspective will be possibly dated and definitely from someone on the outside, casually following what’s new in Android but I did have a great time bouncing between platforms back in the day. (RIP webOS, BB10 and Windows Phone)
I had a Moto Z Play back in the day (that battery life but like that and the Priv it replaced, a bit big for my taste) and I ditched it when a then-critical feature to me: “Ok Google with Screen Off” was removed around the time Google Assistant and the Pixel 1 was rolling out. It was a Play Services and/or Assistant/Google Now update that removed the option from settings, I uninstalled them to keep it temporarily and when I looked it up, all I could find was a curt official “the feature is not supported” response on some support board. I knew the Snagdragon-whatever chipset it had supported it, and I was using it just fine in the past - it felt like gaslighting, I saw people throwing around the “your battery life would suffer” excuse or that it was never supported despite it being the time when chipset support for hotwords when sleeping like Hey Cortana, Hey Siri were a notable feature and the Z Play had it.
Imagine my reaction when I see that feature being advertised as a Pixel exclusive(? At least it was advertised as a Pixel feature) so that was it.
in hindsight, Google’s shenanigans to promote their own in-house projects over Android as a whole seems pretty in-character now. Even as iOS features aren’t as big like “ooo iOS’s facsimile of multitasking!” there’s still the “that’s neat” or small QoL moments coming out like auto-deleting 2FA texts when they’re used. And I just don’t seem to see any of that in recent releases. I saw “AI color themes!” and a new time layout? and I’m not shortchanging the features already there like holding volume down to mute, but it just feels like they’ve decided base Android is good enough and slowed down or stopped in favor of figuring out whatever exclusive Pixel features and what to keep from the non-Pros.
But with the move of so many things to Play Services, are features still coming out that way outside of the usual point release?
