Observations on Android, five years later

Android as seen by a long-time iOS user, Part 2

About three months ago, I decided to take another close look at Android. After spending some time catching up with the latest and greatest smartphones powered by Android, and after reading and watching an inordinate amount of reviews, it was clear that a lot had changed for the better since my last good look at this OS back in 2014 (and with 2011 hardware).

Despite all apparent improvements, though, when the time came to choose which device to get, I didn’t want to be using some specific brand’s flavour of Android; I wanted the pure experience. So my search narrowed down to a few affordable AndroidOne handsets. Thanks to a fantastic limited-time offer on Xiaomi’s website, I grabbed a brand new Mi A2 (black, 4 GB RAM, 64 GB storage) at a lower price than what I had been seeing at local second-hand shops.

You can read its tech specifications here, but suffice it to say that this is an overall excellent phone with features and a performance I’ve seen in much costlier devices. The only thing I don’t like about it is the size. My comfort threshold is low: anything bigger than my iPhone 8 is unpleasant to use. The Mi A2 has a 5.99-inch display, it’s 20.3 mm taller and 8.1 mm wider (but thankfully it has the same 7.3 mm thickness as the iPhone); at least its clearly iPhone-inspired design makes it sleek and tolerable enough to handle. Oh, and it doesn’t have a notch, which is a big bonus in my book.

Biometric authentication is made through a fingerprint sensor located on the back of the phone, where your index finger is supposed to land as you hold the phone. I always thought this sensor placement was awkward and less practical than the iPhone’s Home button, but I was wrong. I got accustomed to it quickly. I’ve also noticed that the unlocking is as fast as on the iPhone (if not sometimes faster).

Android, five years later

The last time I truly interacted with Android was with an old 2011 Sony Xperia Neo V that ran Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich), and it was exactly five years ago, in November 2014. This Xiaomi Mi A2 currently runs Android 9 with all the latest updates.

In five years, and after five versions, the Android experience has improved dramatically. Not only with regard to the UI — the whole system under the bonnet feels way more robust and reliable.

One obviously huge difference between my first foray into Android back in 2014 with that old Sony Xperia and experiencing it now on a current device, is that there is practically no tinkering involved to make the phone usable, and this is even truer when you choose an AndroidOne smartphone, with Android at its purest.

From an interface design standpoint, in my 2014 review the impression was that Android 4.0.4 felt a bit disjointed — a collection of first- and third-party apps which lacked a unified UI and visual language, or a distinctive platform design. Buttons, UI elements, and behaviours felt generally different within each app. Google’s Material Design has thankfully rectified this ‘randomness’, and Android today looks and feels more organic and consistent.

At the same time, however, what’s been happening in mobile UI visual design these past few years is that everything has become flat, colourful shapes floating in a whitespace expanse. With third-party apps in particular, it’s often hard to distinguish between their iOS and Android versions.

One thing Android still does better than iOS is Notifications. They have a way of being noticeable without being annoying or overwhelming once they pile up (at least for how I use my phone). To the point that on my Mi A2 I have left all notifications enabled, and it’s all still less intrusive than on my iPhone where I have allowed notifications only for a handful of carefully-picked apps.

Example of Android’s Notifications pane — As you pull it down from the top of the screen, all the little icons that crowd the status bar expand into notification messages, and for immediately actionable notifications you’ve given the relevant options straight away (see YouTube’s notification). As you can see, there are still three notifications left to expand, represented by the icons at the bottom of the pane (new Gmail messages, a notification from Twitch, a Like from Twitter). Predictably, if you tap on a notification you’ll enter the related app; if you swipe you’ll dismiss it. Once you expand everything, you’re given the option to ‘Clear All’, which is a much bigger label than on iOS, thus easier to tap.

I still think the way Android treats the phone’s status bar leads to clutter and the occasional confusion; but in the 5 years that have passed since my last dive into Android, this situation has markedly improved, especially if you’re able to keep up with the notifications you receive and clear them as you read them.

One design choice I particularly appreciate in Android when it comes to Notifications is the use of a notification dot as opposed to iOS’s notification badge. It’s a minor detail, but I find that having a light blue dot next to an app’s icon indicating that there are notifications for this app is much less stressful than a red badge with a counter indicating e.g. 6 unread notifications, 11 unread emails, or 4 unread messages. In both cases, I’m free to read any unread notification whenever I please, but iOS’s numbered red badge subtly conveys a sense of urgency that’s largely absent in Android’s blue notification dot.

The Notification dot tells me there are notifications from Twitter. In the previous image you can see that it was a liked tweet.

One could argue that Android delegates this urgency to the appearance of notification icons which progressively clutter the phone’s status bar, but I actually find this method to be conducive to a more efficient notification management. It’s a gentle nudge to take a look at your notifications without letting them accumulate too much (and risking missing an important one among the filler, like it sometimes happens on iOS). I hope I’m making some sense; I’m aware I’m deep into personal preference territory here.

Some visual design choices

As you can see in the image above, it’s pretty clear what I’m going to point out — the app icons are too close together. A whole screen of icons feels crowded and cramped, but most of all… those truncated app names! Here the situation is much better on iOS: with longer app names, iOS reduces letter spacing and manages to fully display the name of apps like Pocket Casts, SoundHound, Hipstamatic, Quartz Brief, AdobeCapture, and AirPort Utility, the latter probably being the app with the longest non-truncated name on my iPhone.

Android can’t even display the full name of “Headphones”, Sony’s app for managing their wireless noise-cancelling headphones. Heck, even Google’s own Play Store name is truncated! It’s not pictured above because it’s on another screen, but Instagram — a 9‑letter word — is displayed as “Instagra…”, which is even more ridiculous, considering that you can certainly fit an ‘m’ in the space occupied by the ellipsis.

Despite having now spent almost three months with my Xiaomi Mi A2, Android’s application tray (is that its name?) still manages to throw me off a bit. As a long-time iOS user, I’m accustomed to seeing all apps on my iPhone’s springboard. On iOS, what you see on the screen are essentially the contents of an Application folder. On Android, the screen’s real estate is like a Desktop where you put shortcuts (in the Windows sense) to the apps you’ve installed and use more frequently. To look at all the apps, you swipe from the bottom and you see them in the tray; in other words, not everything that appears in the various phone screens is necessarily all you have installed. Things like Calculator, Clock, Contacts, Files, “Keep No…” (Keep Notes, I presume), Lens, News, Settings, etc., are not placed on the ‘desktop’ by default, and you access them via the tray.

The advantage of such design approach is that you can effectively customise what you typically see on the phone’s screen to your heart’s content. App icons don’t even snap to the closest consecutive empty space like on iOS, so you can put just three or four icons on a screen in places that, for instance, are more easily reachable by your finger.

The drawback is that, as you install new apps, the placement of the others inside the tray shifts, and you lose your place a bit. This often happened to me with Settings, so much so that I eventually had to place its shortcut on the phone’s ‘desktop’. Admittedly, it’s not that huge of a deal, but visually it makes for a crowded, cluttered experience — you swipe left and right and see apps; you swipe from the bottom, apps again, a sea of round colourful icons.

Contrast this with another mobile OS that distinguishes between a ‘desktop workspace’ and a separate list of apps: Windows Phone. There, the visual difference between app shortcuts/widgets (tiles) and the full list of actual apps is unequivocal.

Home screen and app list on Windows Phone 8.1

Home screen and app list on Windows 10 Mobile

Android’s navigation buttons

The Xiaomi Mi A2, like many other Android smartphones, features three persistent software buttons at the bottom of the screen. A Back button (◁), a Home button (◎), and a Multitasking button (☐). The Back button is used to go back inside an app, but also to exit an app. In my 2014 piece I wrote that this behaviour could be confusing and inconsistent. I don’t know whether apps have got better at this, but now it really isn’t problematic like it used to feel, and I still haven’t found myself kicked out of an app when I simply wanted to go back within the app’s menu hierarchy, for example.

The Home button also invokes Google Assistant when long-pressed, and I find this rather handy. I also like that when you invoke Google Assistant this way, the Assistant just quietly awaits your input, whether by text or voice command, and doesn’t say anything. This is useful when you want to avoid being loud in a public place, and/or want to keep your interactions with your phone to yourself.

The Multitasking button is perhaps my favourite. When interacting with a user interface, I generally much prefer (physical or virtual) buttons over gestures. And with the Multitasking UI in particular, on iOS I still prefer the old double-tap on the Home button rather than the swiping gesture introduced with the iPhone X. With Android’s square button it’s even simpler, as you just need to tap it once. There’s even a shortcut to close all open apps if you so wish:

Handling of background processes

All the issues I mention in my 2014 article have thankfully become non-issues in this regard. Since I purchased this Xiaomi handset I’ve never experienced unexpected behaviours, crashes, stuck processes, anything. The system feels consistently stable and I don’t feel compelled to check on it every 10 minutes to see if an app or background process is misbehaving. And, quite frankly, I’d be surprised if I still had to.

Storage handling

When using that Sony Xperia phone with Android Ice Cream Sandwich back in 2014, I was extremely frustrated by the way Android handled storage between internal memory and the microSD card. Unfortunately, this Xiaomi Mi A2 does not feature expandable storage via a microSD slot; it only has internal storage, so I can’t say whether the situation has improved on this front, but I’ll simply assume that it has. Again, it would be appalling and disappointing if it still were a mess like on that old Sony Xperia.

App selection and polish

In the past few years, I’d say from 2016 onwards, I’ve reached a sort of saturation point with iOS apps: I tend to explore the App Store much less frequently than I used to, and I’ve become very selective when it comes to adding a new app on my iPhone. In short, I have now settled with a selection of essential apps I use all the time, and I rarely feel the need to venture outside this comfort setup. Photo apps are possibly the only exception, but it feels it’s been a while since I last found some really unique photo apps worth keeping around. And in general, the trend towards app subscriptions — which I strongly dislike — has tempered my interest in looking for new apps for my iOS devices.

My iOS app setup looks more or less like this:

A few first-party essentials (Mail for email, Calendar for my calendars, Reminders for the occasional reminder, Safari for most of the browsing, etc.)

A bunch of clients for cloud services (Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, Simplenote…)

Messaging and social network apps (essentially Telegram, and then Twitter, Mastodon, and pnut clients)

RSS feed readers, read-later apps, podcast apps

A few utilities (unit converter, dictionaries, white noise apps, etc.)

Document-handling apps (document scanners, PDF readers, etc.)

Photo-taking and photo-editing apps

It looks like a long list, but it isn’t, really. The point is, when I started exploring Google’s Play Store to look for the same apps or Android equivalents of the kind of apps I use most often on iOS, I wasn’t disappointed. On this Android smartphone I was quickly able to come up with an essential app setup that was enough to keep me going even without my iPhone.

Sure, iOS still offers an incredible selection of good-quality third-party apps in several departments (e.g. I have found many more great photo apps on iOS than on Android so far), but overall the quality of Android apps has remarkably increased since the last time I explored its Store.

One thing I’ve noticed, however, is that on Android third-party apps seem to require on average many more permissions than on iOS, and I’ve often wondered why certain apps wanted me to let them access the microphone, camera, my Twitter account or my contacts.

Other than this, no real complaints here. The Play Store keeps being a nice tool to browse for apps. Apps’ pages are informative, and I like that they feature both the most positive and most critical review for an app, for example. App recommendations are plenty, and are divided into a few subcategories which — while seemingly confusing or overlapping at first glance — I suppose they’re generated by different algorithms. I like that the Related to this app section is clearly marked Ads, i.e. that they’re sponsored recommendations.

Final observations

In 2014 I concluded my article as follows:

I found the Android OS to be better than I expected. I was eager to test drive an Android phone because I was worried I was getting too prejudiced in my criticism against Android, so I wanted to experience it more extensively and thoroughly than just playing around for ten minutes with a handset borrowed from a friend. There are many things to like about Android, and its design and UI are definitely getting better version after version. If my iPhone stopped working and I had to resort to a cheaper Android phone for a while, I guess I could switch without too much hassle.

But it must be a current phone, with the latest Android version, certainly not this Xperia with Ice Cream Sandwich. The root of pretty much everything negative about my experience with this specific Android hardware and setup has been this: I’ve often had the feeling I wasn’t dealing with an intuitive, standalone, homogeneous device, but rather with a computer crammed into a smaller interface, having typical ‘computer problems’ to attend to or to watch out for.

And I went on saying that a smartphone owner shouldn’t be constantly babysitting and troubleshooting his or her device and tinker to optimise it as to achieve a consistently smooth experience. On the other front, iOS offered just that: an intuitive interface, a hassle-free user experience, and a superior selection of great-quality apps.

Five years ago, doing a complete platform switch and going from iOS to Android and vice-versa, implied a certain amount of friction that felt less problematic the more tech-savvy you were. The two experiences felt really different and, as far as I’m concerned, Android felt second-class. Even on more powerful handsets, basic stuff like scrolling and animations could end up being jerky and stutter with annoying frequency. The system looked more utilitarian than well-designed to provide an effortless, pleasant user experience.

Today, from my first-hand experience, I can say that this once very noticeable gap is essentially gone. Android has improved on all fronts, while iOS has for the most part rested on its laurels (and in certain areas has actually got buggier than it used to). The overall experience is similar between the two platforms. An increasing number of operations, interactions, and UI behaviours have become barely distinguishable from one another (share sheets, for example, look and work in a similar way). For three months I’ve been carrying both my iPhone 8 and the Mi A2 with me, keeping the iPhone as primary device, but for two weeks I purposefully inverted the roles, and I noticed that — save for a few favourite iOS apps — I could have left the iPhone at home.

Today, iOS and Android look and behave exactly for what they are: the two mainstream platforms. Using one or the other is now a matter of personal preference more than ever, and not a matter of sheer technical superiority. Apple’s hardware still has a bit of an innovative edge (the CPU, the camera system), but Android sort of counterbalances this by offering a variety of hardware choices that have markedly improved in recent years. That is, today you can find very good Android phones at all price ranges from several manufacturers whose offerings have kept getting better and better. On the other side, you’re stuck with what Apple decides to provide on a yearly basis. And if you don’t like certain design choices or certain features, you hold on to your current iPhone until Apple introduces something you like that compels you to upgrade.