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Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

The poor design described in the article is really bad.

But

> Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on the web.

This is exactly how I feel when I pick an Android phone (even with stock Android). Finding apps and launching them quickly seems like an art to learn. And don’t even get me started on how settings are organized. So I conclude that both platforms are a matter of getting used to and learning how to use them, since both makers have crammed a lot more on to smaller screens than can be intuitively deduced.

Funnily enough, among all the Android users I’ve seen, everyone has a habit of force killing their apps every time they close it! I wonder how they learned that and why they even do it (I can understand killing rogue apps or buggy apps).

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I use both and am now a current iPhone user. Certain things on iPhone (like muting all notifications with "Do Not Disturb" are much more unintuitive on the iPhone)

I’m genuinely curious, how do you turn on Do Not Disturb in Android? On iOS, you swipe the top right corner to open the control panel and then tap the moon icon for enabling Do Not Disturb. I won’t argue that magically knowing the control panel is in the top right corner or that moon == Do Not Disturb is intuitive, but I am curious how android does it that is significantly better?

It's the same on android

You can enter it from volume control as well as control panel

I think it's very device dependent sincem ost OEMs ship some kind of non-native shit UI on top, but my Android phone has a slider (hardware) on the side of the phone like an iPhone to toggle between this.

Android 9/10: Pull from the top to open your "tray" where you can turn on/off things like wifi, flashlight, airplane mode, do not disturb, etc. You can re-order and enable/disable those items too, I forget what it looks like stock but mine is right at the top.

While not playing media, the volume buttons control ringer volume. If you turn the volume all the way down and then press the volume button one more time it enabled Do Not Disturb. When you press the volume button again at any time, the volume indicator drops down from the top to show it is in Do Not Disturb. You can cancel Do Not Disturb by pressing the volume up button one more time or pressing the "Turn Off Now" link in the menu that shows the Do Not Disturb setting.

You can also Settings > Sound > Do not Disturb where you can change automatic settings, allow priority notifications which break through, etc.

> Finding apps and launching them quickly seems like an art to learn.

Swipe up from home screen, the launcher + search bar appears.

It is somewhat annoying that none of the primary buttons now brings up the launcher, but that change happened long ago. :/ IIRC pressing the home button while on the home screen would make the launcher appear. Since it is Android there is probably a utility to add that back.

Of course users can also arrange apps on their home screen however they want and ignore the launcher altogether.

> Funnily enough, among all the Android users I’ve seen, everyone has a habit of force killing their apps every time they close it!

I haven't witnessed this, but anecdotes are useless! I've had to show iOS users how to force kill misbehaving apps. Back in the days of 1 button knowing the right sequence of taps / holds to activate any of the button's many features was, well, the exact opposite of intuitive. Not that the modern practice of various arbitrary swipes around the screen to do stuff is much better.

On stock Android, one button is switch task, one button is go home, one button is go back. Three of the most common things users want to do, all right there.

A quick access menu + notifications can be pulled down from the top. Pull down once to get notifications and common shortcuts (Wi-Fi, flashlight, rotate, Do Not disturb, shortcut to settings), pull down again to get less commonly used options (Airplane Mode, BT Toggle, manual brightness adjustment)

Media playback stuff is done in the same UI as notifications, media playback apps pin a card to the top of the notifications list. No separate UI to learn, everything is in one place.

Don't get me wrong, Android used to be terrible. It was slow, buggy, and background apps had free rein to thrash the system to the point of it being unusable. But now days it is pretty good.

Also I can set my own animated wallpapers, so that is pretty nifty.

(But seriously, Windows Phone 7, most discoverable UI ever!)

>(But seriously, Windows Phone 7, most discoverable UI ever!)

Was that the one with all the floating "tiles" on the screen? IIRC it was influenced by the Zune UX. I remember when my father purchased a Windows phone as his first smartphone. It had already been announced they'd stop supporting them, but the Verizon guy didn't tell him that. I actually rather liked the UX and OS; the thing about Android's "desktop" that I dislike is its "pagination" - i.e. you can fit 12 icons on one page, and have to flip through them. So I have my calendar on one page, 8 icons or so there, my work email on one, my personal email on the next. I can navigate it quite quickly, but compared to the Windows tiles it seems antiquated for some reason.

Yup, that was Windows Phone.

Everything was laid out so that further content was partially clipped. It was awesome. The OS was butter smooth and great on battery life.

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