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The reason given is:
Specifically, Google wanted to eliminate the button that lets you view all your open apps, making it easier to see your apps with a swipe.
But the underlying reason for wanting to do it comes from this quote from Dave Burke, Google's VP of engineering for Android
"Android have those three buttons at the bottom: Home, back and something else," Burke said. "And it's, it's a little too much, a little too complicated. I think of it as like walking into a room with three doors and it's like, 'which door do I go in?'"
My response to Burke would be: Well, Dave, when you walk into the room, and there's three doors, and one of them is labeled "bedroom", one of them is labeled "kitchen", and one of them is labeled "bathroom"; it's pretty easy to decide whether you're tired, hungry, or need to take a leak - so maybe you should look at having standards for labeling things.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @08:16AM (2 children)
I've heard the arguments ("can't read English") and I don't give a damn. Google is too lazy to translate and too politically correct to just use the World's most standard language.
Those pictograms are a language that nobody is born into. They might as well be Esperanto or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. They mean nothing to me. They are so damn generic and meaningless that I always forget what they are supposed to do.
So yes Dave Burke, in a way they are too complicated... but only because you refused to use a language I can read. Next time, try plain English.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @02:28PM
but "insightful" is not appropriate.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Tuesday May 15 2018, @02:55PM
It's called Recents [android.com]. Internally it was called Activities during development but the calendar app people wanted that name. Then they switched to tasks but the business Notes devs fought and won that one. They couldn't use Apps since people thought that's the list of installed applications. They considered Background but some of the entries aren't actually running. Finally they decided on History but the browser people had them change it to Recents since people kept asking why Chrome's tabs aren't showing in the History...
The real problem is the confusion over the name reflects how no one actually knows what it does: It lists recently run apps. But what swiping apps off actually does? It doesn't signal kill -9. It could signal suspend to RAM, cache the heap, cache the assets but kill the process, cache the process and clear the assets, close the client and start the daemon, disconnect from the windowing system but keep running in background (client to service transition without losing assets) or some combination of the above. And that doesn't even begin to describe all the weird stuff going on with the threading over high and lower performance cores, sleep states or emmc vs sdcard storage being automatically moved around. Oh, and as schedulers and SoCs change, the behavior changes as well. e.g. Some low cost Mediatek SoCs and Samsung SoCs made anything getting swiped off get killed almost immediately without suspension unless whitelisted manually over memory and compute constrained / for better UI responsiveness despite Google telling them not to.
IMHO, anything short of a poop emoji won't begin to describe what a shit salad this Recents is.
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