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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 darkfeline on Tuesday May 15 2018, @08:10PM (3 children)
SN is supposed to be about the comments, yet the comments here are shit:
1. Android sucks!
2. Fuck icons!
3. Stop changing the UI!
4. Obligatory +5 Funny joke
Even the article is kind of bullshit, and no one cares about what the VP says, except CNet apparently.
So let's talk about the change itself, shall we?
Android currently has three software buttons almost always present at the bottom of the screen: back, home, and recents. These are labeled with the icons, respectively: triangle pointing left, circle, square.
The home button brings you to the home screen, which presents icons for app you can use to launch or switch back to an app. The recents button brings up a screen that lets you switch to a recently used app, in LIFO order. On the home screen, you can swipe up to access all of the installed apps (the home screen itself only shows apps that you have arranged there; presumably the apps that you use often). The all apps screen also contains a row at the top of the five or so apps that you would most likely want to access, based on machine learning AI magic. It turns out that these predicted apps are accurate something like ~80% of the time.
What this change does is remove the recents button and adds the ability to swipe up on any screen, not just the home screen, to access a new screen. This new screen is basically the recents screen with the five predicted apps at the bottom, and some obligatory UI aesthetics changes (for example, the recent apps are presented in a horizontal list rather than vertical). The idea is that the recent apps combined with the predicted apps satisfies almost all use cases, saving you from having to rendezvous to the home screen.
If you read through this, you realize that nothing really was removed. Some new "expert" features were added which aren't really worth mentioning, the recents button was changed to a gesture, and the UI was tweaked to keep the UI people employed, and that's about it. Nothing to see here folks.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @08:32PM (1 child)
Now that's what I call a comment!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @08:41PM
That too was a comment. I have stated it therefore it is!
(Score: 1) by xhedit on Tuesday May 15 2018, @10:24PM
And here's the inevitable metacomment complaining about comments.
Shocker, people are tired of google changing shit for no reason. I like the recents setup and Android has gotten more and more unusuable after peaking in usability sometime in the 4.x or 5.x days.