So I switched to a pixel 7 from an iphone 10 xs a few months back, and I’ve absolutely loved it in comparison to the locked down nature of an iphone. So I think to look up material you on YouTube for fun, and decide to read the comments and found that people hated it. Quick googling led to me to find two reddit threads and an article talking about how much they hated it. Personally, I don’t understand the hate, as you can simply choose to have the color be a dullish blue manually.
Idk, it might just be that I haven’t been using android long to care about the fact that material you is being forced.
Flat is bad, actually.
Windows XP, original iPhone, Winamp3 candy-style buttons were more discoverable, more distinct at a glance, and more usable. Even when they were completely stupid Cruelty Squad geegaws like any non-square Winamp3 skin. (Zoomers: you missed out on the dumbest sci-fi bullshit interfaces.)
Windows 95 had better design language. Every window element had clear hierarchy. They had relief shading and instant on-click visual responsiveness in eight megabytes of RAM.
What everyone’s going back to is some Windows 3.1 nonsense, or Mac OS right before they fired Steve Jobs. Flat squircles with literal black-and-white contrast or none at all. Clickability sort of vaguely implied. Toggles failing to indicate which side is “off” - which are new, but stupid.
Even ugly Flash games gave things gradients.
Older Gen Z (98-2003) I believe would remember the terrible UX sci-fi themes, at least I do.
Yeah a lot of older things had more depth to them, but I still feel like frutiger aero and other retro design languages simply wouldn’t work today across all the different screen sizes that exist.
Why.
Mostly variable screen size and resolution.
Google created a system called DP (not DPI, or PPI), or density-independent pixels.
To keep it very short: The gist is that bigger resolution on the same screen size just allows better clarity, but doesn’t change the size of elements in relation to the physical world. So a button would have the same real-world size on a 720p device or a 1080p one (assuming the screen size is the same), which is desired because with phones, the screen is the thing you use to control the device. App devs use DPs as the target, not a resolution itself, the system can handle how things are actually displayed.
This is fine for an interface that uses color as the way to differentiate elements, but it gets really weird when you use something less flat. Like, imagine you are using gradient and shadows to separate UI elements from each other, but you want it to have the same real world size, like Android. On some devices, the actual pixel size of the gradient can be too small to actually render properly so it looks blocky, or the pixel size is too large, and it looks weirdly over smooth.
Gradients can also scale.
Everything can scale.
The aesthetic we’re talking about was for 17" screens at 1024x768. Your phone will look fine.
Gradients can scale, but if you are trying to use a big fancy gradient effect and the actual pixel size is, like, 1 pixel, then you lose all those effects and it looks weird. You can kinda see something similar with Apps icons losing visible detail and looking weird if they are too detailed.
IIRC Android actually has the minimum width/height of 360 DP, which is basically 360 pixels (or it was 320?)
Oh wow, so a one-DP drop shadow scaled to 4K would be six whole pixels.
This is ridiculous. No kidding fewer pixels means less detail. That makes a screen full of identical flat shapes worse.
The aforementioned original iPhone was 480x320. The big dumb candy icons looked fine.
If, and only if, the screen size was the same. And even then it would be 10 pixels.
And if the screen was larger it would be… less?
I remain devoid of shits to give.