I miss KitKat!

BionicRasher

I've been using Android Lollipop for a few days, I miss KitKat!
The new interface is hideous, seems like a bad copy of iOS and the ugly TouchWiz, so damn colourful and white with ugly animations, not minimalist and elegant at all. The Dialer is like something for a 12yr old. The screen no longer seems to respond to the proximity sensor and when I remove the phone from my ear after a call I have to push the power button to get the screen to turn on to end a call. This is basic stuff Google.
I hate the new recent apps "overview", it is dog ugly …. takes more time now just swiping away the apps because this new implementation only shows us two or almost three recent apps and the rest are hidden behind. The new notifications pull down is not intuitive at all. The ‘Clear All’ button is at the bottom of the notifications and is hard to see and reach if you have a lot of notifications.
Lock screen notifications – not well implemented at all (have a look at ACDisplay in the Play Store 100% better than this Lollipop version)
As for how you access settings – crazy. Its now a double pull down and then touch the tiny cog wheel at the top of the screen – not easy at all and takes 3 actions.
On screen buttons - A sideways triangle, a Circle and a hollow Square. Yuck!! What was wrong with the VERY INTUITIVE Back Arrow, Home icon and the Stacked Cards
The whole Silent / Mute notifications junk - Who thinks of these things? Its now so complicated that its taken me 3 days to even get Gmail notifications working as they should. Before this they just worked now it takes about 50 clicks to get it set up correctly!! The long press the power button for Airplane mode and Silent, vibrate, or Sound was ingenious and worked flawlessly. How do I set my alarm clock and mute all other notifications or put the phone on silent? Answer --- I can't (well maybe I can but it means clicking about 100 other things to accomplish it.)

Oh Google – you have messed with a very intuitive OS that was fast becoming a beast of a system to allow me to do almost anything with a smartphone. Now you have just made it pretty (for 12yr olds) and messed with it for the sake of messing with it. I really don’t see any major improvements from KitKat other than Fancy Dan animations and the few decent things like multiple user accounts. Maybe it runs better under the hood but it still seems to lag a lot more than KitKat.

Hopefully incremental updates will fix a few issues ASAP but it looks like the overall change in making it look and behave like iOS is going to be what we are stuck with. Maybe it’s time to reinstall KitKat on my devices.

homer911

Haven't upgraded yet and now I'm thinking I shouldn't

Thanks for the insight

Ste-

You could always root and unlock the phone and isntall Kitkat again, or isntall multirom and install both once space on the phone allows.

murphaph

CM11 has most of the nifty features (apart from multi user accounts) of Lollipop whilst still looking and feeling like KitKat. I'm also not convinced I'll upgrade (permanently) to CM12 (Which will be Lollipop based) to be honest. Looking at it I think I prefer the existing UI.

nedd

BionicRasher wrote: »

How do I set my alarm clock and mute all other notifications or put the phone on silent? Answer --- I can't (well maybe I can but it means clicking about 100 other things to accomplish it.)

you asked too many questions to answer but I can answer this one.

press the volume down button, you will see the volume bar and "None" "Priority" and "All".

None will completely mute your phone and not even alarms will sound, Priority will mute calls, texts and notifications but leave alarms (you can configure other Priority notifications like let calls from your Mammy through) and All will unmute everything.

Lollipop is different and is taking a bit of getting used to but I like it. I am using CM12 on my HTC One and it is a little buggy which is annoying but I am not considering going back.

D'Peoples Voice

BionicRasher wrote: »

The new interface is hideous, seems like a bad copy of iOS and the ugly TouchWiz,

:eek: That bad!
The difficulty I had on Touchwiz trying to change the mobile network on someone's Samsung Galaxy S4 from 3G back to 2G, or the difficulty I had trying to find the MAC wifi address on an iOS 5S - thinking it would be in the same menu as other wi-fi settings .... only to discover it was in ONE of the last places I would look.

I've a Moto X and love the interface, almost everything is so intuitive.
The thought of losing that interface for a Touchwiz or iOS lookalike.....:o

BionicRasher

nedd wrote: »

None will completely mute your phone and not even alarms will sound.

That's what I mean - I can't set my phone to silent and have an alarm ring the next morning with one click. I can set priority but I need to do about 10 clicks to get it working correctly to set it to silent and allow calls from family through. is my 74 yr old mother going to be able to figure all this out? I doubt it.

in KitKat I had an app that set the phone to silent at 11pm at night and allowed callers that were either in my family group or people that rang twice in quick succession to come through. This ain't working now in Lollipop (maybe the dev will get it working and that would resolve my issues but this should be built in to the OS)
In Kitkat you could press the power button - set the phone to silent and voila the alarm would wake me in the morning

Skylinehead

BionicRasher wrote: »

As for how you access settings – crazy. Its now a double pull down and then touch the tiny cog wheel at the top of the screen – not easy at all and takes 3 actions.

For this one, what was the difference with Kitkat? Pull down -> switch to quick settings -> Settings. 3 actions. Either way you can double swipe to make it quicker, or better again just put Settings on your homepage or access it through apps.

gzoladz

I love it. I installed on my n10 and havent had a randoom reboot, performance is better and it fixed some battery issues.

UI is not great, but I have Nova that looks after that.


Pleased with it tbh.

BionicRasher

Skylinehead wrote: »

For this one, what was the difference with Kitkat? Pull down -> switch to quick settings -> Settings. 3 actions. Either way you can double swipe to make it quicker, or better again just put Settings on your homepage or access it through apps.

Ya 3 actions on KitKat also but 1 swipe 2 clicks is much more intuitive than the new 2 swipes 1 click on a tiny icon in the top of the screen. Maybe I am being picky but it's just not as easy. Try it out. Two swipes just doesn't seem to flow nicely. Its also very hard to do a 2 finger swipe while holding the phone with 1 hand!

Francie Barrett

I think Lollipop is a mess. Lots of stuff that I was used to has been changed for no good reason and stuff that worked great now doesn't work (camera and notifications are two examples). Not only that, but my Nexus 7 is barely usable because of the update. Whole experience has put me right off Android.

BionicRasher

The notification shade is not great either. If you have a lot of notifications you need to scroll right to the bottom to access the clear all button. I frequently have a screen full of notifications that I used to be able to clear with one click. This is no longer possible.

I just feel the whole flow and ease of use has gone backwards and they have spent too much time on the material design which really does very little for the OS.

Mantis Toboggan

The camera is some mess.

TerrorFirmer

It's like they went to pains to change stuff for the sake of it. Replacing the three buttons? The whole sound notifications as well - this annoys me the most of all, such a pain in the ****ing arse.

I have liked each Android update in general, but I hate this one.

kindalen

No gallery anymore is a pain, the tabs on kitkat gone, so everytime you use any apps it opens a tab.
Annoying and sloppy overall from google.

Battery does seem to last longer though.

Hmmmm... I can't wait for HTC to roll out lollipop. Then I can rant about how I loved kitkat. Am sure it just takes a bit of getting used to.

Mc Love

Is lollipop finished - thought it was still in dev

irishchris

Flashed lollipop to my OnePlus one today and really impressed. Notification screen is excellent as is the Google now screen improvements. The double pull down on notification bar for settings is better for bigger phones using one finger compared to kitkat. Very very impressed so far.

BionicRasher

More issues.
Bluetooth connectivity is appalling. Keeps dropping connection with car unit, Bluetooth speaker also.
Voicemail icon is not being displayed on the notification shade when I have voicemail
Random app crashes
Camera is a bit hit and miss
Screen gets garbled at times too. Think of the old snow on your telly 10 years ago at 4am when you wake up on the couch!

Really annoyed at the whole silent mode junk. Its hard to just change volume control unless you click through the priority, none all etc. Needs to be sorted on the next update.

The Now Launcher is really not that nice at all. Very white and almost childish. Who thought that the colour teal was a good idea?

irishchris

BionicRasher wrote: »

More issues.
Bluetooth connectivity is appalling. Keeps dropping connection with car unit, Bluetooth speaker also.
Voicemail icon is not being displayed on the notification shade when I have voicemail
Random app crashes
Camera is a bit hit and miss
Screen gets garbled at times too. Think of the old snow on your telly 10 years ago at 4am when you wake up on the couch!

Really annoyed at the whole silent mode junk. Its hard to just change volume control unless you click through the priority, none all etc. Needs to be sorted on the next update.

The Now Launcher is really not that nice at all. Very white and almost childish. Who thought that the colour teal was a good idea?

Agree with the fact that voicemail notification does not show but we have to remember we are dealing with the very early days of lollipop here and no doubt will be ironed out with next incremental update.
I personally like the new look of Google now. Bit of color does no harm. Attached a screenshot of it for others to decide. Tried to add in the new sound bars too in the screenshot

BionicRasher

irishchris wrote: »

Agree with the fact that voicemail notification does not show but we have to remember we are dealing with the very early days of lollipop here and no doubt will be ironed out with next incremental update.
I personally like the new look of Google now. Bit of color does no harm. Attached a screenshot of it for others to decide. Tried to add in the new sound bars too in the screenshot

Agree that the Google Now page is nicer than before but the whole Now Launcher (compared to the stock launcher) is a bit cat malojian !!
The app drawer is white and stark. The pop ups and notifications are amature looking compared to KitKat. Compare the pop up that shows when you click on a link for example and it asks you what app to use as default. KitKat just seemed much more mature where as Lollipop seems to be more about colour and this material design and less about function and flow. Its annoying to have to scroll all the way to the bottom of a long list of notifications to locate the 'Clear All' button. its just not well thought out compared to the flow of KitKat and previous versions of Android.
I realise that its early days but this was soak tested for a good few weeks and simple Bluetooth and Voicemail issues should be ironed out before general release.

The dialer is not great at all. All the options (speaker, mute, open dial pad etc) are now at the top of the screen and the end call is at the bottom. If you have a larger phone or are holding it in one hand its hard to access the on screen options

Anyway I suppose it will take some getting used to but so far not impressed.

irishchris

BionicRasher wrote: »

Agree that the Google Now page is nicer than before but the whole Now Launcher (compared to the stock launcher) is a bit cat malojian !!
The app drawer is white and stark. The pop ups and notifications are amature looking compared to KitKat. Compare the pop up that shows when you click on a link for example and it asks you what app to use as default. KitKat just seemed much more mature where as Lollipop seems to be more about colour and this material design and less about function and flow. Its annoying to have to scroll all the way to the bottom of a long list of notifications to locate the 'Clear All' button. its just not well thought out compared to the flow of KitKat and previous versions of Android.
I realise that its early days but this was soak tested for a good few weeks and simple Bluetooth and Voicemail issues should be ironed out before general release.

The dialer is not great at all. All the options (speaker, mute, open dial pad etc) are now at the top of the screen and the end call is at the bottom. If you have a larger phone or are holding it in one hand its hard to access the on screen options

Anyway I suppose it will take some getting used to but so far not impressed.

Actually agree with you totally on the app drawer which for me is the only big letdown. It doesn't look right at all. Only 24 hours into it here so may be more annoyances with it but so far enjoying the experience

irishchris

I know most will find it pointless but thought it was a fun idea for android to add it in. Press settings>about phone>>tap android version 5 times>tap lollipop 5 times then keep your finger pressed on the lolipop and SURPRISE

Technophobe

irishchris wrote: »

I know most will find it pointless but thought it was a fun idea for android to add it in. Press settings>about phone>>tap android version 5 times>tap lollipop 5 times then keep your finger pressed on the lolipop and SURPRISE

If you tap the build number in the same manner, you get a message saying you are x steps away from being a developer...what is that all about?

Professey Chin

Technophobe wrote: »

If you tap the build number in the same manner, you get a message saying you are x steps away from being a developer...what is that all about?

Developer Options menu for debugging etc
Used to be just a checkbox but they hid it in one of the Jelly Bean builds

BionicRasher

irishchris wrote: »

I know most will find it pointless but thought it was a fun idea for android to add it in. Press settings>about phone>>tap android version 5 times>tap lollipop 5 times then keep your finger pressed on the lolipop and SURPRISE

Ya there has been Easter Egg Surprises since Android 2.3. They have ranged from Android mascot surrounded by a pack of zombies to Jelly Beans bouncing around the screen and now this surprise.

irishchris

BionicRasher wrote: »

Ya there has been Easter Egg Surprises since Android 2.3. They have ranged from Android mascot surrounded by a pack of zombies to Jelly Beans bouncing around the screen and now this surprise.

Think this is my favourite,although very frustrating too :-)

MarkR

Just downgrading from lollipop to cm11 nightlies on my nexus 7 2012. Lollipop was terrible on it.

BionicRasher

Lock screen not working now. Seems that the smart lock/trusted places won't turn off after I set up a Bluetooth headset to be trusted.
Phone not looking for sim card unlock code after reboot. Tried 2 factory resets and still the same issues.
Vibration on keyboard is intermittent at best.
Seems these are commonish issues.

Time to downgrade to kitkat I think. Some more googling required as not sure how to downgrade a Nexus 4

BionicRasher

While I am looking for the installation process of downgrading to kitkat I have found another annoying feature of Lollipop.
Even though I have Merge Tabs and Apps set to off the chrome tabs I was browsing yesterday for example are still showing up in my recent apps

So I have 2 tabs open in chrome but there are at least 6 still showing up in the stack of recent stuff. A reboot also no longer clears out the recent apps

I see that Lollipop 5.01 is incoming so maybe a lot of the issues will be sorted.
Just seems that there are more issues with this than past Android updates. They really seem to have spent most of the time on this Material Design and the basics were overlooked

jozi

Nexus roottoolkit by wugfresh will let you downgrade

MarkR

I actually had trouble with the roottoolkit, trying to go back to stock 4.4.2. Went for CM in the end with the roottoolkit, and was great.

peckerhead

Interesting poll here (scroll down for the comments). Seems to be good news for Nexus 4 & 5, not so great for 7...

Think I'm gonna wait for 5.1, to be honest... unless anyone else here with a 1st Generation Moto G can tell me it works OK on theirs?

Discodog

I was really cautious about whether to update. The update went superbly will all my widgets, settings etc being retained. I have had no problems with Lollipop & I like it. My Nexus 5 feels faster & I wouldn't go back to Kitkat.