I’ve been in Camp Android for a number of years now, having broken free from the corporate chains of my BlackBerry back in 2011. But while I’m currently enjoying my HTC One M8 as my primary phone, I get to review other smartphones pretty much every other week, most of them being Android ones.
And here’s where things get a bit sticky for me. There are so many different smartphone manufacturers with Android handsets on the market that they’re all trying to differentiate themselves from each other. Which isn’t technically a bad thing, but there are some things that I’ve noticed that are really starting to annoy me.
So here are five annoying things that Android smartphone manufacturers need to stop doing:
I get it. You don’t like the clean, minimalist looks of stock Android, so you want to jazz things up a bit with fancier icons, sparkling wallpaper, and tone-deaf ringtones. But please stop making UIs that are so heavy with transitions and special effects that it literally becomes a chore to use your phone. On one phone I recently reviewed, the unlock screen could also be used to bring up a shortcut to most used apps and settings. While a great idea on paper, in reality it was terrible because almost every time I wanted to unlock the screen, it launched a program shortcut instead. There’s no harm in making your software look prettier than the competition, but just don’t go into overdrive with the ‘handy’ tweaks that end up ruining the user experience.
One of the things I hate is clutter, and digital clutter is no different. I have an iPad and iPod, and I’ve got everything bunched up into folders to that I only have access to which apps I really use. On Android it’s become a trend to do away with the default App drawer and instead litter every single app icon across five to seven phone screens. Not fun at all to swipe through, and even harder to then stuff them all into folders. Please, just keep the default app drawer and we can all get on with our lives.
Just stop. Talking to your phone to take a photo, or waving your hand, or giving a thumbs-up, or a high-five…they all just make you look like an idiot. One brilliant smartphone I checked out had an option to ‘hover’ your hand a few centimeters from the screen to scroll through apps – because the few extra centimeters it would take to physically touch the screen are just *so* daunting.
Another bizarre trend – can we all just agree that the charging port belongs at the bottom of the phone? Not at the top. Not at the side. At the bottom. End of discussion.
We get that you want to showcase some super-awesome apps to run on your super-awesome phone, but that’s what the Google Play store is for. Why not just dump your apps in a separate section of the Play store? Why on earth would you want to create a totally independent app store, which in addition to having maybe fewer than fifteen apps on it, also requires the user to sign up with a separate account? Just no.
By Nick Rego
