The Android 12/13 UI really grinds my gears. Excessive amounts of whitespace, and the notification shade has become “kiddified” - Turning off wifi/mobile data now takes 2 taps, the icons are all ridiculously big and takes up so much screen space, etc.
I personally don’t like phones that are excessively big, because I use it a lot on my commutes. Screen real estate is valuable to me, and while whitespace has its uses, I think Android 12/13 went too far - it might work better on a tablet, but it sucks on a phone. I was really tempted by the Pixel, but ended up getting a Samsung partially because of this (One UI doesn’t have the same bloated-whitespace look).
Am I the only one? Surely Google did user testing… didn’t they?
Android has had enormous amounts of whitespace ever since Android 4, it’s nothing new. First the whitespace was black, then it became white in Android 6, and now it becomes coloured by the background. I think peak whitespace waste was the first release of Material Design, but they fixed a lot of it since.
I like the new design. I did change my settings to put more things on my screen. What’s the point in having a 6" phone if you’re not going to display more crap?
Check out Settings > Display and change the display size to your liking, you can probably fix a lot of the issues that way.
When I was playing around with the Pixel, I already tried making display size the smallest. Notification shade didn’t change, and neither did those damn quick toggles :(
They definitely do for me, I’m on Android 13 (crDroid). Every UI element (except some apps that decided to implement their own display framework) seems to switch correctly.
Maybe they changed it, or the Pixels have a bug? Wouldn’t be the first time Google’s own release is less stable and has fewer features than their competitor’s implementation of the same shell.