Introduction
For years, the Android platform was synonymous with personalization. Want a fully customizable phone? An Android phone would be best suited. First to support widgets, first with live wallpapers, first with lock screen customization, an always-on display option, the list goes on and on. This, combined with the open ecosystem, has earned Android a reputation for being the most robust system for some people.
However, in recent years, slowly but surely, things have started to change. Some of the features that Android was known to pioneer came to the iPhone, while on Android they were left out or abandoned altogether. Apple had made a few customization staples not only available on iOS, but much easier to set up and actually used by millions of people.
Personalization issues
Lock screen widgets not showing up on Android
Lock screen widgets on iOS 16 proved to be very useful and Android has no answer
Lock screen widgets! Why are they so important? Well, it’s simple: they’re not a complete game-changer, but they can be useful for everyone! Not everyone needs to have a personalized home screen with crazy icons, but I imagine almost everyone wants to be able to see the weather on their lock screen.
Lock screen widgets were the big new feature of iOS 16, unveiled almost six months ago and launched in October. Since then, we’ve only heard radio silence from Google and Android phone makers. Pixel phones do not support lock screen widgets at all.
An exception here is Samsung, which quickly rolled out what looks like a bad copy of iOS 16 a few months after its release. Theoretically, Samsung supports lock screen widgets. Realistically, even to see these widgets you have to tap the clock, which defeats the purpose of having them in the first place. The whole idea of lock screen widgets is that they are effortless, lift your phone to see the widgets, put it back up, no need to interact with it.
Now, of course, Android still has some customization perks! For starters, you can freely move the icons around on your home screen! Apple has stubbornly refused to enable such an option for its iPhones, and it looks frustratingly upside down.
And yes, you can still get very cool looks on Android that you can’t get on iPhone. On Android it’s easy to download a custom launcher, change the icon pack, add a few fancy widgets and you get a unique look that can be completely different from the default one, while iOS is still a bit limited in this regard (but now you can easily change icons and completely transform the look of your iPhone with just an app and a few clicks).
The big problem with notifications
Xiaomi, OnePlus and others limit notifications so you can never be sure you’ll receive them in time
(Image Credit – ArsTechnica, Ron Amadeo) Many Android phone makers are aggressively killing background apps
The other area where I think the Android platform has failed to protect its users from bad system behavior is in notifications.
Notifications on Android are still the Wild Wild West to this day! Will your Android phone provide timely notifications? If you have a Google Pixel, the answer is yes. If you have another phone, the answer ranges from “it depends” to “how on earth do I fix this?”
The situation is completely out of control and phone makers like Xiaomi and OnePlus are just two of the biggest companies failing. “Don’t Kill My App” test. These companies have aggressive measures in place that kill apps running in the background, which means you don’t get real-time notifications from these apps, only when you unlock your phone. This makes it easy to miss an important message or email.
There are tools in the interface of some of these phones to “to block” apps, but these tools don’t seem to actually work.
Android Universal Search
It’s broken at its best and doesn’t exist at all at its worst
The universal search feature on Android is something you’d think a search company would get.
Yet right now, system search on Android isn’t just messy, it’s confusing.
First of all, do Android phones even have universal search? Most Android phones have some form of Google search built into them. Swipe in from the bottom right or left edge on most Android phones and the Google Assistant starts. A longer swipe on some phones brings up a search screen. Is this a universal search? No, it’s just a Google search.
Then you have a search bar in the app drawer. Is this a universal search? On some phones like Samsung Galaxy devices it is possible but on others like Xiaomi phones it is not.
This makes simple searches much more difficult on Android. On an iPhone, I can easily type “Keyboard” and at the third letter a suggestion to jump directly to keyboard settings appears, which is exactly the expected behavior. A search for the term “keyboard” even in the settings app returns multiple results with confusing names that are hard to digest even for a smartphone veteran like me.
The path to follow
While all of these elements of the Android ecosystem aren’t deal-breakers on their own, together they show how Google has neglected to improve important sections of its platform. This has become even more apparent as Apple adds long-missing features and fills in the gaps.
Ultimately, my hope with this article is that it’s a small nudge towards a better future for Android. Hopefully Android 14 will introduce something much more substantial than the usual security patches.
