Once you experienced it, it's hard to go back to the app grid.Apple's iOS might be user-friendly, but it's a bit restrictive when it comes to personalization, so you can really only change the look of the home screen by either jailbreaking or exploiting glitches. It works marvels and I can't get enough of how good it looks.Īnd in general, I wish more launchers had fastscroller as overlay option, so that you can get to any app via tapping/flicking onto a letter in a single tap/swipe. UPD: it also recently got client-side implementation of monet and built-in contextual variable icons, which works even on devices that don't have it as a part of AOSP. UX on foldable device is unmatched, especially after it added support for side-to-side widgets and widget stacking.Īnother slight annoyance is that in modern android quickstep is no longer standard part of AOSP, and depends on how OEM implemented it, which means that on many devices (including mine mix fold 2) you either lose access to gesture navigation in order to use Niagara(I get around it by using Infinite Gestures + OMS overlay to hide the navbar) or get broken animations when swapping between apps and going home. The only thing I miss still is not being able to open drawer by swiping up (though fastscroll on letters is good enough, but kinda sucks that it only handles latin letters there, cuz like 3rd of my apps are in Cyrillic and thus stuck at the first category). Absolutely loving it and it keeps getting better year over year. I've been using Niagara since its first days. What matters is having the option to do so for those usages which make a meaningful difference to me. Of course, I don't customize every use case. This is another reason when it comes to devices I'll use constantly, I consciously choose those I can significantly customize and adapt (eg Android, Windows, Linux, Firefox, etc). Then there there is the current UX design obsession with "simplifying" interfaces by removing features, reducing density and increasing the remaining spacing and typography sizes to the point of, IMHO, insanity. While people can force themselves to adapt across this divide, it will always be uncomfortable and slower. I think this is more than just a preference or learned behavior, it's an innate trait like handedness. However, my brain expects stuff to be in the same place it was last time and it throws me when things keep moving around. She can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want that. She prefers contextually adaptive "smart" interfaces that change to list the most likely options first. For example, I'm highly spatial vs my wife who's very sequential. But the reality is people have different innate preferences about some kinds of usage modes and defaults. Some people argue all these things should just be built-in to phones and "it's a bug" the designers didn't just set-up everything "correctly" in the first place. Customizing automatic screen rotation to be per app, by time of day and even by location is another one of those seemingly little things that's just so nice in constant daily usage. I use my phone a lot for reading e-books, controlling home automation, photography and other use cases where I'm switching between portrait and landscape modes frequently. This uses the phone's accelerometer and, surprisingly, works perfectly with no false positives. I've also added a custom contextual action to double-tapping the back of my phone that I use constantly. I find these kinds of customizations do meaningfully improve usage efficiency and utility, making a real difference on devices I use constantly.įor instance, taking control of my phone's three physical buttons with custom double-press and long-press actions that are contextual is so useful I can't imagine using a phone without it. Another key area is speeding up navigation by hiding unused things and increasing legibility with better UI density and typography. However interface customization can go far beyond aesthetic visuals to adding functions, default behaviors and time-saving shortcuts, improving interface hierarchy and surfacing frequently used options. That may be true for purely decorative skinning for some people (although personally I enjoy using interfaces more when they have excellent visual design, iconography, layout and consistency).
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