So I switched to a pixel 7 from an iphone 10 xs a few months back, and I’ve absolutely loved it in comparison to the locked down nature of an iphone. So I think to look up material you on YouTube for fun, and decide to read the comments and found that people hated it. Quick googling led to me to find two reddit threads and an article talking about how much they hated it. Personally, I don’t understand the hate, as you can simply choose to have the color be a dullish blue manually.
Idk, it might just be that I haven’t been using android long to care about the fact that material you is being forced.
I’m talking about Material You’s color pallet feature. It identifies colors from your home screen background and sets that as the color scheme for your entire phone.
This feature got tweaked in Android 14. The algorithm was changed, and the colors that it automatically detects are different. This is very disorienting, and some things just don’t look good now. For example, you can tell if you are sending RCS or SMS messages in the Google Messenger app by the color the text bubbles are. But now they are the same color. And in order the change that, I have to select a different color pallet, which will change all the colors on my whole phone again.
My questions are:
Why does this feature exist? Why can’t I just select the colors I like instead of forcing an algorithm to select the colors for me?
Why did they tweak the algorithm? Now the colors that I got used to are different and there’s nothing I can do to get them back.
Why change things at all? Just let our UI stay constant instead of changing it all the time. It’s hard to use our phones when the UI changes every year. What benefit is there to changing the way our phones look?
Having a cohesive color scheme that matches one’s wallpaper is aesthetically pleasing. If you would like to manually select a color, you already can in the color sections select a color. If you would like more control, I suppose there is Repainter.
Not aware of this happening when I was on Android 14? I assume it was for an improvement?
Because it’s an improvement? Why not totally stop upgrading Android?
I can set that myself if I want that. Let me be in control of my own device
Visual changes are by subjective, so there’s no such thing as an “improvement”. I would say reverting it to the previous UI is an “improvement”. I’m not talking about not upgrading Android. I’m not talking about not adding new features. I am specifically talking about changing the UI. Why remove buttons and replace them with swipes? Why change colors? Why rearrange the settings? All it does is make it harder to use the device for people who are used to having it a certain way.