why does everyone hate material you?

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.

Kusimulkku,

I think it looks ugly. It selects the shitties colours possible. That’s why I hate it. Also used to be that I couldn’t turn the damn thing off.

netchami,

So I switched to a pixel 7 from an iphone 10 xs a few months back

Pixels are great, and they become even better when you install GrapheneOS. It’s super easy and maybe takes 20 minutes, but it substantially improves your privacy and security. I switched from an iPhone to a Pixel running GrapheneOS and I don’t want to ever go back, the experience on Graphene has been great.

Flax_vert,

I love it. All of my apps are all the same theme and it’s wonderful. But I wish I could manually set each colour. Even if it’s a setting in dev options.

tomo,

my bigger issue is that im not big on material 3 tbh
now if they did all the color themeing stuff on material 2 id be more into it
material 3 is way too rounded and overly simplified for my liking

tomo,

AND everything feels so big and clunky which i realized after reading another comment that brought that up
yeah i dont think material you is the issue for me as much as the underlying theme with material 3

danielfgom,
@danielfgom@lemmy.world avatar

I think it’s great. One of the best things that have come to Android in a while. Everytime you change the wallpaper all your apps and OS look new!

It’s at the point where if the app doesn’t have material you I won’t install it.

Flax_vert,

I have some modded apps to apply material you lmao

kzhe,

I love it. So much.

BearOfaTime,

Because it’s awful. Minimalism that hides info, while making things harder to see/parse.

randromeda,

You can’t have information dense and minimalist at the same time.

limerod,

Does everyone, now? Personally, I love it. I use Niagara and Smart launcher 6. The recent update of the niagara launcher made it even more consistent with icons. I love how the colors match on most of my apps.

KrummsHairyBalls,

I love it. I just wish we were allowed to manually pick the 3 colours.

aluminium,

I personally can’t stand ultra minimalists UIs anymore. I want to go back to iOS6 or Windows Aero like designs.

creation7758,

As a mostly oled black person, I don’t like material you aesthetic because of how not minimalistic it is. Different tastes I suppose

Nath,
@Nath@aussie.zone avatar

The neat thing about Android is you have a choice. If you don’t like the launcher your phone came with, there are plenty of alternatives that you can use for free from the app store.

I recommend trying alternatives and seeing whether you like any of the others better. If you don’t, you can go back.

aluminium,

Yes but there are also many parts of the System that can’t be touched. The lockscreen, settings app, quicksettings area, task switcher,… are all things you have to use whatever the OEM forces you to use.

Not to mention that launchers these days work jankier than ever.

I believe that today’s Google sees launchers as a misstake they made years ago and they now have to live with, rather than a concept that should be expanded to other parts of the OS.

thoughts3rased,

I can see why Google doesn’t allow swapping out specific “core” apps such as settings. Giving a foreign app access to your system settings sounds ripe for abuse, which is why a lot of permissions are focused on changing them.

Not_the_Droids,

I hate it because I can’t change my colors now. I get a reddish brown on dark brown. I prefer white on black, which I’ve always had until Material You came along. I’ve researched how to turn it off, and it appears there’s no way to do it on my model of phone.

I’d be fine with it, if I could disable it. It’s the fact that it chooses your color scheme and you can’t change it that is frustrating.

jbk,

Maybe Repainter from Google Play can help

Not_the_Droids,

You have to have root, and I don’t.

kzhe,

Android 14 comes with a monocolor theme as an option if you want it?

mindbleach,

Flat is bad, actually.

Windows XP, original iPhone, Winamp3 candy-style buttons were more discoverable, more distinct at a glance, and more usable. Even when they were completely stupid Cruelty Squad geegaws like any non-square Winamp3 skin. (Zoomers: you missed out on the dumbest sci-fi bullshit interfaces.)

Windows 95 had better design language. Every window element had clear hierarchy. They had relief shading and instant on-click visual responsiveness in eight megabytes of RAM.

What everyone’s going back to is some Windows 3.1 nonsense, or Mac OS right before they fired Steve Jobs. Flat squircles with literal black-and-white contrast or none at all. Clickability sort of vaguely implied. Toggles failing to indicate which side is “off” - which are new, but stupid.

Even ugly Flash games gave things gradients.

soulfirethewolf,

Yeah a lot of older things had more depth to them, but I still feel like frutiger aero and other retro design languages simply wouldn’t work today across all the different screen sizes that exist.

mindbleach,

Why.

ChristianWS,

Mostly variable screen size and resolution.

Google created a system called DP (not DPI, or PPI), or density-independent pixels.

To keep it very short: The gist is that bigger resolution on the same screen size just allows better clarity, but doesn’t change the size of elements in relation to the physical world. So a button would have the same real-world size on a 720p device or a 1080p one (assuming the screen size is the same), which is desired because with phones, the screen is the thing you use to control the device. App devs use DPs as the target, not a resolution itself, the system can handle how things are actually displayed.

This is fine for an interface that uses color as the way to differentiate elements, but it gets really weird when you use something less flat. Like, imagine you are using gradient and shadows to separate UI elements from each other, but you want it to have the same real world size, like Android. On some devices, the actual pixel size of the gradient can be too small to actually render properly so it looks blocky, or the pixel size is too large, and it looks weirdly over smooth.

mindbleach,

Gradients can also scale.

Everything can scale.

The aesthetic we’re talking about was for 17" screens at 1024x768. Your phone will look fine.

ChristianWS,

Gradients can scale, but if you are trying to use a big fancy gradient effect and the actual pixel size is, like, 1 pixel, then you lose all those effects and it looks weird. You can kinda see something similar with Apps icons losing visible detail and looking weird if they are too detailed.

IIRC Android actually has the minimum width/height of 360 DP, which is basically 360 pixels (or it was 320?)

mindbleach,

Oh wow, so a one-DP drop shadow scaled to 4K would be six whole pixels.

This is ridiculous. No kidding fewer pixels means less detail. That makes a screen full of identical flat shapes worse.

The aforementioned original iPhone was 480x320. The big dumb candy icons looked fine.

ChristianWS,

Oh wow, so a one-DP drop shadow scaled to 4K would be six whole pixels.

If, and only if, the screen size was the same. And even then it would be 10 pixels.

mindbleach,

And if the screen was larger it would be… less?

I remain devoid of shits to give.

ChristianWS,

Exactly. A 4k screen will have the same amount of DP as a 480p screen if both have the exact same size. Elements will appear smoother and more defined, like letters, on the 4k screen than they would on the 480p one, because the 4k display has more pixels per DP, but the actual number of DPs on screen will be the same.

Like, imagine you have a 1080p phone and a 4k Tablet that physically could fit 4 of those phone screens. The Tablet would have two times the amount of vertical and horizontal DPs than the phone, but each DP would correspond to the exact same amount of pixels, and the buttons would have the same real world size.

mindbleach,

Okay.

And that makes 2000-era drop shadows stop working… how?

How much smaller than an original 2007 iPhone is your phone, if it has the resolution of an original 2007 iPhone, but can’t match the graphical clarity of icon design seen on the original 2007 iPhone?

ChristianWS,

It doesn’t stop working per se, but it starts looking… weird.

Take for instance this screenshot, I believe it is from an iPhone 1st gen, but I’ve never seen an iPhone so who knows.

You can see how the battery icon gradient is kinda weird close to the outlines.

The bottom area of the axis of the General icon is almost bleeding with the background

How the top of the Sounds, Brightness, Wallpaper and iPhone is starting to blend with the highlight.

And the Safari icon is a blurry mess.

Even here, you can see that the actual list items lack any sort of skeuomorphic design, being separated by an outline to improve visibility. Heck, even the status bar and the top app bar uses outlines to separate them from the main view, foregoing drop shadows.

mindbleach,

Oh no, part of an icon has less contrast. Because that totally matters when the rest of the icon has intense contrast. Which somehow justifies this modern trend of everything being pastel with no contrast in the first place.

This is dumb.

Everything you’re describing looks fine. Even the barely-distinct letters on the Safari icon don’t matter, because they’re just hinting for the crystal clear indications that it’s a compass. Meanwhile in Android 12, there is no separation, everything’s a randomly-colored circle, none of the pictographic icons are even large within their circle, and even the battery icon is less readable. Material You is even worse, because they got rid of the random colors. Peripheral vision? Never heard of it. Skimming? Nope! Squint, peasant. Color is forbidden, unless it’s all four primary colors randomly segmented inside one of Google’s shitty unlabeled icons.

And you want me to believe it has to be this way, because what if that modern-ass zero-bezel 8" screen had the resolution of a Game Boy Advance.

ChristianWS,

You are misunderstanding the situation. The safari logo is a mess, we know what it means because we’ve seen the big res version. For a designer, this means that color can get in the way when pixels are limited and it makes then aware that too much detail can result in a visual mess, the solution is to create a logo that can work in monochrome and to make the necessary parts of the logo more prominent.

The safari logo removed the letters and focused on the compass metaphor. On Android, notification icons are monochrome, so this implies the app logo should also work in monochrome. What this all means is that a Designer is more likely to start with a monochrome and low detail logo icon and then start adding details if necessary, because removing detail is more difficult than adding.

I don’t think the picture you sent of Android 12 is actually from Android 12, at least I think it is from Samsung due to the icon colors, not AOSP. I really hate Samsung’s implementation of Material Design so I will not defend them, because it really sucks.

I was pointing out that even in the old iPhone, the actual division of items were made with colors and outlines, not with gradients, which are not great to actually create UIs

This is purely speculation on my part after using Material Design 3 for an App Redesign, but I think the actual Material You system probably started as a way to help developers get a color palette. Material Design 1 and 2 required the devs to actually code the colors(or get the palette from a website) and sometimes this resulted in weird combinations, Google simplified the process so devs can just add 3/4 colors and it is harmonized.

At some point they figured out it would be useful to have the seed be a dynamic image, like the new media stream controls on the quick settings which use the colors of the album cover. If there is already a tool go generate a palette from a picture, adding a way to generate the palette from the user wallpaper is a nice bonus.

Tl;dr: I think Material You is a bonus from the development and streamlining of Material Design color palette. As well as a greater understanding that designing with saturation is better than with colors due to the existence of color blind people.

The only colors that have a contrast issue in Material Design 3 is actually the surface container colors, but they are not meant to be used together without another means of separation, so it is fine

mindbleach,

‘Color is bad, actually,’ says alleged designer. As if ‘working’ in black and white means there’s any benefit to being in black and white. Whilst complaining about a logo that’s already basically white-on-blue. And is plainly a compass even to me, when I haven’t touched a Mac in twenty years.

Having controls change colors dynamically is awful for usability. How do you encourage that, right after complaining that part of the Safari icon is only as distinct from its background as the entirety of any Material You icon?

I reiterate: this is dumb.

No kidding gradients aren’t the only thing we’re talking about. But they’re a detail you pointed to as somehow awful at this resolution… even though the color in the icons is mostly gradients, and again, they look fine. If anything, gradients suffer at larger scale, because screens and color-spaces only have so many shades of green.

And doing ANYTHING for the sake of 320x480 in 2023 is just fucking insane! Have we addressed that, directly? The fact we’re even talking about how this style looks at original 2007 iPhone resolutions, while discussing enormous high-def pentile OLED pocket supercomputers, makes no god-damn sense. ‘It wouldn’t work as well as it did on the the displays it originally worked on’ is a complete non-sequitur, even if it wasn’t self-contradictory,

Why the hell are we still talking about this?!

Flat design is demonstrably awful for usability. It is an obstacle to recognition.

Excessive versions of the alternative worked just fucking fine on phones with itty-bitty screens and 1980s resolutions. They won’t somehow be worse, larger and brighter and crisper than ever.

You don’t need any blathering about palettes to add relief shading or drop shadows.

Google keeps making this worse, and they’re not alone, and I don’t care why. It needs to stop.

ChristianWS,

As if ‘working’ in black and white means there’s any benefit to being in black and white.

There are bunch of benefits to that, just look at the popularity of monochrome icon packs. Even before the official introduction of Adaptive Icons on Android 12, the status bar was already using monochrome icons to increase visibility. Notification icons were monochrome since a while ago.

When the UI itself works without hue, you are pretty much guaranteed that color blind users aren’t left behind, how’s that not a benefit?

Whilst complaining about a logo that’s already basically white-on-blue. And is plainly a compass even to me

I mentioned they eventually increased the most defining features of the icon after a Redesign, as the cardinal directions letters were removed to make the needle and the… degrees(?) more visible.

How do you encourage that, right after complaining that part of the Safari icon is only as distinct from its background as the entirety of any Material You icon?

I’m frankly unsure how the hell would you get a Material You icon (actually Adaptive Icon) to have the same low contrast as the safari icon. IIRC it is using primary and on-primary color tokens.

again, they look fine.

Agree to disagree.

And doing ANYTHING for the sake of 320x480 in 2023 is just fucking insane! Have we addressed that, directly? The fact we’re even talking about how this style looks at original 2007 iPhone resolutions, while discussing enormous high-def pentile OLED pocket supercomputers, makes no god-damn sense. ‘It wouldn’t work as well as it did on the the displays it originally worked on’ is a complete non-sequitur, even if it wasn’t self-contradictory,

Why the hell are we still talking about this?!

Actually, the newly released Pixel Tablet has a closer than you think density to the first iPhone. IIRC each dp on the Pixel Tablet is less than 1.75 pixels. It isn’t even double than the first iPhone.

mindbleach,

Status bar icons are boring to be unobtrusive. They have goals directly opposite to the identifiability of most controls. Where they convey information, there’s only a dozen you really expect, instead of the zillion things you can do or install or click on. That’s also why they’re not labeled.

I’m frankly unsure how the hell would you get a Material You icon (actually Adaptive Icon) to have the same low contrast as the safari icon.

… do you understand icons are supposed to contrast with each other? You’re talking about a sea of colored circles, or a sea of uncolored circles, with itty-bitty binary icons. Quite frankly, what the fuck? This is not “agree to disagree” territory. It is objectively awful for the function of these little pictures in an interface.

For god’s sake, even within your iPhone example, with multiple white-on-blue icons, there’s different shades of blue for Apple’s browser and e-mail versus the system settings, and different weights for a giant white envelope versus fine compass engraving, and a red accent for the needle. And your criticism of these is to nitpick corners and edges (despite obvious unsharp masking and dark outlines clarifying almost every edge) as if you don’t know part of the icon sticking out means the whole icon sticks out. It doesn’t fucking matter if the corners did ‘bleed into the background’ - which they don’t - because you can still see what it is, in the middle! And the middle’s gotta be enough, because in the sterile interfaces you’re championing, the middle’s all there is.

It doesn’t need to change color to match a different background because matching the background is the opposite of what it’s for. Candy icons tend to stick out on dark or light - because they contain both dark and light aspects. And those don’t need to be razor-sharp, large-print-playing-card style iconography, because they’re in fucking color. Conveying information through color alone is bad - but some information is conveyed through color, and it’s kind of important to recognition and usability.

If you want to mention you have some form of colorblindness, that would explain a lot.

Google and all keep pushing this aggressively barren motif because it makes things look “clean” and “consistent,” but the actual purpose of the software is that users want to find a thing out of a sea of a million other things without having to look at and think about every individual thing.

But I can’t deal with you quoting a paragraph that says “old density doesn’t fucking matter but old density was fine anyway” just so you can be wrong in a whole new way by saying that well actually new density’s at least twice as high now. And no I don’t fucking care where the “almost” goes in that sentence. It’s three different kinds of pointless. Why am I still here.

BearOfaTime,

Windows 3.x was a thousand times better than MY, and it had to work with very limited, well, everything.

Windows 1.x was pretty bad, but for the same reasons.

NullaFacies,

Older Gen Z (98-2003) I believe would remember the terrible UX sci-fi themes, at least I do.

CJOtheReal,

Because its messing shit up and many people have wallpaper changers or animated wallpapers.

Also stop forcing shit on people without having a turnoff button as soon as its implemented.

mojo,

Who is “we”? I love it.

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