Android 5.0 Lollipop Review (Featured Android 5.0 Video)
Release of Android 5.0 Lollipop (2014) Latest Review on the new Nexus 6 phone and Nexus 9 tablet, that mission has reached an apotheosis. It's a sudden, jarring change from the Android we've known, now combined with a torrent of tweaks and features. It's easily the most important update to the world's most-used mobile OS in several years. It's a big deal.
Google has been on a mission to redefine itself as a design-focused company for some years now.It's hard not to get metaphysical when talking about the design for Lollipop. That's because the philosophy behind the new look is based on something Google calls "Material Design”."
You also can't talk about the design changes in Lollipop without comparing it to the equally bold design changes Apple made with iOS 7 last year. Both attempt to remake nearly every corner of the OS, both make heavy use of layers, and both have high-concept ideas about how those layers interact with each other.
Jony Ive’s mission at Apple was to get rid of skeuomorphism, where digital things imitate real-world objects. In doing so, he created a beautiful but cold crystal palace of colorless, translucent planes. Android designer Matias Duarte at Google, on the other hand, has built the Emerald City.
Lollipop has more skeuomorphism than ever before, except the reality being imitated here isn't real at all. It's like waking up in Kansas and discovering that everything is still in color and your slippers are still very much a deep shade of ruby red.
Those fuzzy concepts about how an OS should look and feel do have practical effects. Android 5.0 looks virtually nothing like the Android that you're familiar with. All the shades, tinted glass, and neon effects have been replaced with subtly textured whites and bright (sometimes too bright) colors. Previously incoherent and random animations have turned into a simple suite of rules for the way things move and relate to each other on the screen.
If you've used Android before, you don't need to worry about being lost. The core elements of an app panel, a notification shade, a lock screen, and a home screen for widgets and Google Now are still here and still work essentially the same way. But for newcomers, the list of UI concepts and their relation to one another can be daunting. Lollipop's main job is to make them less so, and it works.
The best part might be the animations, which are so fluid and prevalent that they're practically a middle finger to the Android of a few versions ago. Transitioning from the Overview (formerly known as the recent apps switcher, or multitasking) to the home screen to the app pane to the notification shade isn't exactly a symphony of movement, but it is at the very least more harmonious than it's ever been.
It's also, at times, garish. Just like Apple overreacted to its old design on the iPhone, Google has decided the colors should be splashed in lots of different places. App menu headers are bold reds and blues greens, but there's no logic to the system of colors to match the logic of animation. Even those animations can get a little overbearing. It's great when you first start using Lollipop, but once you get your bearings, you kind of wish they'd go a little faster.
Actually, that’s part of one more similarity between iOS 7 and Lollipop: various failures to address some of the details. As David Pogue pointed out a couple weeks ago, there are lots of places where it's hard to tell what's happening. For example, in settings, text can be a number of things: a button to take you deeper into a menu, a heading that does nothing, a button that toggles a switch off to the right, or a button that activates a pop-up menu.
But those are mostly minor, solvable quibbles. Lollipop is ambitious; it's easily the most ambitious update Android has seen in several years. The fact that the new design works as well as it does even in this first iteration is a very good sign.
The biggest change is a "Priority Mode," which you can quickly toggle anytime you hit the volume buttons. It's essentially the same thing as Do Not Disturb on iOS, but with an emphasis on making it easier for you to choose which notifications can still come through. There's also a simple "None" mode, which shuts everything down, including alarms. Both modes have convenient buttons for setting a time-out so you don't leave your phone bereft of Twitter replies because you forgot to change your settings.
Alongside the improved notifications is a new attempt to make a coherent Quick Settings panel. Google messes with these toggles in every iteration of Android, usually to middling effect. It's the same story here. Instead of just giving us the option to customize the settings ourselves, Google says that it automatically tries to guess which settings you want to flip and shows you those. What I want is "Mobile Hotspot." What I get instead is "Invert Colors," with no way to manually change it. Maddening. The same "we'll reorder it for you" philosophy applies to the sharing menu, but there at least it seems to work better.
You can also turn on a "Pin" feature for apps, which prevents a user from exiting the active app without a passcode. iOS has had a similar "Guided Access" feature for awhile now, but on Android the giant "Pin" icon is much more intuitive, and it’s perfect for handing your tablet to a kid who just wants to play a quick round of Cut The Rope.
The pin appears in the "Overview" stack, which replaces the tiny multitasking thumbnails with bigger screenshots in an infinite vertical stack. It's very pretty and usually very fast, but, more importantly, some apps can make better use of it. Gmail can put in a new card when you hit "Compose," for example, so that you can toggle between an email you're writing and an email you're referencing. Chrome can put multiple tabs in there as well (though only on phones, not on tablets, oddly).
It's an idea that is great in theory but can be hard to think through in execution, especially when it comes to keeping track of your Chrome tabs. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, I'll say that Duarte did a better job at Palm with this idea way back in 2009 with webOS, where you could spatially arrange your apps and group them.
Various apps have seen updates: Gmail now works with any email address, not just Gmail. (There’s inexplicably still an icon for Email, but it just tells you to go to Gmail.) Google brought back the "Messages" SMS app for those who don't want it integrated with Hangouts.
Calendar has some very pretty new views. Many of Google’s new apps have been given tablet-optimized views that work great on the Nexus 9 but don't show up in landscape on the Nexus 6 despite its generous size, which is disappointing.
Google has been on a mission to redefine itself as a design-focused company for some years now.It's hard not to get metaphysical when talking about the design for Lollipop. That's because the philosophy behind the new look is based on something Google calls "Material Design”."
You also can't talk about the design changes in Lollipop without comparing it to the equally bold design changes Apple made with iOS 7 last year. Both attempt to remake nearly every corner of the OS, both make heavy use of layers, and both have high-concept ideas about how those layers interact with each other.
Jony Ive’s mission at Apple was to get rid of skeuomorphism, where digital things imitate real-world objects. In doing so, he created a beautiful but cold crystal palace of colorless, translucent planes. Android designer Matias Duarte at Google, on the other hand, has built the Emerald City.
Lollipop has more skeuomorphism than ever before, except the reality being imitated here isn't real at all. It's like waking up in Kansas and discovering that everything is still in color and your slippers are still very much a deep shade of ruby red.
Those fuzzy concepts about how an OS should look and feel do have practical effects. Android 5.0 looks virtually nothing like the Android that you're familiar with. All the shades, tinted glass, and neon effects have been replaced with subtly textured whites and bright (sometimes too bright) colors. Previously incoherent and random animations have turned into a simple suite of rules for the way things move and relate to each other on the screen.
If you've used Android before, you don't need to worry about being lost. The core elements of an app panel, a notification shade, a lock screen, and a home screen for widgets and Google Now are still here and still work essentially the same way. But for newcomers, the list of UI concepts and their relation to one another can be daunting. Lollipop's main job is to make them less so, and it works.
The best part might be the animations, which are so fluid and prevalent that they're practically a middle finger to the Android of a few versions ago. Transitioning from the Overview (formerly known as the recent apps switcher, or multitasking) to the home screen to the app pane to the notification shade isn't exactly a symphony of movement, but it is at the very least more harmonious than it's ever been.
It's also, at times, garish. Just like Apple overreacted to its old design on the iPhone, Google has decided the colors should be splashed in lots of different places. App menu headers are bold reds and blues greens, but there's no logic to the system of colors to match the logic of animation. Even those animations can get a little overbearing. It's great when you first start using Lollipop, but once you get your bearings, you kind of wish they'd go a little faster.
Actually, that’s part of one more similarity between iOS 7 and Lollipop: various failures to address some of the details. As David Pogue pointed out a couple weeks ago, there are lots of places where it's hard to tell what's happening. For example, in settings, text can be a number of things: a button to take you deeper into a menu, a heading that does nothing, a button that toggles a switch off to the right, or a button that activates a pop-up menu.
But those are mostly minor, solvable quibbles. Lollipop is ambitious; it's easily the most ambitious update Android has seen in several years. The fact that the new design works as well as it does even in this first iteration is a very good sign.
The biggest change is a "Priority Mode," which you can quickly toggle anytime you hit the volume buttons. It's essentially the same thing as Do Not Disturb on iOS, but with an emphasis on making it easier for you to choose which notifications can still come through. There's also a simple "None" mode, which shuts everything down, including alarms. Both modes have convenient buttons for setting a time-out so you don't leave your phone bereft of Twitter replies because you forgot to change your settings.
Alongside the improved notifications is a new attempt to make a coherent Quick Settings panel. Google messes with these toggles in every iteration of Android, usually to middling effect. It's the same story here. Instead of just giving us the option to customize the settings ourselves, Google says that it automatically tries to guess which settings you want to flip and shows you those. What I want is "Mobile Hotspot." What I get instead is "Invert Colors," with no way to manually change it. Maddening. The same "we'll reorder it for you" philosophy applies to the sharing menu, but there at least it seems to work better.
You can also turn on a "Pin" feature for apps, which prevents a user from exiting the active app without a passcode. iOS has had a similar "Guided Access" feature for awhile now, but on Android the giant "Pin" icon is much more intuitive, and it’s perfect for handing your tablet to a kid who just wants to play a quick round of Cut The Rope.
The pin appears in the "Overview" stack, which replaces the tiny multitasking thumbnails with bigger screenshots in an infinite vertical stack. It's very pretty and usually very fast, but, more importantly, some apps can make better use of it. Gmail can put in a new card when you hit "Compose," for example, so that you can toggle between an email you're writing and an email you're referencing. Chrome can put multiple tabs in there as well (though only on phones, not on tablets, oddly).
It's an idea that is great in theory but can be hard to think through in execution, especially when it comes to keeping track of your Chrome tabs. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, I'll say that Duarte did a better job at Palm with this idea way back in 2009 with webOS, where you could spatially arrange your apps and group them.
Various apps have seen updates: Gmail now works with any email address, not just Gmail. (There’s inexplicably still an icon for Email, but it just tells you to go to Gmail.) Google brought back the "Messages" SMS app for those who don't want it integrated with Hangouts.
Calendar has some very pretty new views. Many of Google’s new apps have been given tablet-optimized views that work great on the Nexus 9 but don't show up in landscape on the Nexus 6 despite its generous size, which is disappointing.
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