In general, I agree. I’ll add two things:
- Android allows you to use third party launchers if you don’t like the one that comes with your phone. I use Nova Launcher, for instance. I’m not an Apple person, but to my knowledge that’s either not possible or a pain to do on an iPhone. It also lets me buy from different Android device manufacturers and keep a consistent UI across all of them.
- Android has some serious UX issues in a few places. The one that gets me the most is when you share something. The interface you get differs based on the source app, sometimes only has a handful of visible options with no sorting or recency options, and it hides the fact that’s you can scroll to see more, but never more than about four at a time.
Still, I’ll take it over an iPhone any day.
Agreed. This UI is very much inherited from ancient word processing applications. The shift that Microsoft made in the Vista era to the tabbed menu buttons only added extra mouse clicks to get to the same set of functions. Word and LibreOffice both allow you to do the kind of thing you’re talking about, but those features are nestled way down into menus and trays that are ugly and hard to use and promote the use of the wrong tool since the wrong tool is made more accessible.