Android Lollipop is a downgrade from KitKat… And here’s why

Android 5 Lollipop has been rolling out on Sony devices and I’ve now had the software for almost a month on my Xperia Z.

Lollipop rumours started up around this time last year, with the official announcement and early releases coming in around autumn time. It was an update I’d very much looked forward to, and I’d waited a whole year to get it.

Sadly however, when the long-awaited update eventually reached my handset on the evening of the 9th of June, my only thought was, “How do I get this garbage off my phone?”

In the past, Sony have always left a “personal” touch to Android’s OS updates: they’ve been optimised for the devices, with smaller icons and slightly nicer general aesthetics. That’s why I bought a Sony. But not this time: Android L comes out on Sony devices pretty much as stock Android like you’d get on a Nexus. But this isn’t the main problem: the main problem is the OS is just awful.

And here’s why…

I’ll start with the lock screen.

The lock screen is now primarily the place for checking the time and your notifications. The call and camera functions at the sides are just there to balance the screen, and launching either app is a pretty slow process compared to logging in and launching either the usual way.

There is also no option for multiple screens any more and therefore you cannot use lock screen widgets.

Dealing with notifications is a bit of a struggle as they sometimes refuse to swipe away, or open when tapped. Sometimes content hides, sometimes it doesn’t; it’s journey full of surprises every time. Sometimes, the keyboard even comes up over your notifications, creating a massive mess.

Another annoyance is the fact the time is no longer displayed in the top right of the screen. Instead, it shows you which user is logged in to the phone: which while useful, is ultimately less so compared to knowing the time. The only clock on the lock screen is in the middle, and hides as soon as you expand notifications — so now, you’ve no idea how long ago notifications have come through: what an excellent idea.

Alongside this, logging in is now a two-step process: first you have to get the keypad up, and then you have to log in. The extra step just takes time. Logging in also exposes your pin to the world, as each number/letter comes up for a second, so, if you’re like me and type in your pin in under two seconds, every character is still exposed for the one second it takes for the log in to happen. If you get your pin wrong, the input doesn’t clear straight away either: there’s another second delay, so if you start immediately typing (as you would before for an incorrect pin) it’ll add those characters to the end of what’s already there, slowing you down further as you end up typing the pin incorrectly once more.

The home screen / menus

The thing that immediately struck me as I logged in was the size of the icons — they’re absolutely massive! Having just come from using Android KitKat on a Sony (it had been visually enhanced by Sony before release) those icons were huge to me — they felt 50% larger than before. Also the navigation menu was different: with the back, home, and task buttons having a more “standard” Android feel.

All apps seem to launch from the bottom, and close by falling off the screen. Folders open up and out from the middle, and close by shrinking away. These animations can get a little dizzying. Adding some more action: pressing down on buttons highlights them in a a semi-translucent to solid colour (depending on which menu you’re in), and scrolling to the top or the bottom of a page also displays a semi-circular highlight (this one is quite cool as it tracks where your finger is and adds a larger portion of the highlight nearest your finger).

Going into the main menu and folders, the app selection menu has a translucent background so you can see your wallpaper, but when opened, the folder backgrounds are solid white — it’s quite the inconsistency; in fact, one of many.

Individual apps and status bar colours

The idea with Lollipop was to have the coloured status bar so it looked more like part of every app (this also makes the screen look bigger), but the colour matching of status bar colour and app colours are sometimes completely off: in fact, Twitter has “Facebook blue” as its status bar, whereas Facebook has “Twitter blue”. Definitely something to fix! Different apps also seem to have different ideas about what the status bar should look like: some, like the native Sony Album app have it set to transparent, but others, like the Sony Videos app don't — it’s translucent. Others, like many of Google’s own apps, have it set to solid. So, what’s the standard here?

Notifications panel / notifications

Perhaps one of the worst offenders in this update is the notifications panel and quick settings.

Notifications display fine: in fact, the option to clear all notifications has now been put at the bottom, reducing the chance of accidentally clearing all notifications by accident (something I suffered a few times with KitKat). Also, opening notification previews is a little easier now, which is another bonus. The annoyance however, comes with the way in which notifications display: they are now in large blocks that hover at the top of the screen. Some display for a split second, others for up to 10 seconds — and you cannot change the display time! Also, they display regardless of whether you’re in full screen mode or not: making something like showing your friends photos a little awkward as there’s no way to remove the notification from covering part of the photo and you have to simply sit it out and wait for it to go away (swiping dismisses the notification altogether). This is especially irritating when you’re in an app, or on a website: all the controls are at the top and you cannot navigate away from your current page as the notification covers the whole of that top part of the screen. Whose bright idea was this? (On KitKat, the notifications displayed at the top of the screen and in the status bar itself; and it was perfect as it disrupted nothing.)

Quick settings / audio settings

To access quick settings, you now have to pull down twice from the top: once to open notifications, and again to open quick settings — and these are now a pain to work with. You can no longer rearrange them or remove ones you don’t use: the panel opens up and you are presented with a slider at the top, and it’s difficult to tell what it does (it’s for setting brightness of the display, but you really can’t tell unless you test it out). Underneath, there’s WiFi on the left, and Bluetooth on the right, and if you don’t use Bluetooth that often, the icon is a little redundant and you cannot remove it. Under those are the smaller icons which you can move around, including flash-light, screen rotate, location services, and mobile data. These can be turned off and on with a tap, but the inconsistencies here are huge: when turned off, some of the icons just dim, and others dim and get a line across them. This is visually very confusing and it can sometimes be hard to tell if a certain setting is on or off. Switching some on/off also takes the panel away, but switching others on/off leaves the panel where it is, allowing you to make further changes.

Alongside this, audio settings are no longer in the quick settings menu — they have their own menu which can only be accessed when the physical audio controls on the phone are pressed. You are then shown three settings: silent, priority, and sound. Vibrate is not there any more! To put your phone on vibrate you have to manually turn the volume down — again, something which doesn't immediately spring to mind.

Overall, everything feels very disconnected — why would you take audio setting out of quick setting? They belong together.

Speaking of disconnection…

Making a phone call is now a process which requires a bit of thought, and genuinely stumped some guys in my local phone shop. They were baffled when I showed them the call option was no-longer under the Contacts app, but you had to specifically go and find the Phone app (which side-note, is an app I’d personally stashed away as I’d always used the short-cut in Contacts). When you launch Phone, the dialling pad icon is centre-aligned at the bottom of the screen — very inconsistent with anything else using Material Design, which puts buttons in the right of the screen — it’s where I expected it to be, but not where it was, and I was left feeling confused. The same is true with the call icon — it’s in the middle.

Status bar icons

The status bar now displays different things depending on if you’re logged in or not. In the lock screen, it displays your carrier on the left, then WiFi, signal, battery life, and the currently logged in user on the right. Once you’re logged in, it displays notifications on the left, and the WiFi, signal, battery life, and the time on the right. There is simply no reason to make them different.

Alongside this, a lot of the status bar icons have now changed: displaying which sound setting your phone is on makes no sense — vibrate still looks like vibrate, but “priority” is a star, and mute is a circle with a line across it — neither of which remotely suggest anything to do with sound. In fact, the mute icon looks like a warning sign.

(Another nag I have, and this will only apply for the people who use the TrueCaller app: if a number you’ve blocked tries to contact you and the app blocks the incoming call, your phone automatically goes into Priority mode.)

Let’s talk colour schemes…

Bright, bold colours seem to be a trademark of Material Design, and when used well can look incredibly stylish and simple. But Lollipop goes against all those rules. The colours are at times too bright: especially above the keyboard when predictive text suggestions comes through in bright orange blocks (and you cannot change that colour). As mentioned previously, there is no consistency between the transparency of the colours, or the tones — making it hard to look at sometimes, as the colours don’t match very well. This also means that looking at the screen in dim light can hurt your eyes as the colours are so vibrant and the icons so large. Colours seem to fly in from everywhere: be it on the keyboard, as highlights, as backgrounds, etc. It looks awfully busy. (By comparison, KitKat used majority dark colours across the OS, making it a little easier on the eye, and also keeping with the consistency.)

Recent/running apps

By clicking the bottom right, you can see what apps are open and switch between them. There is even the handy option to close all apps in the top right, which is great… Except, it hovers over the Google bar — like a bad glitch. The bar should simply not be there, it should be just the button; otherwise, it looks like a hint notification giving a suggestion, except, it’s not.

Chrome

The reason this is getting an entire section to itself is because it is so incredibly annoying. Chrome tabs now display as part of the recent/running apps menu. The idea is, you can click through them the same way you would between apps — but this makes no sense what-so-ever as the apps manager is for apps and separate Chrome tabs are part of the main Chrome app — not multiple launches of it. The most irritating thing here is that not only are tabs harder to access than simply having them as part of the main app, but closing all apps with the short-cut button now closes all your tabs as well. It’s pretty easy to forget you had tabs open as well — all the things you were planning to look at later: gone. Also, website previews don’t always load, meaning that if you have two pages from the same website open, you might accidentally close the wrong one because there is no preview available to enable you to tell the difference between one and the other.

And if that wasn’t annoying enough, Chrome’s own “homepage” is now a page which displays your most visited sites — but it doesn’t work. I use the app daily, and have done so since the update, and my homepage is still blank (and I’ve not deleted by web history once).

Navigation

More on the subject of navigation: when you go into a menu, then into a sub-menu, and click the back button, you are taken back up to the top of the last menu you were in — not where you left off. This one seems to happen in the settings menu occasionally, and also in the Apps list in settings. Very annoying, and very time-consuming.

Battery life

The worst thing overall about the Lollipop upgrade is the way it drains your phone’s battery. “Cell standby” has been a major problem, as has “screen”, followed by “Android OS” — every single time, these are the top three reasons the battery life is not lasting a full day. In fact, 100% charge means different things every time: some days, using your phone for Facebook or Twitter uses up around 2–3% per minute, and other days less than 1%. Some days, the phone will say it’s on 100% for around half an hour of use, and then suddenly 70%. And I’m not even talking about heavy use, I mean literally sitting on a bus and using Facebook Messenger — not something like playing a graphic-intense, multi-player game. Similarly, when your phone is plugged in and charging, sometimes it’ll charge quickly, other times more slowly and will also lie about the charging level — it may say it’s on full charge and as soon as it’s unplugged it instantly drops down to around 90%.

I’ve also noticed that barely using my phone all day results in the battery dropping down to around 40% after 10 hours. Just having it on standby and receiving notifications that I very occasionally check, or listening to music, drains the battery worse than ever before.

I had a bad incident with battery life overnight where my phone was on around 75% charge when I went to bed and had died around 5/6 hours later. The cause? “Removed user.” Great.

Final thoughts

A few other points I’d like to make:

1. The option to move apps to an SD card sounds exciting at first, but in practice is terrible: not every downloaded app can be moved to and SD card and for those that can, updating the app sends it back to being stored on the device (so you have to move it to the SD card again).
2. The OS is overall pretty slow: my guess is, loading all the animations is taking up a lot of processing power. Even things like typing feel like they take longer than before, and a lot of the time the phone cannot keep up with that’s being typed.
3. When installing an app there was an issue with the new app icon and name not being displayed properly — and you had to restart your device to fix it. This appears to have stopped happening, but I’m not sure what was causing it in the first place.

…And finally a couple of good points:

1. Listening to music makes the lock screen look gorgeous.
2. Having multiple users on the one device is a great and useful feature, especially if someone wants to use your phone — means you don’t have to log out of all your apps to log them in.

Having said all the above, a final note I shall leave on is this: if your phone does not yet have Android Lollipop, my advice is, do not update!

Update (04.07.15):

I got a tweet this morning from Andrew (@closetgeek) who made me aware of two very important things:

1. You can remove your Chrome tabs from the recent apps menu (and therefore avoid closing them all when you close all apps).
2. There is a shortcut for setting your phone to vibrate… But it’s a little awkward.

Firstly, the Chrome fix. Go into Chrome → Options → Settings → Merge tabs and apps, and make sure the slider is set to “off”. Now your tabs will appear in Chrome as before, and it also means that if you have tabs open and close all apps, your tabs will remain open.

Secondly, the shortcut for putting your phone on vibrate. This one is awkward because it doesn’t immediately spring to mind — you need to go into audio settings as before, and if your phone is on Priority or Sound mode, you need to tap the bell on the left hand side to turn on vibrate.

Thank you, Andrew, for your tweet! If anyone else has any solutions to anything I’ve mentioned above (battery life especially!) please get in touch via Twitter: @mila_georgieva.