One of the best articles I have ever read. (I read it more than 2 years ago already, but I just created a Medium account.)

An example of this can also be seen in another area:

I can not stand how mobile phone manufacturers and user interface designers sacrifice functionality for minimalism. This is what I call “toxic minimalism”. Just because some people are not able to handle functionality, power users often suffered in the past. They should have made minimal design optional instead.

This is what Hyun Yeul Lee messed up in 2015 (Samsung Galaxy S6).

On Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2015, Episode 1, she said:

We […] reduced the stuff to the menus and settings.

We removed everything, that got in the way of you having the best experience. No more unnecessary alerts or struggling with hard to use and hard to find features!

First of all, your trash is someone else’s treasure. “Unnecessary alerts” to minimalists means additional verbosity to power users.

And one is not obligated to use the features one does not need. No disadvantage. But if a feature does not exist, and a user does need it, the user is out of luck.

How can a feature that is hard to find stand in one’s way?! This is contradictive.

Additionally, Hyun Yeul Lee introduced a camera user interface that has all camera modes at one glance, as she preaches, because more modes fit on the screen. That’s great. However, to the camera settings, the exact opposite happened. Additionally, the camera modes are now a separately loaded menu. The camera is not on stand-by while browsing the settings, which was the case in all previous Samsung camera user interfaces. Now, the camera viewfinder that is no longer active in background needs to reload again, which could cost precious time that potentially causes a moment to get lost infront of the camera.

They sacrificed many features (software and hardware) in order to blindly follow Apple’s design standards.

They got intimidated by their haters, so they ditched their true fans.

The Galaxy S6 is not a bad device. It also had desirable improvements, especially camera hardware performance and high framerate video encoding method, which is the one feature where Apple was ahead (late 2013 — iPhone 5s) of Samsung (early 2015 — Samsung Galaxy S6). In nearly every other case (battery performance, wireless charging, fast charging, water resistance, storage capacity, camera performance (image sensor size, 2160p video recording, 1080p@60fps), RAM capacity, multitasking capabilities, front camera specifications, overall functionality (just mentioned the most important few)), Samsung has always been years ahead of Apple.

Of course, they are far from perfect. In late 2014, Samsung decided that their Galaxy Note 4 (since Android 4.4.4) and S4, Note 3 and S5 (since Android Lollipop) should have white instead of black as background colour in their menus, and they also removed context menu icons in 2014. Toxic minimalism.

But white on AMOLED is moronic. Uses more battery, AMOLED lifespan, less pleasant on eyes, no more text highlight.

But the S6 should have been a new series of mobile phones. When I first read that the S6 has no Micro SD, no removable battery, no MHL (HDMI), no water resistance, smaller battery capacity, and found out about all those removed features such as Air View, I was shocked. They recovered water resistance and battery capacity next year, however.

The user interface of the Galaxy S3 (TouchWiz 4.0 NatureUX 1.0) was full of ocean blue and nature green gradients. Absolutely beautiful. Inspired by nature. I miss those times. #nostalgia

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Another example of user interface death is Instagram.com since June 2015.

When I first saw it, I thought I had landed on their mobile page.

The pre-2015 website user interface had 5 instead of 3 pictures per row (less wasted screen width) and where the banner on Twitter is, Instagram used to have live image tiles, where random images from the user update each few seconds. Removed for the sake of (toxic) minimalism.