AnandTech reviews Android 5.0 Lollipop, and concludes:
I think Google really hit the nail on the head with Android Lollipop. It evokes the same sort of feeling that the release of iOS 7 did, without some of the negative experiences that followed. Getting a brand new interface is always exciting, as it can dramatically change how it feels to use your phone. Moving from KitKat to Lollipop still provides you with a familiar Android experience, but it almost feels like getting a brand new phone in a way. There’s a brand new UI, and big improvements to performance. But unlike the upgrade to iOS 7, Android Lollipop hasn’t plagued my devices with application crashes and other bugs. In fact, I haven’t really noticed any significant bugs at all after upgrading to Lollipop, which says a great deal about the work Google has put into testing to make sure things are stable.
My experience with Android 5.0 Lollipop on my Nexus 5 have been almost entirely positive. It’s still Android, and it won’t magically draw people away from iOS, but as a whole, it’s a huge leap forward over what came before.
Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is at innovation.
(On my nexus5 lollipop seems faster, the UI more elegant, and the design language mitre intuitive – google not apple)
Google has great ideas but no consistency and they can’t for the life of theirs release a polished product.
Material can be great, but their own apps are highly inconsistent (when they work at all). There was a post depicting the differences a few days ago on android police.
All that to say that yeah, Google may be good at design these days, not so much at implementing or polishing it (and that’s what defines the user experience, not technical papers)
I’m wondering if I’m the only one who has experienced slower performance on Lollipop on Nexus 5. It is noticeably slower for me. I do like the new interface, though.
Edited 2014-12-02 22:14 UTC
i’m an iPhone guy however my wife still has a Nexus 5. We upgraded it to Lollipop and I definitely notice performance degradation.
[Edit: sorry, replied to wrong message]
Edited 2014-12-03 03:27 UTC
I have a similar experience. Performance degrades as time goes by.
I have to reboot every 2 days because the sluggishness is painful. You can try rebooting your phone daily, as a work around
I do have a good experience with Android 5.0 update on my Nexus 4. It is works very good and no huge bugs.
On the Nexus 7 (2012) tablet the update also worked, it was unstable at first but it for fixed after some reboots. I need to keep testing it.
Firstly, not long ago you yourself posted an article where the author lamented how horribly broken the UI in Lollipop is: you almost never know what’s clickable on the screen and what’s not. Android 4.4 was much better in this regard.
Secondly, the choice of colors in L is even worse – some screens are white, others are grayish, then there are black. WTF?
Thirdly, just too many functions of Android 4.4 were removed without any way of adding them back. More on it here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/general/android-5-0-totally…
In fact the only new feature of Android 5 that I find useful is notification priorities – but the way it’s implemented horribly s*cks.
Edited 2014-12-02 22:28 UTC
can you give a link to that article about lollipop being broken? can’t find it anywhere…
I agree with point (5). But (4) is just plain wrong, there is an unlock icon here, just swipe it up. There is also a call icon and a camera icon that you can swipe right/left.
The long press from (7) can be achieved by clicking on the name of the wifi network below the icon. This works for the bluetooth tile as well.
As for the others, they are not applicable to me, though I do agree it’s very white (which is annoying when it’s dark), that’s why I picked the black keyboard.
(Note: I’m talking about a Nexus 5 phone, my Nexus 7 tablet hasn’t received the update yet so I can’t really comment about the tablet experience)
Edited 2014-12-03 15:21 UTC
Yeah, iOS7, as well as iOS8. Not that Android is perfectly stable either, but can we FINALLY stop all the horseshit about Apple products ‘just working’, and stop likening them as a BMW vs a Hyundai?
I beg to differ, on my Nexus 4 Lollipop is quite buggy. On regular occasions, it hangs while (going?) in suspend, on other occasions, wifi simply stops working, and I need to *restart* the phone to get it working again, or pay the price for using mobile data (assuming I notice it in time).
And this was no different with the upgrade to KitKat, it took them several OTAs to get it reasonably stable. I’m starting to think that going for Nexus to get (early) updates might not have been such a great idea after all
For me, the Apple updates (iPad/iPhone here as well) have been much smoother, and if they messed up, they fixed their issues much quicker then what I’ve seen from Google so far. Ofcourse, I might just have been unlucky with my Nexus 4 maybe…
You’re not the only one experiencing freezing. Freezing on Nexus devices seems to be a common problem. My girlfriend’s Nexus 10 frequently freezes after the update. It froze on occasion while KitKat was running on it, but now it’s even worse. I personally think it’s because the hardware is cheap, or perhaps it’s caused by apps that aren’t fully integrated for tablets and Nexus devices. Either way, she hates her Nexus 10 and regrets buying it. She wishes she would have bought an iPad, because while she restarts her tablet on a daily basis, my iPad doesn’t restart unless it’s intentional. Never had a problem with my iPad freezing and needing a hard restart. I will personally avoid getting Nexus devices in the future unless hardware/software integration significantly improves.
My nexus 4 has had a catalogue of weird issues.
1) apps are randomly crashing
2) at least one time the entry of text stopped working in hangouts, then after a short while hangouts refused to work with an error talking about Google Play store. Then the play store stopped working and hangouts would no longer open. After about 3 or 4 attempts to retry the play store log in, it worked, then hangouts was working again.
3) I keep getting a gloating error message about a null pointer that has something to do with the OS enumerating headphones.
Overall the OS is much more pleasing to use though.
About notifications:
“It’s now accessed by simply swiping downward a second time after bring down the drawer. I think this works much better than the separate pages that Google was doing previously, which felt more like a way to just throw in quick settings without having to change the design of the drawer beyond the addition of a button.”
are you kidding? this is the single worst change they made. I’m a tablet user so having two zones for swiping down is a great idea (dont know how it works on phones). I’m still on KitKat so to lock rotation or change brightness I just need one swipe instead of two, I also access settings from there so I use this quite a lot and forcing two swipes instead of one is not a good idea…
This review looks like a Google Ad for their system basically which I still have not received on my Nexus 7 wifi. It’s 3 weeks since they anounced OTA updates.
I second you as a (1st gen) Nexus 7 user. Not only does the UI design get stupider, the overall UI performance feels very sluggish compared to KitKat.
Initially I wish I could update my MotoG as soon as it’s ready. Now I think I’m more reluctant to press on the system update button.
Have a 1st gen N7 here too, and yes, it feels much slower. Then again, even with KK performance was less, it seems the NAND performance is not helping here.
Anyway, I totally agree on the UI design getting stupider, at least for tablet users. As much an improvement 3.x/4.0 used to be (UI wise) for tablets, since then they’ve slowly gone backwards again.
I guess that makes it clear how much priority tablets get these days from Google, most of the money is being made from phone customers clearly…
I was going to make much the same comment myself.
I’ve got a Nexus 10, and my take away from using Android 5 on that for a while is that it’s a fine phone OS.
The quick settings thing bugs the hell out of me. Yes, a 2-finger swipe will go straight to it (that worked on 4.4 on phones too), but it’s significantly less convenient than the single-finger swipe I could do before, especially if I’m using my thumbs. I find synchronising swiping down with my two thumbs at the screen edges is nearly impossible.
On a 10″ tablet things in the centre of the screen are significantly less accessible than they are off to the side, especially in landscape. The central positioning of the notification/settings pull-down sucks big-time IMHO, as it’s much less usable. Similarly I’m also unconvinced about the the central positioning of the unlock keypad.
Besides that though it’s quite nice.
Another thing to whine about of course is the lack of availability of updates. It was two weeks after the availability of updates was announced for it to show up on my Nexus 10. Another week to show up on my Nexus 4. No amount of “check for updates” would change that. It’s deeply frustrating. In contrast my iPhones and iPads get their updates the day they’re announced.
I don’t get this. It’s not like Google don’t have a massive server infrastructure capable of serving out updates to all the Nexus devices simultaneously. Also as Nexus devices are sold in comparatively low volumes, it’s not like they’ve even got the same order of magnitude of devices to serve updates out to than Apple does. It’s very poor customer service.
And we’ve seen what that has lead to. Apple’s latest streak of updates have been disastrous. The staged rollout to Nexus devices ensures gamebreaking bugs don’t spread far, were they to appear.
And if you want, you could have updated your Nexus to Lollipop on day one. It’s not hard.
Edited 2014-12-03 11:38 UTC
Hmmm…complaining that you can’t get a .0 release on the day it was supposed to come out? It’s not clever to be one of the “early adopters” of such a major update. tTe chances are there’ll be a few nasty little bugs in there that won’t get fixed until the next update after the .0 one.
I waited a few weeks to update Nexus 7 2012 to Android 5.0 (it had been running CyanogenMod for the 2 years before that quite happily). No obvious issues when I did the update, but I can’t say I particularly impressed with the Material design. The pulldown stuff from the status bar was actually a step back in my books, so it was pretty well a “meh” from me.
I’ll wait for CM12 and see if they make the status bar pulldown stuff easier to use than the Android 5.0 version.
You can probably use two fingers to swipe it down (mid and ring finger seems to be the easiest in my opinion). I like it on the phone, it was a bit annoying at first but now I think it works fine there. I don’t have any experience on the Nexus 7 yet as I still haven’t received an update there.
Edited 2014-12-04 08:57 UTC
My girlfriend’s Nexus 10 is doing ok after the update, but it does appear to be a bit slower, and it has a few bugs. After the update, the tablet has been freezing and needs to be restarted at least once a day while in use.
Anand keeps comparing Lollipop to iOS 7. Not a fair comparison because that is not the current version of iOS. Compare apples to apples, please.
iOS 8 is a good operating system. Yes it has bugs, nothing is perfect or ever has been, moving on. It is for users to don’t have to tinker with everything about their devices in order to “make it mine”, which is absolutely fine for a lot of people.
Android on the other hand, is targeted at those who get a new device and then change EVERYTHING about the OS and the interface to suit their tastes. Icons, launcher, whatever your want to change, it can be changed. And that is just fine as well if that’s what you want to do. Just beware that in doing so, you may experience bugs and misbehaviors along the way. iOS users can jailbreak their device and change everything about it as well, but they know that they are on their own when they do and Apple cannot be held responsible if their phone acts up or turns into a brick as a result.
Both these OSes are now, in my opinion, afflicted with the “modern” look, in that their interfaces are made of of screens with almost nothing on them but dots, words in difficult to read fonts, and shapes that may or may not be buttons, may or may not do anything when you touch them, and functions that are difficult to fathom because it magically became evil to make a button look like a button. Design is a fluid thing and changes over time, but when you deliberately make it more difficult for a user to do something they want to do, you have not helped in a good way.
Both these OSes are good, both have flaws, and the world will move on.
My Nexus 10 was really bad with the latest KitKat update (4.4.4?) and it randomly rebooted all of the time. Two weeks in with Lollipop and it has yet to reboot on me. Everything seems smoother too, but that might be a placebo.
It’s a shame Android device makers don’t make it easy to upgrade; I bought a very nice Android tablet a couple of months ago, and it’s stuck with 4.2 because hey, it’s already sold, why support it?
Even if there was an easy way to sideload “stock” Android on it (it’s a Kobo Arc 10HD, not supported by Cyanogenmod) I’d be happy, but I’m afraid I’ll brick it due to whatever custom nonsense the manufacturer has done.
I have a nexus 7 and while Lollipop certainly looks nicer and I can see the improvements, it is pretty much unusable. I have no idea what happened, but it is slow, freezes constantly…
Looked online this seems to be a common problem.
I have no idea how it showed up as an automatic update.
I’ve basically left it alone until they release an update.
I put it on my nexus 7 (2013) via adb because the OTA update wasn’t appearing.
It seems to work all right my main gripe is volume buttons: even with sound off it manages to make sounds.
Or no sound at all.
My phone with 4.2 behaves normally. Off is off only the alarm clock comes through (you want that) I can turn the alarm-clock off separately or only select the days I must wake-up.
You can halve the animation times or turn them off for a faster UI appearance. Available in developer mode (Press build number 7 times)
Edited 2014-12-04 11:39 UTC
Unfortunately my experience on the LG G3 with Lollipop was quite bad. I do realize that version 20C of the ROM was not the final thing, but it should be pretty damn close anyway. The biggest problem for me, before moving back to 4.4, was battery life. From two and a half days on KitKat, on Lollipop I was barely having 15% after 10 hours. Other than that it was running smoothly with no major hiccups.
I’m gonna sit on this one until LG comes up with a 5.0 version with decent battery life.