So I switched to a pixel 7 from an iphone 10 xs a few months back, and I’ve absolutely loved it in comparison to the locked down nature of an iphone. So I think to look up material you on YouTube for fun, and decide to read the comments and found that people hated it. Quick googling led to me to find two reddit threads and an article talking about how much they hated it. Personally, I don’t understand the hate, as you can simply choose to have the color be a dullish blue manually.
Idk, it might just be that I haven’t been using android long to care about the fact that material you is being forced.
Flat is bad, actually.
Windows XP, original iPhone, Winamp3 candy-style buttons were more discoverable, more distinct at a glance, and more usable. Even when they were completely stupid Cruelty Squad geegaws like any non-square Winamp3 skin. (Zoomers: you missed out on the dumbest sci-fi bullshit interfaces.)
Windows 95 had better design language. Every window element had clear hierarchy. They had relief shading and instant on-click visual responsiveness in eight megabytes of RAM.
What everyone’s going back to is some Windows 3.1 nonsense, or Mac OS right before they fired Steve Jobs. Flat squircles with literal black-and-white contrast or none at all. Clickability sort of vaguely implied. Toggles failing to indicate which side is “off” - which are new, but stupid.
Even ugly Flash games gave things gradients.
Older Gen Z (98-2003) I believe would remember the terrible UX sci-fi themes, at least I do.
Yeah a lot of older things had more depth to them, but I still feel like frutiger aero and other retro design languages simply wouldn’t work today across all the different screen sizes that exist.
Why.
Windows 3.x was a thousand times better than MY, and it had to work with very limited, well, everything.
Windows 1.x was pretty bad, but for the same reasons.