Who would need to press the power button to actually turn off or restart the device, right?
The setting to change this is also pretty much buried under Settings -> Special Features -> Gestures.
(Yes, I have no idea why the Assistant is in German when the phone is set to English either 🫠)
Another in a long line of messing with user interface things on updates, without any prior warning to the user. And if you even get a changelog at all on the update prompt it’s always just vague bullshit like, “Bug fixes and usability improvements,” without explaining what those “improvements” are supposed to be.
In unrelated news, the last major update on my Moto G changed the incoming call screen from swipe up to answer, swipe down to reject to swipe left to answer, swipe right to reject. What is this, fucking Tinder now? And don’t come at me about the “gesture” setting in the dialer app options, either. Yes, I am aware of it. The only options listed there are now “horizontal swipe” and “single tap to answer.” Why any rational individual would want to inflict the hell that is the latter option on themselves is unknown to me.
This kind of horseshit is why boomers and old people are terrified of updates and drive us IT nerds up the wall by perpetually ignoring and dismissing them. Because when you change the user interface choices people are used to behind their backs and without warning, as far as they’re concerned you just broke their device.
Cut it out.
The best explanation I saw several years ago: Large tech companies drive change through competing individual teams and projects. So some manager pitched a half-assed idea, somehow convinced upper management to go with it, got developers to heroically implement it, and might have gotten some bonus for doing so. It doesn’t matter if there was no value as long as some decision maker thinks there is (or does not care, or numbers were fudged anyway).
It is literally change for the sake of change.
Android is getting really terrible in general, whoever they have designing the UI is not good at their jobs. The thing I hate the most is now you have to open the side menu to open your contacts in the contacts app. It’s so annoying. Add several seconds to every instance of making a call.
That dialer change was evil. I have switched to Fossify Phone now and use that as a dialer. The Fossify apps are amazing, they also have a gallery and messages app, so Google’s proprietary BS isn’t neccessary.
Samsung just improved my user experience by removing “silent” from the available options when pressing the volume down button for notifications/ringer — now I need to open a menu to press a touchscreen button a couple times, instead of being able to quickly set my phone to silent through tactile feel without looking.
thank you so much for improving my user experience for me, Samsung, this is really what I’ve been missing for the past decade
i really liked that swipe up to answer too
Last update changed the phone buttons around for no reason I can discern. Not sure that’s ever happened because I was shocked, never had to relearn the buttons.
I noticed that and also noticed how they swapped out the assistant for for Gemini AI bullshit that doesn’t work right so you can’t tell it to turn on a light or generally to do anything and have it actually do it correctly.
Every time my phone gets an update I have to go and switch that shit back. I honestly believe they’re trying to get me to buy a Linux phone.
you can change it
My post literally says so :D It’s still a dickhead move to put the assistant in there as the default when setting up the device and hiding the option under “Gestures”.
It’s all fuckin stupid shit but I love that it’s in German. That’s the icing on the cake.
Not just new ones. Last month my mom asked for help because she could no longer turn off her phone. I checked the settings and the power button had been assigned to the assistant.
why the Assistant is in German when the phone is set to English
Because Google just has no idea how to deal with multilingual people. Google Assistant’s ability to understand and respond to prompts that are in either of my languages is completely unpredictable, even for the language the UI is displaying in. Another issue is that you apparently just cannot in any way control what language call screen will use to talk to a caller. Such a good feature rendered entirely useless for me because of that.
Same. On my stock Pixel it defaulted to hold the power button for assist. Which I immediately disabled and never looked back.
This was coupled with the power menu being added as a button to the notification shade.
I imagine it was in response to Apple when they switched to having the Siri button.
On the Nothing Phones is it just a press?
You should install GrapheneOS and never have to fuck with Gemini again…
I want to. Literally the only thing stopping me is !147
Don’t use your personal device for work. I refuse to do that because my time off is mine. There’s no reason for work to be invading my personal life.
Google and languages is its own clusterfuck anyway. To this day, I don’t think it properly supports using multiple languages.
First, English YouTube titles were (often badly) auto-translated to German and I found no other option to disable it but to set my entire profile’s first language to English. Then it began translating German stuff into English instead.
Is it so hart to implement an option to say “I speak both English and German perfectly well, please stop trying to accommodate some primary language”?
Bonus: Technical terms being translated one way or the other, usually without awareness of the technical, semantic context that would require a specific translation (or none at all).
Anyway, that’s tangential.
I agree, the forced auto-translation is really annoying. There’s a browser extension called “YouTube No Translation” that fetches the original titles and descriptions from the YouTube API and replaces them.
It’s ridiculous, I already need three extensions to make YouTube useable again. YouTube Row Fixer, YouTube No Translation and YouTube Enhancer. And it’s still garbage in some places.
Plus SponsorBlock, but that’s not a Google issue. I just can’t stand hearing people say “without further ado” before “but first”. Also, skipping the extra bit at the end of music videos where you get treated to five-second-bits of other songs you didn’t ask for.
I currently don’t have the patience and spare energy to degoogle, but I admire anyone who does.
It just asked me what it should do when I press the power button. Pretty painless, 🤷. End of the day it’s just another win for GrapheneOS though.
I turn off my phone every night, so I changed that back as soon as I found out.
They also messed with the navigation bar… Before, instead of having three buttons, you could have it display three lines at the bottom that you used by swiping upward. They did away with that, so now your only options are 1) the three regular buttons that are too easy to accidentally press and take up too much screen real estate, or 2) one line that is harder to use combined with a back functionality enabled by swiping from the left ir right sides of the screen. It’s not only slower to use than the three lines, but it also results in accidentally going back when trying to scroll horizontally.
They could have left an option to keep the three lines, but no, they love reminding us we don’t really own the devices we pay for >:|
If Samsung, install Good Lock and use the Navstar plugin to bring the functionality back.
That’s what I did.
Thank you, I will definitely check those out.
It also seems I can root my phone, but I’d rather not go that route until absolutely necessary (e.g. some future update that breaks side loading).
This is so cool. You showed me a whole new world
How do you people lock your phone if not by pushing the power button? You just put it in your pocket like that?
it’s press and hold. Just pressing locks it.
That wasn’t made clear by the OP at all.
Just tested to make sure and it still shows emergency, restart and power off so I’m good for now 😄
I just found out thanks to your comment that mine changed to this Gemini bullshit on a long press with the UI 8 update I guess…
Double tap empty space on the home screen
That’s just extra steps, cause you need to go to the home screen first. Maybe I’m misunderstanding.
Screen button, turned on in settings, under accessibility. Two taps, screen is off.
Next step of their Always On (always spying) wet dream.
Thanks.
On xiaomi, search for “gesture shortcut” in the settings menu to get to the right option menu.
I own an nothing phone too, and I had the same thing. Same thing had my dads phone, Samsung device. Everyone is doing it, it’s not just nothing.
i turned it off and set it to a swipe from the bottom corners of the screen, which makes a lot more sense
Yes took me a while to figure this out. Was months ago after an update.
