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They really didn't have to redesign a text box. Please stop reinventing the wheel. I don't need another pop up in my life.
It's impressive how modern companies with thousands of professional designers manage to make increasingly goofy designs lol
"Modern" (i.e. Apple-chasing) design seems to be hellbent on wasting as much screen space as possible.
To prove yourself as a executive you have to make the company do stuff, so people come up with reasons to do wasteful things. It's all a circle of shit people being shitty to get ahead.
Okay, so I'm not crazy. I started seeing this today, and I had to stop and think "Wait, was this always here?"
I thought this was just me but I swear this is so fucking annoying
Completely unnecessary filler space
Does anyone else feel like the quality of the keyboard swipe auto-complete has completely tanked as well?
Just like their search engine, every version of Android gets worse.
I don't know how to edit the main post on mobile so I'll just add this comment. The message I typed in the screenshot populates in a "pop up bar". The message no longer gets entered where you think it should go and it looks like shit and takes up extra screen space for no reason. I really dislike this change.
Fuckin annoying tbh. Can't stand when giga corps do this and sense it's required for rcs I can't just go get a better foss alternative sense none of the people I text are tech savvy or able/willing to switch to something else and rcs is pretty essential for me knowing if someone read it or not.
If I could I would ditch all google and giga corps products but I'm way to poor to do that. And it's so ingrained into society it's hard to find anything that works with these proprietary shit.
I paid for Textra over a decade ago, and it's easily the best money I've ever spent. It's the best texting app I've ever used and I highly recommend everyone check it out. They still churn out updates regularly and the features are above and beyond most messaging apps.
The text lines up with the recipient's text bubbles. It's on the left, and it's left justified, so it's under the other person's messages, rather than mine.
I could have sworn the old UI had the text entry closer to the right.
I hate this new layout. Why is the box smaller than the width of the screen? It was already too small. If anything they should have made it taller and kept it the same width it was before
I'm not a fan either. I will swap to literally any FOSS texting app that supports RCS.
Can Textra handle RCS yet? I bought it ages ago but ditched it when it couldn't handle RCS
I've been reading articles for years about how Google say they're going to open the RCS API to 3rd-Party apps but they have yet to do so.
This is why I scoff every time Google takes jabs at Apple about iMessage. Pot, meet kettle. Until I can use rcs with Textra, they got no room to talk
They're proobably working on how to track messages on the way, like “hey, wanna use RCS? here's our com.google.rcs library”, which by coincidence sends every message to Google.
Nothing can without the blessing of Google, and so far that's limited to Google Messages and Samsung Messages (whatever it's called)
I will just drop this here:
Please dont let Google also scan your Messages?
It's so bad I uninstalled all updates and went back to the version that shipped with the phone. That got rid of it.
I tried to install other versions from apkmirror but the design has been in there a while and they turned it on server side. My P8 shipped with
messages.android _20230529_03_RCO1
and it's gone for me.
Maybe they reserve that space for future AI suggestions?
Almost certainly the answer. Same reason they just hobbled their "ok Google" by not letting you access it with the screen off anymore. They're going to switch engines and they want to reintroduce the same features all over again but make it feel like an upgrade.
I just looked through all the settings, there doesn't seem to be a way to change it back.
I like it. Previously it would hide a bunch of icons to give the bar more space, now it doesn't need to
From what I noticed they only added an emoji button though. This already is on my keyboard area. Maybe I'm missing something but at least you enjoy it.
And the emoji button in the message area has less features than the one found in the Google keyboard (no emoji kitchen?!), so I'll never want to use it anyways.
If I had wanted all the extra bull shit that came with these updates I'd have bought an iPhone.
I think it's an improvement, particularly for folks like my grandfather that have the UI/font scale increased.
On his phone there was basically 1-2 words that would fit in that old text box ...
so his
text
message
preview
looked
like this
Then maybe they should make it an option instead of ruining it for the rest of us because wasting space is the new hip thing.
Just out of curiosity, how much people still use SMS? I can't remember last time I sent SMS.
Here in Finland we use mainly Whatsapp, FB Messenger, Telegram or Signal for messaging. Almost no one I know has sent SMS in the last 10 years.
Wouldn't be an SMS discussion without someone patting themselves on the back because they use use some corpo app.
It's not a choice, here, so much as it is the result of our smartphone culture.
In the US, using the default messaging app on your phone is the norm for most people. Third party messaging apps like WhatsApp simply never caught on over here, so we've let Apple, Google, Samsung, etc determine how we talk to each other. Vendor lock-in tactics run rampant, with barely any regulation.
The default messaging apps on iPhone is iMessage. It's locked down and can not communicate with any other messaging app except via SMS. Therefore the other apps have to use it to communicate with iPhone users.
Conversely, Google has a messaging protocol they're trying to get Apple to adopt called RCS, but Google also refuses to let RCS be used by third party apps. So SMS becomes the fallback for communication between them.
It's partially corporate bickering, partially consumers being tech illiterate and staunchly opposed to using anything third party. Particularly in the case of iPhone users, there's a strong culture of entrenchment in the Apple ecosystem, and for some people, not being in it is actually seen as worthy of derision. There's actual cases of bullying in schools if a kid doesn't use iPhone, and that's having an increasingly detrimental effect on the market.
You have to appreciate, in Europe, you're mostly using Android, a (somewhat) open ecosystem, and that mentality is stronger over there.
But here in the states, iPhones are extremely prominent, and with them comes the mentality that Apple has spent decades programming into its consumers: don't use anything non-Apple, and if that creates problems for other people, too bad, they should just buy Apple too.
The default messaging apps on iPhone is iMessage. It’s locked down and can not communicate with any other messaging app except via SMS. Therefore the other apps have to use it to communicate with iPhone users, who you will never, ever convince to download a third party messaging app
One other thing is that none of the third party messaging apps can even use SMS. iOS is designed so that only Apple can use SMS.
I'm in France and I still use sms. Unlimited sms became the norm well before data plans and messaging apps, and it's much easier I can just text someone without having to look on which plateform they have an account. It's like voice calls, for sure you can call someone on messenger or Whatsapp but why bother when I can just make a regular phone call?
The US seems to primarily still use sms. I've heard it's tied to having unlimited messaging phone plans being the norm, so people weren't as drawn to other platforms.
Also, you don't even need a platform at all. Just a phone and a phone number.
I think the real question is, why hasn’t there been a successful effort to properly modernize SMS. Having a standard service capable of messaging any mobile device without using a corporate crufty app the corps can glean all your data from seems the more logical choice. SMS itself will send even if you have a weak cellular connection without Internet data.
Universal standards are good for open communication. Every phone should be supporting the IMS video calling that has existed in the 3GPP spec since rel 99. (1999) as well.
How we got to this selective app hellscape instead of standard voice, video, text messaging is the real problem needing a solution.
UK here, I still use SMS for people who aren't on Signal.
I don't use WhatsApp and I'm on Android, so no iMessage, so SMS is the great leveller that will always work.
It's a shame Signal dropped SMS fallback as it was really useful.
Apparently Textra itself doesn't support desktop sync like Google's app, but there are workarounds.
However, does Textra support RCS?
Yup hate the new update. I have a weird problem with deleting words too with the backspace since the update. Will probably revert to Samsung messages soon.
Me, using Google Voice for SMS: "Y'all have nice UIs sometimes?"